And now she’s looking at me like she’s already halfway out the door.
I cross the room and pull the chair closer to the side of the bed with the least amount of machines surrounding her. Luca glances over at me and offers a shy smile around a spoonful of potatoes.
“You want some?” he asks softly.
The sound lands like a fist to the sternum.
I force my mouth into something that might pass for a smile. “No. You eat up for me, okay? We need you big and strong to take care of Mama.”
He nods solemnly. “I will. I promise.”
Elena’s gaze flicks to me, then away again.
When the nurses come for the trays and the lights are dimmed for the night, Luca climbs into bed beside her despite the nurses’ protests about IV lines. Elena winces but doesn’t push him away. Instead, she tucks his head under her chin and hums a quiet, wordless lullaby. Within minutes his breathing evens out, his small fists slowly unclenching from where they’re wrapped around the front of her hospital gown.
I watch her watch him.
Her lashes are dark against pale cheeks as they slowly flutter closed too. There’s a bruise blooming along her jaw from where she hit the marble when she went down before I got there, and another thin cut above her eyebrow has been stitched. She looks fragile in a way that makes me want to burn the world down to keep anything else from touching her.
But above that, she still looks beautiful.
What scares me is the distance I can already feel growing between us. She hasn’t said it yet, but I heard it in her voice earlier when she told me she couldn’t go back to the villa.
I can’t raise Luca like that, Dante. I can’t live waiting for the next shoe to drop.
She’s right.
That’s the worst part.
And I have no idea how to convince her otherwise.
I stay until the night nurse comes in to check vitals. I carefully brush a strand of hair from her forehead back, freezing when her lashes flutter open and her eyes focus on me. They’re bleary, barely conscious as she tries to blink the sleep away from her eyes.
“Rest,” I murmur.
She nods once before closing her eyes and quickly falling asleep again.
I stay like that for a long time, watching the rise and fall of her chest, memorizing the faint freckles across her nose from the sun here and the way her lips part slightly when she finally relaxes.
I tell myself I can fix this.
Once she’s home, once she’s safe behind the walls of my villa and surrounded by my soldiers, she’ll see I can protect them both. After I hunt down the Bellanti Don and put a bullet between his eyes, there will be no more loose ends to worry about.
But a colder voice whispers a truth I don’t want to hear. That there is no amount of promising I can do that will change her mind. She started slipping away the night she fled the villa in the rain.
The moment she chose to run rather than trust me to protect them, that’s when her final decision had been made. She’s been slipping ever since. No amount of promised vengeance will pull her back if she’s already decided I’m part of the danger.
When the clock above the door reads past two, I finally stand. My legs feel leaden as I walk toward the door and slip out into the hallway again. I need water, or coffee, or… anything to keep me from pulling them both out of that bed and taking them back to the villa before either of them wakes up.
The vending machine hums at the far end of the hallway, rumbling softly when I feed coins into it. I watch the bottle drop and twist the cap off before downing the entire bottle of water in one go.
As soon as I finish it, a thought hits me with brutal clarity.
If she’s going to leave anyway, I want her to do it safely.
Elena has never been the kind of woman who obeys because she’s told to. She’s proven it again and again when she ran from Sicily once, and she survived four years in New York fighting tooth and nail before my men took her from Brooklyn. She’ll do what she thinks is best for Luca, even if it means walking away from me forever.
So, why not give her the tools to disappear properly this time?
