Through the sludge in my skull, the name burns a toxic path.Like acid.Alessandro is the one man I’ve been trying to keep Aurora away from.The one man I’ve sworn to myself to destroy.The one man who’s already taken her from me once.
And he is back.He’s come for her again.And my body will not fucking move, will not do a goddamn thing to stop it.
I haven’t felt this helpless since I was eight years old, screaming inside a room filling with smoke, fire licking my door.
This is so much fucking worse.Because this time, it’s not my life at risk, but hers.The only fucking thing I’ve ever treasured.
I order my limbs to rise, demand obedience from the throbbing thoughts that sift uselessly and never become spoken words.
I’m losing her.I’m fucking losing her.It’s happening right in front of me.
Maybe I’m already dead.
Because this has to be my own personal hell.
But Alessandro’s next words seem to prove that’s not the case.
“I can’t leave him alive.No fucking way.”
“Then you know what I’ll do,” Aurora replies, her voice hard as steel.“You know what I’ve promised.”
“You’ll off yourself for this motherfucker?Suicidal fucking bitch!”
No.No nono.
Never that, Aurora.Never, ever fucking promise that.You don’t even let that thought come into your goddamn head.
Commanding hasn’t worked, so I start pleading – with my body, with Aurora, with anyone who might break me out of this.No one answers.There’s nothing but cold creeping through me.And Aurora’s voice.
“He lives, and you get me.He dies, and you don’t.Make your choice, Alessandro.”
“That’s not a fucking choice!”he shouts.“I don’t blow his fucking head off, he’ll come and put mine on a goddamn spike!”
“So take me somewhere he can’t follow!”
He snorts.“Like where?New York?We both saw how well that worked out for my father.”
“No, not New York,” she agrees.“Taormina.”
Taormina.Sea and sun and Aurora on the sand, tiny angel with her frangipani.Lemon and wishes and the beat of my fucking heart.
Taormina.The one place on this earth it’s too dangerous for a Giordano or Titone to return to.
Does she know that I can hear her?Is she leaving me some clue?Dropping breadcrumbs for me?
She has to know that I’d follow her fucking anywhere.She has to know that even Taormina, with its ashes and its grudges and its pain, is not enough to keep me away.
My life has been hers for twenty-two years.
No.Even longer.Even before I met her, even before I knew that she existed out there somewhere, I was fucking waiting for her.
Even if I didn’t truly grasp that fact until this moment.
Now, trapped in my own body, consciousness receding like the tide, it all becomes so fucking clear.I was made for her.I may have been warped, damaged, nearly fucking destroyed.I may not be the boy who knew her once, who loved her once.
But I love her still.
I will do whatever it takes to find her.
