"Wife." Constantine's voice came through the open doorway, low and steady. "Lower your gun."
I lowered it. My legs made a decision I hadn't authorized and I sat down hard on the edge of the bed and pressed my hand over my mouth and stared at the floor and breathed, shallow and fast and completely insufficient.
"Cecilia, child, you did it." Dante's hand was on my back, slow circles, the unhurried comfort of a man who had seen the aftermath of violence before and understood what it required. "You saved our lives. Breathe, daughter. Long slow breaths."
His voice was the anchor. I breathed. Long and slow, the way he said, and gradually the shaking became something I could feel the edges of rather than something I was entirely inside.
Constantine pushed through my barricade like it was toy furniture, the chairs scraping and the table catching and none of it slowing him for a single second. He was across the room in three strides and he grabbed me and pulled me up to him with a force that lifted me half off the floor.
"Cecilia, don't you ever do that to me again." His voice was rough in a way I had never heard from him, stripped of everything except what it actually was. He crushed me against him and I didn't care. Breathing was optional at this point. "God, I love you more than words can say. I love you." He kissed the top of my head and then his hands were on my face and he was looking at me and pressing his lips to mine with a possessiveness and a desperation and a relief that I kissed back with everything I had, needing the contact to confirm that we were both here, both real, both on the right side of this.
I pushed him back from me. Panted. Stared at him. I was completely aware that this was totally inappropriate behavior in front of his father, and I looked over his shoulder and Dante's face was lit up with a smile that made him look years younger than the man who had been lying in that bed an hour ago.
I turned back to Constantine and looked up at him and felt my heart do something it had been doing for eight days and intended to keep doing.
"I love you." My eyes filled.
Dante clapped behind me.
"You do?" Constantine asked.
"I do." He kissed me again, and Dante clapped again, and somewhere in the middle of it I started laughing, the slightly unhinged laugh of someone on the other side of something terrible, and Constantine was laughing too, and the room held all of it.
"Well, you two make an amazing team." I turned in Constantine's arms and looked at his father. Dante's eyes werebright and his color was better than it had been in weeks and he looked like a man who had just witnessed exactly what he needed to witness. "This family is in good hands with you both at the helm. But I've decided I might not be ready to let this life go quite yet." He shifted on the bed and laughed. "Where's my wife?"
"I'm here, my love." Lucia stepped over my brother's body as if it wasn't there, with the particular composure of a woman who had spent forty years in this life and had decided long ago what she was and wasn't going to let affect her entrance. She came around the bed to the empty side and sat down facing her husband and took his face in her hands. "I'm very glad to hear you aren't leaving me soon."
"I want you to move back into this room." His voice was quiet and entirely certain. "For the rest of my days, you will sleep next to me. My deepest regret is sending you out of here."
Lucia looked at him with forty-one years of love and the specific exasperation of someone who had been right about something for a long time. "Who knew it would take almost dying for you to realize it?" She pressed her hand to his cheek and kissed him gently, and I looked away because some moments belonged only to the people inside them.
Constantine took my hand. He looked at me and looked at his parents and said nothing because nothing needed to be said. He motioned me toward the door.
"Close your eyes, amore. You don't need to see him."
I closed my eyes. Strong arms came under me and lifted me without effort and I buried my face in his chest and felt him step, felt the slight deliberateness of it, felt him lift his leg and walk over Santino rather than around him. He could have walked around. We walked over him instead. No respect was given to my lifeless brother's body.
I didn't mind it one bit.
He carried me out into the hallway and I kept my face in his chest and listened to his heartbeat, steady and real, and thought about Nicola's voice at exactly the right moment and thought that maybe she was here in whatever way the people we loved stayed with us after they were gone.
The house was quieter now. The shooting had stopped. The sounds that replaced it were the particular sounds of aftermath, men moving with purpose through rooms, voices low and efficient. I kept my eyes closed and let Constantine carry me and thought that this was what it felt like to be on the other side of something and not yet know what the other side looked like.
CHAPTER 16
CONSTANTINE
"Iwant to see him," CeCe whispered as I set her down when we got to the hallway.
I had been hoping she wouldn't say that. I had been hoping the shock of the evening would be enough to carry her through to our room without her remembering what Santino had said upstairs, but she had remembered and she was going to do something about it because that was who she was and I had known that from the first morning in the kitchen.
"No, baby, I don't think that's a good idea." I took her face in my hands. "Please trust me on this."
She pushed my hands away and ran down the stairs before I could say anything else.
I followed her because there was nothing else to do, and I was already calculating how bad this was going to be, already knowing I should have taken her the back way to our wing and locked her in our room until I'd had the chance to clean this place up. But she was already at the main floor and she stopped in her tracks and looked down at the man at her feet and went very still.
The great room was not what it had been three hours ago.
