I do the same.
Or… at least, I try to, anyway.
I keep my eyes down and busy myself with Luca and remind myself constantly that looking for Dante only dredges up thingsI can’t afford to feel. It’s easier to push it down until the hurt slowly ices over into numbness.
When we are forced to speak, it’s only when we have to, and it’s never about the night he grabbed my arm and threatened to take my son away from me because I refused to give him what he wanted. Sometimes, though… I catch him watching Luca when he thinks no one notices. His expression is always unreadable, a strange heaviness flickering in his eyes before he schools his features back to stone.
I don’t know if this truce is meant to last forever or if it’s only the calm before the next inevitable storm. I don’t know if Dante is waiting for the right excuse to do whatever it is he plans on doing to Luca and me.
All I know is that I’m suspended in this limbo until that happens.
When Dante leaves Sicily for a meeting on the mainland, the shift in the villa is immediate.
The air feels lighter, and while the guards remain vigilant as always, the tension surrounding them dispels just enough to allow me to think.
To plan.
It doesn’t take my mind long to come up with something and soon, I find myself persuading one of the house butlers—an older man named Milo with tired eyes and a fondness for Luca—to drive me into town.
I tell him I want to retrieve a few family heirlooms from my father’s abandoned villa and some things of my mother’s, sentimental pieces I don’t want lost to time or looters whenever the city decides to eventually put the place up for auction. He hesitates only briefly before agreeing to give me an hour.
I leave Luca with one of the maids and head out with him.
The drive is quiet as Sicily rolls past the window, sun-bleached stone hills and winding roads, achingly familiar and impossibly distant all at once. When we finally pull up to my family’s villa, my chest tightens so hard, it almost hurts to breathe.
I leave Milo idling in the car and head up the familiar walkway to the front doors. To my surprise, they open without a key.
Inside, the house is an absolute mess.
In just four years since I’ve been gone, dust coats every surface in a fine, suffocating layer. Curtains hang half-broken over dirty windows, their once fine fabric sliced through and sagging from the aftermath of the night my father and I fled Italy. The air smells of mildew and neglect, but beneath it is a faint scent that breaks my heart instantly.
The ghost of my mother’s perfume, a scent that once meant safety.
My footsteps echo far too loudly in the empty halls, oddly reminding me that I don’t belong here anymore. Whatever this place once was, it has long since stopped being a home. I move slowly, my hand brushing along the faded wallpaper, grounding myself in the physical reality of it before the memories of my past can swallow me whole.
Every corner holds one.
My childhood laughter, bright and careless, bouncing off these walls as I raced through the halls with bare feet and skinned knees. My father’s voice calling me down for dinner, pretending to be stern but never quite hiding the warmth beneath his words. My mother sitting at the edge of my bed at night, brushing my hair with slow, patient strokes while she hummed softly under her breath, an old Sicilian lullaby I haven’t heard since then.
The ache that follows is physically painful. Not only because I miss what used to be but because Luca will never know this place the way I did.
He will never run through these halls or hide behind these doors playing hide-and-seek with the staff. He will never sit at the long dining table arguing over dessert or fall asleep to my mother’s humming. He will never know half of his family history, never feel rooted in something that existed before all of the violence and fear and blood debts tore everything apart.
All because of circumstances entirely beyond his control.
My father never meant for any of this to happen.
I know that with a certainty that settles deep in my bones. He was never a reckless man. He was always careful, loyal to a fault. Our family had stood beside the Cosenzas for generations, alliances forged long before my birth and dating back nearly two centuries, loyalty and business intertwined so deeply, they were inseparable.
When I was younger and years before my mother’s passing, I would sometimes sneak out of bed and wander the halls only to find my parents tucked away in my father’s office late at night. Papers were spread across his desk, maps pinned on the walls behind it, documents I couldn’t begin to understand at the timespread out before them. They would always be talking in hushed voices, spilling over details to keep our families’ businesses running smoothly.
I had never been privy to my father’s dealings or invited into the rooms where decisions were made, but I always knew without a shred of doubt that my father would never jeopardize an alliance like that.
My father and Dante’s uncle had been close friends for years, brothers in everything but blood. That bond didn’t begin to fray until the middle Cosenza brother, Dante’s father, rose to the head of the family instead. His rule was harsher. More ruthless. Where his predecessors valued loyalty, he valued dominance and submission, even from his own.
Still, even during those years when tensions ran high, strained relations never gave way to deception. Disagreement was not betrayal. Political optics were never supposed to be personal. That distinction had always mattered to my father even when it cost him influence and when it meant swallowing his pride more often during those meetings than not.
He believed in the long game, in loyalty that endured beyond individual men and shifting power structures every few years. Our family had survived centuries precisely because of that restraint.
