What had he promised in exchange for the blaring klaxon alarm that went off? I didn’t wonder about that until after I’d tried the knob and found he’d locked it from the outside. I pounded on the door, screaming his name for all of fifteen seconds, calculating what he’d traded with my father.
Our life together. That could be the only thing my father would want. And I knew Antonio’s calculations, because we were of one mind. He hadn’t lied in saying that he wasn’t trying to protect me. He was doing something else entirely. If his plan was to give me up, take Valentina home… then what?
Then something. Maybe he intended to figure it out once Valentina was safe and he’d made peace. Maybe I already knew the answer.
I trusted him. Even as I screamed for him to open the goddamned door, I trusted him.
Then I caught the stink of smoke.
My eyes burned. Was it in here? Would he leave me if the room was on fire?
I turned around. The room was dark but for the illumination from the chai-colored sky and a tiny pinprick of hot orange.
“So,” an Italian-lilted voice said. I heard her clearly between the honks of the alarm. “I can finally see you.”
forty-one.
antonio
Amor regge senza legge.
oosely translated… love rules without laws.
Romanticized. A completely painted-pink version of truth. When love swells and all the world seems small in the face of it, the heart feels like the most powerful thing on Earth. Above all worldly things. Money. Laws. Common sense.
One follows the heart to paradise or destruction, but it rules, and it doesn’t tell you where you’re going. You just go. Laws be damned. Laws of family and country can go to hell, and you can follow.
I’d had no business marrying Valentina, but I loved her. After the first few months, I became dissatisfied in bed, but I stayed faithful. Nothing I did was good enough for her, so I tried to do better. She became an emotional burden, yet I committed myself to her.
Valentina had had no business marrying me, but she did. She was from the north and hated the southern part of the boot. Yet she loved me. She hated the camorra as much as she embraced my family. Omertà burned her alive and set her apart from her friends. But she kept silent for me.
As time passed, maybe one of us would have changed enough to make us happy together. Maybe we would have bent toward each other and met. The day I left with the taste of her risotto sliding against my tongue, disappearing behind the growing bite of bitterness, I realized how far we were from each other. She’d become vicious and moody, and no matter what I did, the only thing she wanted to talk about was my walking away from being my father’s consigliere.
She was pregnant. She didn’t want to bring children into the fold. Saddle them with a father who could be dead or imprisoned. She’d never told me any of that, but I knew it was true. It was obvious.
I didn’t owe her anything. We’d failed each other. I was no more responsible for the failures of our marriage up to the point she disappeared than she was. But after that, I blamed her for everything. For keeping my son from me. For letting me grieve for her. For showing up only when she thought I was dead.
I trotted down the hall, running with the whoop of the siren. I’d grabbed a white coat and headed against traffic to the cardiac floor. I had a room number. Theresa was locked away. That had been my promise. Declan Drazen would manufacture a way for me to get Valentina if I left Theresa behind. I had to go alone. He was protecting his daughter. I was grateful. At least if I wasn’t seeing sense, he was.