She’d woken when I’d tried to quietly climb out of bed in the early hours of the morning. And while she didn’t say it out loud, she clearly felt like she needed to be as close to me as possible. She was my shadow, right at my heels as I moved around the house.
There was shit I needed to handle.
But I’d brushed the responsibility off on Vissi who was understanding of my needing to take care of my woman.
“Primo?” Isabella asked from her position laying on my chest as I stroked my fingers through her hair.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Can we move?” she asked, surprising me enough to make me jolt. “Not right now,” she rushed to add. “I just… this hasn’t been a good place for us. We should start over somewhere else.”
“If you want to move, we can move. I will look into it tomorrow.”
“Vissi said the place… where I was taken… that was…”
“Yeah. That was my childhood home,” I said, my arm tightening around her waist.
“You still own it?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” I admitted. It wasn’t like it was cheap to own a brownstone. Sure, it wasn’t as expensive as one in Manhattan would be, but it wasn’t chump change I tossed at the place, either.
“Do you think a part of you wanted to go back?”
“It was a hell house,” I told her.
“But you held onto it. It could have been someone else’s dream house, but you held onto it. Do you think a part of you was maybe considering, you know, changing the narrative you had of it?”
“Honestly, I don’t know, lamb. I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Do you want to think about it?” she asked. “It’s okay if it is a no. I’m sure there are a thousand other places in the area that we could move to. But it seems significant that you held onto it. And we could, you know, gut the place. Make it have no traces of the past. Then raise healthy and happy kids there. Break the cycle attached to it.”
“Kids?” I asked, hopeful.
“Well, Primo, my mother is expecting at least four grandchildren from each of her kids.”
“Only four?” I asked, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
“Well, the number is negotiable,” she said, turning her head to give me a soft smile.
Suddenly, I could see our kids running around the small, fenced backyard behind the brownstone as Isabella and I moved around the kitchen making dinner. I could see us decorating a big tree in the front window. I could see us shuffling up the steep stairs to the bedrooms.
I could see it all so vividly.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Let’s do it.”
Isabella - 1 month
They needed to create a new word for how exhausted I was.
I’d been spending every spare minute of my day at the brownstone with the contractors and the designers.
When Primo had agreed to my slightly insane plan, I’d promised myself that I would remove everything from the house that could even, in passing, remind him of his father and his dead brothers.
That meant we were even redoing the layout of both upper floors.
The basement level, the one where one of Primo’s men had worked tirelessly to remove blood stains and then paint the floor, was going to be a panic room. It was Primo’s one bit of input. He wanted there to be somewhere safe where he could shuffle the kids and I into if something happened.
He was going to handle the plans for that since it wasn’t my forte, but he left the rest to me completely. And I jumped in with both feet.
Sure, we’d hired a full team, and many of Primo’s men had rolled up their sleeves as well, but I didn’t want to stand by and do nothing. I was there, sanding, painting, and even ripping up all the awful cement in the back courtyard, wanting the space to have a lawn. For kids. Maybe even a dog someday.
I’d grumbled my way through a quick shower when I got back home, even though my mind was on food and sitting down for five minutes after being on my feet all day.
As I made my way down the stairs, though, the scent of sauce was already filling the apartment.
And there he was.
The man I’d been forced into marrying, a man I swore I would hate until the end of time, but had begun to love to a depth I didn’t even fully grasp existed before.
He was the man who murmured to me through my nightmares, who always thought about me first, who was loyal and protective and incredibly giving.
“Hey,” I said, giving him a smile. “I was going to get dinner started.”
“Vissi said you’ve been busting your ass all day. I can handle dinner,” he said, shrugging.
“What are you making?”
“Ravioli,” he told me, gesturing toward the little puffs of dough already lined up next to the stove, waiting to be given a warm bath to cook.