"Who's with your father?"
"He said he would take his chances." Constantine ran his hand through his dark hair, and the exhaustion and the love and the fear were all visible at once in a way he usually wouldn't have allowed. He didn't need the added stress of me not listening and his father staying. I knew that. I was going to add it anyway.
"I'm going to him." I stepped back and turned toward the table. "If you won't let me stand beside you, I will stand in front of him." I grabbed two guns off the table and ran for the stairs.
"CeCe, no." His voice was sharp behind me, a sound I felt more than heard.
"When this is over, I will accept whatever punishment you decide is appropriate, husband." I called it down over the railing without stopping, taking the stairs two at a time, and I heard the silence from below that meant he was doing the thing he did when he was choosing between two options that were both impossible.
All the soldiers in the room looked from me to him. They had smirks on their faces as they checked over their weapons one last time.
"I'm holding you to that!" he yelled back up.
I smiled. A week with that man and I was a goner. I couldn't imagine my life any differently. Turning, I looked over the railing and blew him a kiss. One last glimpse, one last smile from the man that I wanted for the rest of my life.
Then I turned and went to Dante.
The hallway to his room felt longer than usual, the way distances stretched when your heart was beating too fast and your mind was trying to stay ahead of your fear. I passed the photograph room without looking in and pushed open his door.
"Dante, you're stuck with me. We'll ride this thing out together," I said as I barged into the room, already moving, already assessing what needed to change. I positioned the large chairs a few feet from the door to slow anyone coming through, moved the table closer to put the guns and ammunition on, shifted the heavy dresser at an angle to give him something solid to shelter behind. It might be all for naught. I was going to do it anyway.
"Why aren't you in the safe room, or better yet, the safe house away from here?" He wheezed slightly as he looked over at me, watching my preparations with eyes that were sharper than his body suggested.
"Oh, not you too. I just had it out with Constantine." I turned and put my hands on my hips and looked down at the man who, when healthy, would have been a carbon copy of my husband. The same dark eyes, the same jaw, the same quality of attention that missed nothing and gave away only what it chose to.
I watched Dante smile, and his chuckle made me grin despite everything. "He's going to have a fun life with you." His expression grew more serious, more specific. "Cecilia, please make him enjoy life. He can't let what we do consume him. If he does, he will turn out like your father, and so many men who came before him." He held my gaze. "Promise me."
I went to him and kneeled down by his bed and took his thin hand in mine. "I promise."
I didn't get any more words out before gunfire erupted outside.
It started at the perimeter, distant enough that it might have been mistaken for something else, and then it wasn't distant at all and there was no mistaking it for anything. The particular percussion of it moved closer with a speed that made my stomach drop. "Whatever happens tonight, I will never be able to repay you for the kindness you didn't have to show me." I reached for a gun with my free hand and clung to his thin withering hand with the other.
"My girl, you've given me more than you will ever know. I got to see my son happy and in love. That's all a father wants." He clasped my hand tighter, and outside the shooting was getting closer and the shouting with it, and I breathed through my nose and stayed where I was.
"Whatever you do, nobody gets up those stairs. Am I understood?" Constantine's voice, muffled but unmistakable, rose from somewhere below.
Dante's hand tightened around mine and we waited.
Seconds ticked by like hours. The shooting was close enough now that I could hear individual shots rather than a general chaos, close enough that I could hear voices I didn't recognize shouting things in Italian that I chose not to translate. The room was very still around us, the lamp throwing warm steady light across the walls, and I thought about how strange it was that a room could look so normal while something catastrophic was happening just below it.
"They're getting closer, daughter," Dante said quietly, his head resting back on the pillow. His voice was calm in the way of someone who had made their peace. "Let them take me if there's an option."
"Never." The word came out hard and immediate. "You know as well as I do once they find out I'm married to Constantine, they won't let me live. And if they do, I'll wish for death." I held his hand tighter. My family would take me home and give me to Hector just to spite the Venosas. "So no. I'll go down proudly fighting for this family."
Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.
The particular quality of them was wrong from the first step. Whoever was coming up was trying to be quiet and failing miserably, moving with the clumsy carefulness of someone who had never learned how a house gave you away, every footfall too deliberate, the rhythm of someone concentrating on silence rather than achieving it. The wall rather than the center of the step, clothes brushing the plaster.
If it was my father's men they wouldn't be quiet. They would come through whatever they came through with the flat confidence of people who believed they'd already won.
This was someone more careful than that.
Gripping the handgun tighter, I clicked off the safety and fixed my eyes on the door. The knob turned slightly. A cold, clarifying calm settled over me, the same calm that had gotten me out of Sicily and through every impossible thing since.
Fuck, why didn't I lock it? It would have given me a few more seconds to think. Don't think about what you can't change.
Focus, CeCe.
