My mother's head appeared around the door and I watched CeCe contemplate the window as a means of escape before deciding against it and turning her back to examine the bookshelf with tremendous apparent interest in books she'd already read.
"I'm sorry to bother you while you're working." My mother came in and looked between us with an expression that missed nothing and was enjoying itself considerably. CeCe kept her attention on the bookshelf and left the room with the quiet speed of someone who had decided that retreat was the better part of valor, pulling the door closed behind her.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart, did I interrupt something?"
"No, mother. I was kissing my wife and she's shy about being caught."
"Hmm." She sat down across from me and the amusement faded into something else. "I need you to talk to your father. Emilio told him everything and he's refusing to go to the safe house. He won't hear it." She folded her hands in her lap and I could see the effort she was making to hold herself together, the particular composure of a woman who had been holding herself together for eight months and was running low on the resources required. "I need you to talk to him, Constantine."
I looked at her across the desk. "Mother, I can't make him do anything he doesn't want to do. He is still the head of this family. If he was giving up, I'd worry, but refusing to be moved from his own house is exactly the kind of thing he should be doing." I paused. "He's still fighting. That's what we want."
She knew I was right. I could see it in her face alongside the fact that being right didn't help much when the man you'd spent forty-one years loving was refusing to take the action that might keep him alive slightly longer.
"Go back to making out with your wife," she said, standing, her voice catching the edge of something she wasn't going to let out in my office. "Must be nice."
"Mother." I was around the desk before she reached the door. She stopped and her shoulders dropped, all the composure she'd been maintaining going out of her at once, and I put my arms around her and held on.
She was quiet for a moment. Then her shoulders began to shake.
"I'm not ready," she said, her voice muffled against my chest, stripped of everything except the plain truth of it. "I know it's coming. I've known for months. I'm still not ready."
"I know." I held her tighter. There was nothing else available. No version of this that I could make easier, no comfort that was adequate to the size of what she was facing. I was going to lose the most important man in my life, and she was going to lose the man who had been her entire life for forty-one years, and neither of those things had a remedy.
We stood there for a while, my mother and I, in my office with the threat from Italy sitting on the desk behind us and the house quiet around us, and I thought about my father refusing to go to the safe house and understood it completely. He was going to go the way he'd decided to go, on his own terms, in his own house, fighting to the last available moment.
I thought that was probably the most Dante Venosa thing he had ever done.
It didn't make it easier. But it made it true.
CHAPTER 15
CECILIA
The week before the attack had a quality to it that I had no name for.
Not quite fear, though fear was present underneath everything like a ground current you learned to walk on top of. Not quite waiting, though we were all waiting. It was the particular atmosphere of a house that knew something was coming and had decided to meet it standing up. The non-essential staff had gone home with full pay and warm food and instructions not to return until they were called, and without them the house had taken on a different character, quieter in some ways and louder in others, full of the specific sounds of men preparing for something that didn't have a clean name.
I cooked for everyone. Three meals a day, sometimes four, because feeding people was the thing I could do and I needed something to do or I would come apart at the seams. The men received it with a gratitude that was genuine and unperformed, and there was something clarifying about standing in a kitchen making food for people who were preparing to protect something I cared about. I understood it differently than I would have a month ago, before this house had become mine.
At night Constantine took me to bed with an urgency that was connected to everything happening around us. It was as if when the tension got too high he needed to think of something else, and that something else was him and me locked in our room, tangled in one another's arms. I wanted him the same way and for the same reasons, and we held onto each other in the dark while the house held its breath around us, and I thought about how strange it was that I had not known it was possible to want to survive something this much until I had something worth surviving for.
On the seventh morning I woke before dawn with a feeling in my chest I recognized from childhood, from every morning my father had come home angrier than he'd left. The feeling of something about to break open.
I lay still and listened to Constantine's breathing beside me and watched the ceiling and waited.
Emilio came before breakfast. I was in the kitchen when he passed the doorway and his face told me everything before he opened his mouth. I set down my cup and went to find my husband.
And that's where we'd been when the knock sounded, letting him know we needed to be ready.
"I'm not hiding away in a safe room." I stomped my foot and crossed my arms, my eyes following Constantine as he paced the room. Yes, I understood I was starting to sound like a petulant child. I didn't care.
"You have to go with them, Cecelia. Please. I can't do this if I know you're not there." He threw his hands in the air and stopped in front of me, and I could see what it was costing him to keep his voice level. "You promised me you would do what I say."
"I had my fingers crossed when I said it. Constantine, I brought this trouble. Please let me help make it right." I reached out and grasped his arms and held on. "Let me do something."
"I didn't have to bring the trouble to my door. I chose to do that. So it's on me, not you." His voice dropped to something quieter and more urgent. "Now please go be safe."
He leaned down and hungrily kissed me, and I kissed him back with everything I had because if it was the last kiss I ever had from him it would have to tide me over for the rest of my life. I would never have enough of this man and it would be cruel of the universe to take him from me so soon. When we finally parted, foreheads together, both of us breathing unevenly, I knew he wouldn't be happy. But I also knew what I was going to do.
