Tears clogged my throat and blurred his face. “I don’t know if killing him will make that all go away.”
“It’s a start,” he promised, his hands so gentle on my cheeks even though the rest of his still quaked with bottle fury. “All your life, men have hurt you. I didn’t understand until now. Seamus, Christopher, Daniel. None of them showed you how goddamn tragically beautiful you are, Elena. But I will. I’ll prove it to you every single day until I die, mi senti?”
Do you hear me?
I did.
His words scalded my ears, scoured down my throat and burned in my gut like grappa. I felt them, saw them, heard them in every way language could be understood.
He grabbed my hand and pressed it hard over his madly beating heart. “This beats for you. It bleeds for you. I am yours. Your sword, your champion, your lover, and your home. You don’t understand this yet, but I will never hurt you, Elena. I only ever hurt for you because fuck me, you’ve been through too much already. I will only ever hurt those who hurt you because I love you and I won’t let anyone else ever get away with putting pain in your heart without consequences. Mi senti?”
Do you hear me?
“Yes,” I said through the silent tears that ruined my makeup. “I hear you, Dante.”
“I love you, Elena,” he said, the words like four punches straight to my chest, breaking through the cage of my ribs to directly impact with my tender, eager heart. “Mi senti?”
“Ti sento,” I promised him, licking the tears from my mouth. “I hear you.”
“You believe me?”
A sob wedged in my throat and moved painfully in my mouth where it exploded from my lips and fell between us, wet and ugly. “Yes,” I hiccoughed, clutching at his chest with one hand and his hand on my cheek with the other. In that moment, I could fathom him ever letting me go. “I believe you.”
He stared at me like some avenging angel, mad with powerful, vengeful rage, but slowly, breath by breath, he softened until he finally sagged against me, forehead to forehead.
“Cuore mia, my heart breaks for you,” he whispered raggedly before kissing the tears from my cheeks. “I won’t let yours break again.”
“Okay,” I whispered through my strangled throat. “Okay, Dante.”
“Thank you for telling me, I know it was hard.”
“It wasn’t, actually,” I confessed. “I feel better than I have in years. I’ll have to fire my therapist if we ever get back to New York.”
He laughed because he knew I wanted him to. “Mia bella lottatrice,” he murmured like prayer across my lips before he kissed me.
My beautiful fighter.
I kissed him like one. Like a fighter and not a victim. Because I felt for the first time like the victim I’d been could be properly buried and grieved for, moved on from. There would always be a gravestone in my soul where what Christopher had taken from me was buried, but it wouldn’t define me.
I wouldn’t let it and neither would this beautiful brute of man holding me like I was his treasure.
“Should we go home?” he asked, because he was just that dreamy.
I sighed, nuzzling into his neck because he smelled so good. “No, I feel okay.”
He made a noise of disagreement in his throat so I pulled back to smile at him. “I promise, I do feel okay. I want to replace all those old memories I have with Christopher here with something so much better. With you. Fuck the past, let’s focus on the future.”
“I love to hear you curse,” he said to lighten the mood.
I kissed him lingeringly. “Wine and dine me, capo, and then later, I can’t wait for you to fuck me.”
“Che coraggio,” he murmured against my lips. What courage. “Okay, lottatrice, let’s go.”
Twelve
Elena
We ate on the quay beside the glittering aquamarine ocean. Dante knew the owners of the small restaurant off the beaten path, around a massive cliff face from the major promenade filled with tourists. We started with Aperol Spritzes and moved on to wine to accompany our fresh seafood appetizers and pasta dishes, the meat course swimming in verdant green pesto, and a bitter espresso to finish it all off.
We laughed.
It was strange to think I could laugh after such a confession, that Dante could smile naturally after being so consumed by rage.
But that was the power of this thing between us.
We made each other come alive, in good ways and bad, everything heightened and poignant.
Dante told me happy stories about his childhood at Pearl Hall and promised we would visit the manor together one day so he could show me all his special haunts. I told him about being eight years old and dropping four-year-old Sebastian on his head. He’d had a massive lump for ages afterword, which was why he all affectionately called him patatino, little potato.