by K. J. Dahlen
There’s a shift in the air.
He turns his head to face me, and the frission of his excitement moves up and down my spine at lightning speed. “Gio?”
“I know what to do.”
“What?”
Gio is at the side of the bed in an instant, reaching for me. I let him help me into a sitting position, my legs over the edge, toes brushing against the carpeted floor. My heart thumps madly. The fact that I’m completely naked and he’s fully clothed is a distant one. My trembling excitement keeps me warm.
He looks down at me and strokes one hand over my hair. Then, in a movement that’s so graceful it hurts to watch, Gio gets down on one knee. He takes my hands in his. He is dark-eyed, dark-haired, and those pools of black desire are lit with something else. Something fiercer.
“I found the way out,” he says, voice even. “The way out of all of this. And the way into—” A slow smile that makes me burn for him, hot from the inside out. “And a way into the future. Together.”
“What is it?” Even kneeling on the floor, I taste his strength in the air.
Gio takes a deep breath, as if he’s preparing to dive into deep water. “Marry me.”
27
Gio
For one heart-stopping moment Sia only blinks at me, her face expressionless in the pale glow of the city seeping through the window.
The moment is broken when a radiant grin flashes across her face. “Gio,” she says, a laugh in her voice. “What?”
“Marry me.” My confidence grows. Yes. This is right. The rightness feels like the final puzzle piece sliding into place, and giddiness chases after it. I squeeze Sia’s hands. “Don’t you see it?”
“I see how it’d never work.” There’s still that hint of a laugh bubbling up, but Sia’s expression is serious. “We can’t get married. We’ve known each other for five seconds. Who would marry us?”
“No.” I can see the hope written on her face. It’s as obvious as a fucking sunrise, but I get it—I’d be reluctant to believe, too. After all the running we’ve done. After we’ve been shot at. After I almost killed her. “We’ve known each other for a lot longer than that.”
“But we were kids when—”
“Tell me you don’t still feel it.” I’m a dick for interrupting her, but my blood is singing with this solution, with this unbearably right decision. “Tell me you don’t feel how good it is to be together. Tell me it doesn’t feel right.”
Sia bites her lip. “Our families—”
“That’s exactly it.” This is the crowning achievement of the whole plan. If I marry her, she’ll be my family. “This is the only way that our families will ever join. This is the only way they’ll ever accept you.” I laugh out loud. “My family—they never go after their own. Become a Moretto, Sia, and you’ll be safe for the rest of your life.”
Her shoulders slump, a tiny movement, but it’s obvious she’s imagining the sheer relief of it. No more running. No more hiding. No more brothers shooting at her head.
“It’s impossible, Gio.” Sia’s voice drops to a whisper. “They’d never accept me. We’d always have to keep moving. I don’t know any city in the world where—” She swallows hard. “Where you can completely disappear.”
“I don’t want to disappear. I want them to see you for who you are—an innocent.” She’s so gorgeous in the half-light, her naked body so lithe and smooth, and my cock pulses against my pants. “Although you’re not quite as innocent as you seem.”
Sia catches the dirty undertone to my voice and her blue eyes flash with want. She raises one of my hands to her chest and presses it there, over her heart, my palm tantalizingly close to the nipples I’m desperate to play with. “Are you sure about this? It’s—it’s a serious thing, getting married, and I wouldn’t want to—”
I close my eyes and block everything out.
The hotel room.
The never-ending day.
The orders from my father.
Everything, except the beat of Sia’s heart under my palm.
It’s fast but steady, and maybe I’m imagining it, but her skin warms under my touch. I feel every movement of her, every breath, every shudder, every tremble. Right now, there is no such thing as Ricci and Moretto—there is only Gio and Sia.
I breathe her in.
She smells like shampoo and a hint of me, and underneath that there’s the sweet scent of her desire. How close we got, damn it. How close.
I search every inch of my soul for a warning. A thought that tells me to back away, that marrying her would be a mistake, that it’s not the clean salvation I thought it was.
There is nothing. Only a great, pulsing hope, like I’m standing on the edge of reality, a step away from jumping into the life I’m supposed to have. The life I always, even as a teenage boy, wanted. With my hand over her heart, I can admit it in the deepest parts of myself: I always wanted Sia more than anything else, so powerfully that it was too much to put into words.
It made sense, then, that we shouldn’t end up together. How many people end up with one woman? How many people follow the same person from middle school to marriage and never stray, never look at another person? Practically no one. I thought that’s how life went—you met someone who made you burn with life, and you let that fade away until you found someone who did the same thing for you.
I never did.
And yes, we are in a time of turmoil. Yes, our first priority right now is staying alive, not having a sweeping romance that everyone will remember for the rest of time. It’s tense and gritty and hard, and it’s not the way I would have chosen to fall in love.
I didn’t, not really. I fell for her all the way back in school, the first time I saw the sun play in her hair.
All I need to do now is buy time to explore every inch of her, every nuance.
I need to buy the rest of our lives.
