Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  “This isn’t the end, brother,” Alexander promised in the same weighty tone he’d pledged himself as my husband. “I won’t let this happen.”

  Dante’s red lips pressed into a line that was supposed to be a smile. “You’re a Lord, Alexander, not a god.”

  My husband straightened to his full six feet five inches and leveled his haughty glare at his brother. “That remains to be seen. Let’s test it, shall we? I’ll have you out on bail before the month is out. Understood?”

  Dante’s lips twitched again, true humour flickering over his beautiful face. “Aye, aye, brother.”

  Salvatore stepped up in line with us, his shoulder brushing Alexander’s in a show of solidarity I never thought I would witness. “We’ve got you, ragazzo.”

  Dante nodded once, then cut his eyes to me. “You both better take care of my treasure.” My father and husband grunted, slightly offended that he even had to ask. “And you, tesoro, you take care of my family.”

  I nodded mutely, a sob lodged in my throat like a rock the size of a curled fist. Silently, we all watched as they opened the police car door and shoved Dante inside. The cops went to their vehicles, and only when the first of the convey started down the dirt drive did I explode out of Xan’s arms and race to the last car. My fingers pressed to the window, smearing my tears over the pane.

  Dante smiled at me and trailed his big fingers in the marks I’d left there.

  “I love you,” I shouted so loudly I could feel the vibration of it in my fingers on the glass.

  “Ti amo,” Dante mouthed.

  And then the car was moving slow, then faster, too fast for my churning legs to keep up with, and I was falling to the ground as my fingers lost their connection to the glass. I landed hard on my hip but didn’t feel it through the pain radiating from my heart, eviscerating my body like a nuclear weapon.

  “Oh God, Dio mio,” I chanted into my knees as I brought them to my chest and watered them with my tears. “He’s going to jail because of me.”

  Alexander and Tore were on me the next moment. My father sat behind me, cradling me between his legs, his hands tenderly moving the hair off my face to lay my head against his chest. My husband moved in front of me, sliding my legs over his so only a small diamond of space was between our pelvises, and his face was in mine, his hands rubbing over my cold, shivering arms.

  “Hush, my beauty, hush,” he encouraged me gently, his eyes on me, inside me, sealing up my gaping wounds with careful stitches and soothing caresses. “Hush, and trust me now, wife. If it’s the last thing I do, we will end Noel for orchestrating this, and we will get Dante out of jail and home where he belongs.”

  “With us,” I declared.

  He hesitated, but only to blink slowly and flash his eyes at me, showing how they turned from sorrowful smoke to absolute stone. “Yes. Home with us.”

  I sank deep into the bracketed embrace of my father and my husband and allowed myself to believe their strength was enough to bring Dante back to me.

  I went alone to Metropolitan Correction Center two days later. Alexander, Tore, and even Sebastian, when he found out, had wanted to accompany me, but I couldn’t let them. This was about Dante and me. I owed it to him to face his reality without the shield of the men in my life who loved me. I wanted to be exposed as a raw nerve when I went to him, as if my vulnerability would make the sacrifice that much more beautiful.

  I didn’t know about that, but when I saw him behind the glass in the prison they were keeping him in until further notice, I felt every single atom in my body keen with pain like the sorrowful howl of a wolf. He was so large, so beautiful and trapped like a magnificent wild animal in an enclosure too small and ill-equipped to handle him. Grief and rage burned in my hollow chest as I locked eyes on him through the plexiglass and picked up the plastic phone to speak with him, but I had vowed before I arrived that I wouldn’t cry in front of him.

  Dante hated to see me cry.

  I pressed my fingertips to the glass, needing to feel at least the heat of him through the blockade to reassure myself the only way I knew how, through some kind of physical connection.

  His hand was over mine through the partition in less time than it took for my heart to turn over in my chest.

  “Dante,” I said through the crackling phone line. “Mio bello Dante.”

