“I’m sorry,” I whisper back.
Dante pushes up from his chair and stands, turning away before I can see whatever emotions are pinching his face. He tells me to think it over, his voice already distant again as he leaves the room to get some air and shuts the door behind him.
I stare down at Luca and finally let the tears fall. Strangely, now I understand a hard truth I’ve been afraid to admit to myself.
Love might not be enough to save us from losing what I once thought was unbreakable.
23
DANTE
The hospital corridor smells of antiseptic and stale coffee.
It clings to the back of my throat, coating my tongue in a sterile aftertaste, nothing like the salty air of Sicily or the iron tang of blood I’m more accustomed to. I walk the length of the hallway outside once, twice. Hell, maybe three times. I lose count somewhere between the fourth flicker of the fluorescent lights by the vending machine at the end of the hallway and the fifth time my reflection glared back at me in one of the glass windows.
The full truth is that I needed distance from the sight of her pale against those white sheets and the IV lines snaking into her veins, from the way Luca curled into her uninjured side like she might disappear if he loosened his grip for even a second.
Every time she winced in her sleep, every shallow breath she dragged into her lungs, it felt like someone was carving another piece of my heart out of my chest and roasting it over an open flame. I have endured gunshot wounds and broken bones. I have watched my brother bleed out in my arms and have felt the betrayal of a family friend being the one to pull the trigger.
Noneof it compares to sitting in that chair and listening to machines breathe for her.
At no point was I certain she would wake up.
Not when I saw how much blood she lost. My hands had been slick with it by the time Leo and Romano got to me. My hands that had been pressing uselessly against that wound while she stared past me already fading hadn’t stopped shaking until hours after we arrived at the hospital.
When they wheeled her away and shut the doors in my face, that’s when the grim reality of what was to come settled over me.
Too many times in the past had I prayed for her to be erased from my memories so the ache in my chest would stop. And yet standing in that operating room doorway, watching them fight to keep her alive, I realized with brutal clarity that if she died… there would be nothing left of me worth salvaging.
I’ve negotiated with Cartel leaders and stared down men who would happily slit my throat for a fraction of what I’m worth. None of that prepared me for nodding calmly while a surgeon explained the statistical probability of the woman I love not surviving through the night.
And then there had been Luca.
Trying to keep him calm while both of our worlds were collapsing felt like divine punishment. Or perhaps karma at its finest. Kneeling in front of him, squeezing his small shoulders while telling him the doctors were helping Mama wake up and that she was just very tired and he needed to be brave, gutted me.
For a three-and-a-half-year-old, he is brilliant. He watches everything.Absorbseverything. He had looked at me with those grey-green eyes—myeyes—and asked,“She’s not going to leave me, right?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
All I could do was tell him no.
For the first time in years, I prayed I wasn’t lying.
When I get back to the room, I find Luca is sitting cross-legged on the foot of the narrow bed, picking at a tray of hospital food while Elena leans up against the raised headboard, one hand gently rubbing his back. She’s trying to smile at whatever he’s saying, but the effort pulls at the corners of her mouth like it hurts.
I stop in the doorway, unnoticed for a moment.
They look… peaceful.
A mother and her child sharing a lukewarm plate of mashed potatoes and a plastic cup of apple juice. Luca’s dark curls are mussed from sleep as Elena’s own hair falls in slight waves over the pillow behind her. For anyone else, this would be ordinary—a family catching their breath after hell tried to swallow them whole.
For me, it’s anything but. It’s a fantasy that I know will soon end.
My gut twists so hard, I almost taste bile.
I know what’s behind her eyes when she glances up and sees me standing in the doorway. I know the exact question lingering in her mind that she won’t ask out loud.How long until the next one comes for us?
I put that fear there by not protecting her the way I should have. Carlo, Enzo, the Bellantis, that had all been my blind spot. I had put too much faith in myself, that I would be able to handle it all alone, and instead, all that bravado did was drag the last two people I ever wanted affected by this back into that world.
