She gave me a look that was several things at once. "You're going to take it easy and I will change the bandage tomorrow. If it's still bleeding, you're going to the doctor."
I rolled onto my back and put my hands behind my head and looked up at the ceiling. "Pretty sure the woman nursing me back to health is doing a great job."
"I'm serious, Con. You're hurt. You need to rest." I could practically hear her eyes rolling as she settled back onto the bed beside me.
I gave it approximately thirty seconds.
"I think it's time for a little naughty nurse." I slid my hand down her body and she made a sound that was half protest and half something else and tried to roll away and I held her, carefully, conscious of my side.
"Are you sure that's a good idea right now?" She asked.
“Making love to you is always a good idea,” I answered without hesitation.
She stopped trying to roll away. Looked at me with dark eyes in the low light. "Mr. Venosa," she said, and her voice had changed completely, "I can see you aren't going to obey my orders. So I will have to take matters into my own hands."
She rolled out of my grip and swung a leg over me and settled above me with the composure of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing, and I let my arms fall out to the sides in surrender because that was the only reasonable response available to me.
"Nurse Venosa," I said, "do with me what you will."
She laughed, warm and real in the dark room, and leaned down and started moving down my body trailing kisses as she went, careful around my side, everywhere else entirely not careful, and I ran my hands through her hair and looked at the ceiling and thought about eight days and forty years and everything in between.
"Thank you for protecting me, Constantine," she whispered in the darkness.
"We protected each other, amore." I gathered her hair in my hands. "And we will do it every time we have to."
She looked up at me from where she was, my wife in the low light of our room with her hair loose around her shoulders and the city dark and quiet outside our windows, and I thought that this was what it felt like to have everything that mattered in one room.
I intended to spend the rest of my life making sure she knew it.
EPILOGUE
CECILIA
Rain softly fell onto the tents around the cemetery and it felt like the perfect end to the last week.
It was the kind of rain that didn't announce itself, fine and persistent, the sort that soaked through everything eventually without ever seeming to try. The kind of rain that suited grief better than a downpour would have, because grief was rarely dramatic in the way people expected. It was mostly quiet and relentless and present in everything, the way this rain was present in the black wool of every coat around me and the dark earth at the edge of the open grave and the roses that had already begun to droop in their arrangements.
Standing next to Dante’s casket, I rested my hands on the ever-expanding baby bump and let the tears come without trying to manage them.
Around me the assembled families stood in their rows, the soldiers and the capos and the heads of the four families who had come from their respective cities to stand in the rain for a man who had earned that particular loyalty over forty years of keeping his word. They were here because Dante Venosa hadbeen the kind of man whose death required presence, not just acknowledgment.
The priest spoke of Dante's love for his family and how proud he had been to learn he would be a grandfather. Constantine had told him three months ago, in one of those quiet evenings when we had sat with him in the lamplight of his room and talked about everything and nothing, and Dante had looked at my stomach with an expression I was going to carry with me for the rest of my life and said, very quietly, that he had been waiting for something like this.
Tears rolled down my face as the priest spoke.
Grief was a funny thing. I hadn't shed a single tear for my father, not when I watched the light leave his eyes in that chair, not when I turned my back on his lifeless body, and not in any of the days since. But this was entirely different. I had known the unconditional love of a father for seven months before Dante Venosa left us, and the loss of it was as real and specific as any loss I had ever felt.
He had called me daughter and meant it. That was not a small thing. That was everything.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the gathered crowd repeated after the priest, and the words moved through the rain-softened air and I closed my eyes and let them land.
Constantine took a handful of earth and dropped it onto the now-lowered casket. The sound of it, that particular hollow resonance of dirt on wood, moved through me in a way I hadn't prepared for. I pressed my lips together and sent my own prayer down into the dark after it, for the man who had argued with me about wine and told me that home was the place that had room for you and pressed his thin hand over mine and called me his daughter.
Constantine moved to stand at the head of his father's grave and I took a step over to stand beside Lucia. She reached for myhand without looking and I gave it to her and we stood together in the rain while her son faced the assembled families of the Cosa Nostra and became what he had been raised to be.
"Today my father rests." His voice was strong and commanding, carrying across the cemetery with the particular quality it had when he wasn't performing authority but simply being it, and goosebumps moved through me despite the coat and the warmth of Lucia's hand in mine.
“He taught us how to be a family, how to rely on one another, and how to love." He looked across the grave at me and smiled, brief and specific, the smile he kept for moments when nobody else was meant to see it. "The next months will be filled with transition, but rest assured, my focus will be to lead this family as well as he did." He looked back at the assembled families, at the rows of men who had known his father and were now deciding about the son. "Don Venosa, rest easy. We will carry on your legacy."