I open my eyes. “I’m sure, Sia. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
She exhales, and I hear the acceptance in that breath. “But how? How could we do that?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Her mouth curls up into a coy smile. “You didn’t ask me a question.”
I shift my grasp so that her hands are in mine again. “Sia, I don’t give the slightest fuck what your last name is or was or will be. Will you marry me?”
She looks into my eyes, deeply, searching, and then gives a little nod that’s so full of excitement and relief that it breaks my heart. “Yes. But Gio—”
“I know where to go,” I tell her. “I know what to do. But we’re going to have to move fast.”
28
Sia
“Do you see anyone?”
Gio wraps his fist around the handle of his suitcase, squeezing tight. There wasn’t a soul in the hallways of the hotel while we crept out at two in the morning. The service stairwell was the best option, Gio decided, even with our arms full of bags. At the entrance to the underground parking we both hold our breath, listening for the telltale footsteps of someone who might have been watching.
I wait, then wait again, letting the sound of my own heartbeat settle and fade.
“No.”
“Let’s go.”
My heart picks up again on the fast walk to Gio’s car.
“Slow down,” he says. “Slow down. Relax.”
It’s a hard fucking sell, relaxing, now that we’re out in the open. I feel exposed, without the protection of a wedding vow, and as safe as it seemed in the room, the underground parking feels like a trap. Gio unlocks the car when we’re two steps away and I wrench open the back door, tossing the bags in. He doesn’t bother opening the trunk for his suitcase. He shoves it in next to my bags and climbs in the driver’s seat, hitting the locks on the door and craning his neck around to look.
“Still nobody,” I confirm, and he backs out of the spot. “Oh, yeah.”
I twist my body backward, reaching into one of the plastic bags from the department store, and
pull out my brand-new phone. Gio darts his eyes across to my seat and steers us toward the exit. “What’s that?”
“New phone.” I hold the button on the side and power it up. I hadn’t exactly intended to tell Gio that I bought myself an iPhone and a phone plan with his money, but hey, he kidnapped me. It starts up with a flicker of the screen and turns on. The guy in the department store was more than happy to set me up with a new account.
Gio laughs. “Did you leave them anything?”
“Of course,” I scoff. “It’s a department store.”
“Did you leave me anything?”
“Of course,” I scoff, then press my face into a semblance of seriousness. “I mean, your card wasn’t declined, or anything.”
“My god, woman. You’re going to take me for all I’m work.”
“Yes.” I tap through the initial menu on the iPhone and start setting up my usual preferences. “But only because you took me.”
It draws another laugh out of Gio and we pull up to the automated payment booth. He selects the I forgot my ticket option and checks the rearview mirror.
“Shit,” he whispers, face going pale. “Don’t turn around. Don’t make yourself visible.”
My heart leaps into my throat. “What is it?”
“Somebody’s back by the entrance. I can see their head moving over the cars.” He stabs his credit card into the machine. It clicks and whirrs, taking approximately one thousand years to process the payment, to spit out the receipt. “They’re moving way too slow to be—fuck.”
I can’t resist. I’m like Lot’s wife, only I don’t turn to stone when I whip my head around to see the man in a dark jacket, his head covered with a dark cap even though it’s May, stalking up the incline of the ramp floor toward the car. He digs in his pocket and my gut sinks like a rock. “He’s getting proof. He’s getting proof, Gio. Go. Go.”
“I can’t,” he says through gritted teeth. “I can’t—”
The engine revs and I know Gio’s about to take a risk—he’s about to drive right through the gate. Shit. Shit. Is it only a length of PVC, like the ones on campus? Or is there more to it?
I’m winding up, my fingers tapping uselessly at the center console, when it opens.
Gio guns it, out onto the empty street.
I keep looking back as he accelerates toward the freeway entrance. Behind us, the man runs out of the parking ramp, his phone glinting in the lamp of a streetlight. The last I see of him is a fist, shoved angrily down through the air.
I don’t think he got what he came for.
Gio knows where he’s going.
He goes through the toll stops almost without looking, pulling out exact change and tossing it in the automatic collection booths while he checks out the rearview mirror.
The sky is an inky black, and neither of us reaches for the radio volume button. It plays soft and low.
We’re half an hour outside the city when he takes my hand.
“See anything?”
It brings a flush to my cheeks, this checking in, this asking my opinion, as if we’re equals here. We’re not equals, and I know that. Gio is a Moretto. I’m alive because of his grace—because of our friendship—but he knows more than I do about staying alive. It sends a shiver down my spine to think about the things his father must have told him about taking life, but I keep my eyes on the road.
As if he can hear the worries spinning up inside my brain, he continues on before I answer. “I don’t see anything. But who knows. Maybe you’ve got better night vision.”
I laugh. “I don’t have any night vision. I was actually—” It seems so commonplace, so unbelievably normal, to talk about this with him, that it makes me giggle in spite of everything. “I was thinking about going for a pair of glasses, once the semester was over.”
“Oh, shit,” Gio says. “You can’t see?”
“I can see.” I have no idea why I’ve gone the defensive route. “It’s only at night that my eyes start to give me trouble. A little blurring at the edges.”
