Page 24 of Ruthless Vow
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
He doesn’t push it. Just claps my shoulder once, the way he used to when I was a boy pretending not to be afraid.
“Your father went through dark times too. He came out the other side.”
I don’t mention that my father came out the other side broken. That he spent years as a ghost who forgot to stop breathing. That coming out the other side isn’t the same as surviving.
The evenings are harder.
I return late. Always late. She’s in bed by then, back turned to my side, her body a careful curve of avoidance that mirrors my own.
Her breathing is too even. Too controlled.
She’s not sleeping.
Neither am I.
We lie there in the dark, inches apart, and I count the cracks in the ceiling because it’s better than counting the ways I want to reach for her. Better than breathing in the scent of her hair on the pillows, the warmth radiating from her skin, the sounds she makes when she drifts off at last.
By 3:00 a.m., I give up. Slip out of bed. Cross to the study. Pour whiskey. Repeat.
It’s not sustainable. I know that.
But it’s safe. Safe is all I have.
Mid-morning on day eight, I head for the study to review the quarterly projections.
The door is already open.
I stop in the hallway. My blood cools. Every muscle locks tight.
No one enters my study without permission. Not the staff, not my siblings, not even Renzo unless I’ve summoned him. This room was my father’s before it became mine, and the rule has held for years.
Someone is breaking it.
I move forward, quiet, controlled. Ready for anything.
What I find is my wife.
She’s sitting at my desk. Not perched on the edge. Not hovering. She’s settled, surrounded by ledgers spread open across the mahogany surface, a cup of coffee cooling at her elbow and a pen moving across a notepad.
She’s wearing reading glasses.
Oversized tortoiseshell frames that swallow half her face and make her look like a graduate student pulling an all-nighter. My lungs seize. All the air just gone.
Cazzo.
She doesn’t look up. Doesn’t notice me standing there. She’s absorbed, lost in whatever pattern she’s tracing through those numbers, and I stand like an idiot, frozen by the sight of a woman doing paperwork.
Move. Say her name. Send her away.
I don’t.
Instead I watch. She tucks a strand of dark hair behind her left ear when she leans closer to a column of figures. A smallfurrow forms between her brows as she runs her finger down a row of numbers.
She holds the pen left-handed. I didn’t know that.