  There was a wealth of sorrow and regret in those few words, but I didn’t know how to transcribe them in any other way than by saying his chosen name. In some ways, this was the life Dante had chosen for himself when he turned his back on Edward Davenport to be Dante Salvatore, from a lord of the realm to a capo in an Italian crime outfit. In other ways, it was grossly unfair.

  I’d been the one to kill Giuseppe.

  The memory of pulling the trigger lingered in my finger like scar tissue, heavy and misshapen under my skin.

  I remembered the way my heartbeat had slowed, so contrary to the way I would have imagined it churning hot, panicked blood through my veins. It slowed and my vision stung, then went clear as if wiped with Windex. Nothing existed in my body, no thought save one, one golden impulse that overwrote everything else.

  Di Carlo was threatening the two men who had been the centers of my universe for the last five years.

  Killing him wasn’t even a question.

  Yet now, so many weeks after the fact, I found myself doubting my decision. If I hadn’t killed di Carlo, what might have happened?

  Would Dante be free?

  “Don’t do that.” His rumbling voice cut through my thoughts, and when I looked up at him, it was to see an expression on his face I’d never seen before. He was angry with me. Some small part of me was appeased by his anger. I wanted to be punished for my actions, and previously, I’d had no one who wanted to castigate me for them. “Don’t you dare think that way, Cosima Lombardi Davenport. You did what you had to do in order to get out of an impossible situation. You soiled your hands, your very fucking soul, to save me. If you self-flagellate yourself for that the rest of your life, what was the point of your sacrifice in the first place?”

  My lips twisted to echo the wry grin I’d often seen on Xan’s face when someone dared to reprimand him, and he couldn’t argue their point. “While I see your point, it’s only because I was going to say the same thing about you taking the fall for something you didn’t do.”

  He shrugged cavalierly, in the way of all Davenport men. “You did it, tesoro. Not only did I put you in that position in the first place, but anything you’ve had to do or will ever have to do…I’d take your place. No questions asked, no regret felt afterward.”

  “Dante,” I said again in that heavy voice, an entire encyclopedia of words and thoughts inside that one word. My fingers sweat against the glass and smeared over the murky plane as I pushed my hand harder over his. “How can you feel that way about me?”

  “How can I not? Ask any man who knows you well—and isn’t evil—if he would do the same for you, and honestly, Cosi, I doubt you would find a different response. Personally, though, my love for you is only a faded offshoot of my respect for you. I’ve never met a man or woman more willing to martyr themselves for their loved ones. A woman who has been through an almost endless onslaught of nightmarish events, yet still retains her warmth, her integrity, and a smile that could melt the heart of a psychopath. I envied you when I first learned about you from Tore, and then I hated you when I thought you were only ever going to be Xan’s pawn, but as you always do, you proved me flagrantly wrong. I love you, and I’d die for you. I’d be in this place for you—happily—because there is no doubt in my mind that you would do the same for me.”

  “You make me sound too good to be true,” I tried to sass through my broken voice. My chest was compressed with the force of tears, my nose plugged up to stop their flow. “I’m horribly flawed.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Dante said with his trademark grin, his lips red as split cherries, his mouth so wide it punctured creases in each cheek like sharp
dimples.

  “I don’t want you in here,” I told him desperately, feeling my eyes drown in a hot flood of tears as despair filled me to the brim. “I don’t want you here at all. I don’t want any of this for you.”

  “We all make our beds, tesoro. I knew there was a likelihood I would end up in a place like this one day, and I thanked God I look good in orange.”

  “Don’t joke,” I snapped at him even as I smiled. “Only you would joke right now.”

  The amusement in his face bleached out, the ruddiness in his cheeks gone, his lips a single pale line. “Listen to me now, and really hear me. Of all the things that have happened in our lives, of all the awful outcomes that could have manifested from the greed and the hate at the core of those atrocities, my incarceration is almost pathetically mundane. I can survive this, cara. I can survive anything, and I think you know this now, but this? This I can survive well.”