“That’s what it felt like to see you in that bedroom,” he says softly. “A little blurring at the edges.”
I squeeze his hand.
We’re an hour outside the city, maybe more, when Gio pulls off the freeway and into another world.
Empty fields, a valley falling beneath us, the road black and quiet. “What is this place?” It’s so different from the suburbs, so vast, but it can’t be more than ten minutes before Gio slows down, looking carefully at all the pull-offs. He chooses one, and we turn onto a narrow paved road that’s more of a driveway. A really long driveway. “Gio?”
“You’re going to ruin the surprise,” he says, faux testily, and I laugh. We’re under a bower of trees, approaching somewhere in the inky night.
Then I see the lights.
There are two, on opposite sides of a wide doorway, a staircase underneath, all of it leading to the circle drive Gio pulls up onto as if he owns the place. “We’re here.”
“Obviously. But where’s here?”
“You’ll see.”
We step out of the car, Gio coming around to offer his arm to me, and I stare up at the house. It’s big and old, but even in the dark—even with only the two lights burning by the door—I can see that it’s been well-maintained. It’s a house like I’ve never seen in the suburbs, and connected to it, on the other side, is a church.
A church?
Gio doesn’t hesitate. He goes straight up to the door, even though it’s the dead of night, and lifts a big brass knocker. Thud, thud, thud.
As if it’s the middle of the day and not the cool, damp middle of the night, the door swings open right away. At the same time that the light spills out onto the wide staircase my brain fits all the buildings into place. A monastery? Gio brought me to a monastery?
I blink into the light and the man standing there—well, he’s clearly a monk. He’s wearing a tunic, and he could be standing here in the 1590s as easily as he’s standing in front of us right now. And despite the late hour, his face, hardly lined, though he’s got salt-and-pepper hair around his temples, splits into an indulgent smile. “Gio,” he says. “What a lovely surprise.”
29
Gio
Father Lawrence settles into an armchair by the fireplace in a sitting room just inside the main entrance of the monastery, the flames dancing happily there like this isn’t the middle of the night. He welcomed us in, shut the door behind us, and led us away as another monk took his place by the door.
Security settles over me like the light from the fireplace, warm and comfortable. We’re not in the church, but it’s sanctuary nonetheless.
Father Lawrence considers me, and I look back. “You still keep watch all night?”
He smiles, the lines in his face deepening. “If we hadn’t kept that ancient tradition, no one would have been awake to greet you.”
“I’m glad you were.” I remember myself with a little shock. Jesus, I’m being a dick. “Father Lawrence, this is—” My girlfriend? Who was my prisoner? And who’s now my fiancée?
She bails me out. Of course she does. “Sia Ricci,” Sia says, standing to shake his hand.
“Welcome.” Father Lawrence greets her with the same warmth as always, and pure impatience shudders through me. I’m asking him for a favor, I know that. I’m asking him to do something unconventional—I know that too. But I want to be done with the asking. I want to be done with the talking. I want to be married to Sia. He must see it in my eyes, because he folds his hands in his lap and speaks. “What brings you here tonight, Gio?”
I tell him everything.
God help me, I tell him everything—everything but the personal details—my eyes glued to his face. He is calm, though at certain points in my story the corners of my mouth turn down. Finally, my mouth dry, I reach the end.
“—so we left and came straight here. To ask you for your help.” I can’t help the note of command, of confidence, seeping into my voice, and I
shove it back. This isn’t the time for Moretto confidence. This is a time to be humble. “Please.”
He looks at each of us in turn, Sia in her chair, me in mine.
Then he starts in with the questions.
It’s not only now that’s relevant to Father Lawrence, it’s everything. Somehow, the things he says draw out words I thought were locked in my head forever. I find myself, at one point, trying to describe the way the afternoon sunlight danced in her hair. The air in the room thickens with meaning. One question after another, and he does the same for Sia. She answers everything in that clear, even voice of hers. She never looks to me for approval. She’s telling the simplest truth.
I don’t know how long it’s been when Father Lawrence takes in a deep breath, and my chest expands with the weight of it. This—this—is what it’s going to come down to. I can sense it.
“Are you certain of this?” I’m ready to say yes, more certain than I have ever been, but he presses on. “Even though you have much to learn about each other?”
I bite back the hasty word, the hasty answer, the answer to get what I want right fucking now. I breathe in the significance of this moment. I breathe it back out. I turn his words over in my mind. I hold them there, looking from every angle.
“Yes,” answers Sia, and her voice rings with finality.
Father Lawrence nods, but he doesn’t smile. His face is serious. “Then come with me.”
There are things we have to take care of, before he’ll marry us. A special form that comes only from the monastery that stands in for a marriage license. Father Lawrence patiently explains that we’ll need to take it to the courthouse and file it. “Afterward,” he says, but he doesn’t go into any detail about what after means. He doesn’t have to.
Then, with two other monks as witnesses, he leads us through the monastery and into the church.
It’s softly lit with candles, but there’s something else—the gray light of dawn.