He moved and I moved with him, and the morning light was beginning to come through the curtains in thin pale lines, and I thought about the fact that yesterday I had woken up in this house as a guest and today I was waking up as the woman who belonged here, and the thought didn't frighten me at all. It felt like something I had been moving toward without knowing it, like a door I'd been walking toward in the dark and had finally found the handle.
"You're so perfect for me," he mumbled against my mouth. "We fit like a glove." He grasped my breast and kneaded it in his palm before pulling at my nipple, and my breath caught hard in my throat when he moved his mouth down and captured the tight bud between his teeth with a careful pressure that made my back arch completely off the bed.
This was too much. Yesterday I had been afraid for my life, and today I was in bed with my husband in the growing morning light, and both things were equally true and somehow equally part of the same story. The reason we'd married hadn't changed. The danger was still real. But whatever came next, I had had this, and I intended to keep having it, and that felt like the most defiant possible response to everything my father had tried to make of my life.
I was riding the thin line of pleasure and something beyond pleasure when my climax built to a point I couldn't manage anymore. "Let go, baby," Constantine said, and looked at me with dark eyes and held my gaze, and I did, without reservation, my legs shaking and my body spasming and a sound coming out of me that I had no control over whatsoever.
He followed me over the edge with one last deep thrust, my name in his mouth, his arms holding me like something he intended to keep, and then he was heavy and warm above me and we were both breathing like we'd run somewhere and I felt completely, entirely wrung out in the best possible way.
"Am I dead?" I whispered into the warm skin of his shoulder.
Constantine laughed, and the vibration of it against my chest was almost enough to start the whole thing over. "If you're dead, so am I." He rolled off me and pulled the blanket up over us and I curled into his side and thought that my father had wanted to make me a weapon and instead had made me someone who knew exactly what she wanted and wasn't afraid to reach for it.
"Con."
"Yeah." Half asleep, his voice low and rough.
I pressed my hand flat against his chest. "I love you." The words came out before I'd decided to say them, which was probably the only way they would have come out at all, and once they were in the air I couldn't take them back and discovered I didn't want to.
The arm around me tightened. He was quiet for a moment and I felt him come back from the edge of sleep, felt the shift in his breathing that meant he was fully present again.
He rolled toward me and looked at me in the pale morning light coming through the curtains, his dark eyes clear and specific, and what was in them was not surprise. It was the expression of a man who had known something for a while and was glad to finally have it confirmed.
"I love you," he said. Simply, completely, like a fact that had been true for longer than today.
I looked at him and thought about Sicily and the airport and the coffee shop and the floor of his office and the kitchen at five thirty in the morning and the library in the lamplight and the ceremony in the candlelit great room and every small specific thing that had built this between us in five days, and I thought that some things didn't need time to be real. They just needed the right two people.
"Good," I said, and kissed him, and felt him smile against my mouth.
Outside Chicago was waking up, gray and cold and indifferent, and inside our room the morning light was coming through the curtains in wider lines now, and somewhere in the house I could hear the distant sound of the kitchen starting up, and I thought that this was what it felt like to be exactly where you were supposed to be.
CHAPTER 14
CONSTANTINE
The days after our wedding had a quality I didn't have a word for.
Not quite peace, because the threat from Italy was always in the background, a low frequency hum underneath everything else, and I was too experienced to mistake a lull for safety. But something adjacent to peace. Something that felt like what life might be when the external pressure lifted, a preview of a thing I hadn't known I wanted until I had a glimpse of it.
CeCe had moved through the house and made it different without changing anything visible. She cooked in the mornings and read in the afternoons, talked about the history of our family and anything else he raised with enough conviction to invite an argument, which was most things. She sat with my mother in the evenings sometimes, the two of them in the sitting room with a bottle of something good between them, and I would pass the doorway and hear them talking in the easy unhurried way of women who had decided to trust each other, and I would keep walking because some things were private and I was glad they existed.
At night she was mine, and I was hers, and the mornings came too quickly and I found myself resenting my own alarm clock for the first time in my adult life.
I had a wife. I was still getting used to the specific weight of that word and finding that it fit better every day.
Four days after the wedding I was at my desk when Emilio came through the door without knocking.
"Constantine, we've got chatter." He set a transcript on my desk that our security team had intercepted overnight, his expression doing the thing it did when the news was worse than he wanted it to be. "It's significant."
I picked it up and read it. Then I set it down on the desk and leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"Fuck." I had known it was coming. I had known it since the night of the wedding when the four families had sat in my office and told me the window was narrowing. Knowing something is coming and having it arrive were different things. "I was hoping we'd have more time."
"I know."
"How long?"
"Days. A week at the outside, and that's optimistic." He sat down across from me, his eyebrows pulled tight. "The chatter puts him in transit. He's not making calls from Sicily anymore."