  He was right. Dante was a large man, a built man, so packed with muscle I could see the striations under the exposed olive skin of his forearms, bulging like rocks wrapped in orange canvas under his regulation jumper. He could kill a man with his bare hands, and he would if they tried to fuck with him in prison. He was also smart enough not to let it come to that.

  Xan was not the only one Noel had taught to play chess.

  “I know,” I conceded, not sad but darkly proud of my beast behind the glass. “I know, but still, I won’t have it. Not for long. Xan’s secured the best fucking lawyers in the country, and Elena is on the team taking the case. I made her promise to do anything she must to get you free of this.”

  Dante raised an eyebrow, ignoring the clank and groan of the door opening and slamming shut behind him as another prisoner, this one with Nazi tattoos on his neck, entered the phone bay to make a call.

  “Your Elena may be a smart woman, but I doubt she is a ruthless one. Getting me ‘free of this’ will take more than excellent legalese.”

  I thought of the way my sister had beaten up Christopher at Giselle’s art gallery opening, of the times she had been shrewd enough even as a child to hide the rest of us kids in our designated spots so that the local Camorra wouldn’t find us and use us against Seamus and Mama. I thought of the edge in her eyes like a honed blade and her restless discontent despite her perfectly ordered, socially respectable life. I thought of her instantaneous agreement to join Dante’s team of lawyers even though she hated everything that spoke of my life without her. I thought of the fissure in her habitually cold face as she’d held me while I cried for the man I’d unwittingly sent to prison for me.

  “She’s a Lombardi woman,” I told him solemnly. “I wouldn’t underestimate what she can do if you put her in a corner.”

  “And why would she fight from this corner for a man she does not know, let alone a man like me?”

  I tipped my chin just as she would have with pride radiating through my voice. “Because I asked her to, and there is nothing she wouldn’t do for me.”

  Dante stilled at my words, impacted by the way they echoed his own. He respected nothing as much as loyalty, and Elena was the most loyal soul I knew.

  She would go to bat for him. Hell, I truly believed she would go beyond that to get him out of trouble because he was a man I loved, and my sister loved me enough to never want to see me without, not if she could help it.

  Cosima

  If my relationship with Alexander was like something from a dark Greek myth, Sinclair and Giselle’s romance was like a fairy tale; and not one of the Grimm brothers’ nightmarish fables. No, this was something even Disney couldn’t produce.

  It seemed the light filtering through the palm trees in trapezoids and sparkling off the calm, clear waters like fistfuls of glitter was actually pink, as if the very air was aware of the romance of the moment.

  Sinclair, the cold Frenchman who had dated but not committed to my eldest sister Elena for years, had planned and executed not only a surprise proposal, but the perfect elopement for my other sister, Giselle. It was so beautiful, the way she walked out of the waves in a wedding dress like froth over her curves, escorted by Sebastian who felt no shame in the tears that lined his eyes. It was so shocking to see Sinclair of the implacable expression and incredible calm watch her walk up to him to be his bride with a face as open and bright as a newly formed star pulled down from the sky.

  We had missed so much, but there was no way in heaven or hell I would have missed Giselle and Sinclair’s wedding. Alexander was in fine spirits after taking down the Order, even though his father was still free to rein over his realm of terror at Pearl Hall, so he actually capitulated to my demands. In fact, he went so far as to fly Mama, Sebastian, and Dante down to Cabo San Lucas with us on his private plane. Dante wasn’t allowed out the country when he was on bail, but Alexander was rich enough to grease the right palms to make it so. Neither Alexander nor I were comfortable with him out of our sight since he’d been released the week before, and I knew Dante felt the same.

  Elena, of course, didn’t join us.

  When I heard about Christopher’s reappearance in their lives at Giselle’s art show, I’d wanted to hop on a plane and take both my sisters in my arms just to feel for myself that they were safe from harm. It pained me to know that I wouldn’t be seeing Elena at the wedding, which was exactly why I had pressured Xan into going back to New York to attend the newlywed’s party at Osteria Lombardi.

  Elena, I knew, would be there.

  Something indefinable had happened when she interfered in Christopher’s assault on Giselle, some transition between my sisters from archrivals to hospitable foes. It wasn’t that they would ever be close. Like ink and oil, they belonged too much to different things, but it was the dénouement we had never thought they would achieve.

  So Elena was there in the bustling restaurant that night along with everyone else my family loved; Dante, Cage Tracey, Willa Percy, Giselle’s friends Brenna and Candy, Sinclair’s business associates who had witnessed their affair in Mexico, and even some of my sister’s friends from France had made the journey. It was an Italian party, so it was loud, filled with boisterous laughter that gleamed brightly under the strung fairy lights, and too much wine was poured and imbued.

  We hadn’t had a party like it since the restaurant opened two years before, when Sebastian and I had finally been able to hand our mother her dream in the form of brick and mortar.

  I’d missed it, the comradery between us all, the way we orbited around each other, coming together and breaking apart in duos and trios of combinations every so often because we couldn’t stand to be apart.

  Not anymore. Not after so many years of fractured family life.

  Even Salvatore was folded into the bosom of our family. Sebastian unwittingly charmed his father with tales from Hollywood, unaware that the older man laughed not only because they were funny, but because he was learning about his son’s life from his own lips in a way he never believed he would. Mama lingered nearby, talking to Giselle and Sinclair, but her eyes were on her men, a small smile placed like a fading indentation in her doughy cheek.

  “Theirs is a love story without an end,” Dante said softly from behind me.

  I turned in the circle of Alexander’s arm, content to stay there while my husband spoke to Sinclair’s business associate, Richard Denman, about a potential joint venture in London.

  “Maybe one day,” I hoped. “Maybe one day, they’ll get their heads out of their asses.”

  Dante rewarded my coarseness with one of his loud, gravely laughs, his head thrown back so his black hair framed him like a dark crown. “What will I do without you when you are gone, tesoro?”

  “You mean if you are gone,” I corrected gently with a hand on his iron forearm. “We won’t let that happen, though, D.”

  His grin was wry, and he looked so very much like Alexander in his rare moment of self-deprecation. “I wonder if it is a Davenport curse that we always believe we have the ability to control things. Sometimes, I’m a
fraid, cara, it is the things that control us.”

  “No, not anymore. We’ve come out on the other side of battle victorious and now to the victor go the spoils,” I teased, knocking my wine glass against his rocks glass. “If we can take down the Order, we can certainly take down the New York City police force and district attorney’s office.”

  Another twisted grin that ate up his full, too-red mouth. “And if that happens? If I am free, I’ll still be here in the city, and where will my Cosi be? I doubt it will be here with me.”

  “No,” I said again, this time with a genuine smile that branched off from the roots of homesickness dug deeply into my heart. “We’ll go back to Pearl Hall.”

  “Noel is still there,” he reminded me pointlessly, just because he wanted to change the topic from his own trials.

  I shrugged. “Alexander thinks it will only be a matter of time now that the Order has fallen for the MI-5 to have enough on Noel to incarcerate him for good. Apparently, they’ve found records of transactions between a shell company potentially operated by Noel and di Carlo, so they could even pin my attempted murder on him.”

  “So, you really are going to leave?” Elena asked softly from behind me.

  I reached back and found her hand unerringly to pull her to my side. Her familiar Chanel number 5 scent wafted over me, and the feel of her against me was so right that it felt like two puzzle pieces clicking together. I leaned my head against her shoulder, the ends of her curls soft as cotton beneath my cheek.

  “I will, but I’ll come back to visit often.”

  There was a silence between the three of us that said not often enough. It won’t be the same.

  It wouldn’t. I wasn’t naïve enough to doubt it. I had lived apart from my siblings for long enough to know how distance could erode a bond. I also knew that the secrets we had all harboured between us were almost at an end, that it would be easier to love across a thousand miles without those obstacles to hurdle over.