Page 176 of The Ache That Stayed

The resort sat buried high in the Alps, wrapped in snow thick enough to silence the world beyond it. Private. Remote. The kind of place people with too much money and too many secrets escaped to when they wanted to disappear for a while.

It was quieter here than Sicily. Not silent. Never that. There was always noise—wind pushing through pine trees, distant laughter carrying across snow, the muffled scrape of skis against packed ice outside the resort. But it felt cleaner somehow.

Like the world had softened beneath all the white.

The kids had spent the entire day turning it into complete chaos. Romano and Matteo nearly launched themselves off a staircase trying to wrestle. Sophie convinced Kyra to start a snowball war against Antonio until Alessia threatened all of them with early bedtime.

I stood near the edge of the slope, watching Roxanne absolutely fail to snowboard.

“Rox,” I called out as she nearly wiped out again, “you’ve got the balance of a drunk baby deer.”

“Shut up,” she snapped immediately before losing balance again.

Kyra’s laughter echoed across the slope. “Mamma sucks at this.”

“Language,” Marcello said calmly from beside me.

Kyra stuck her tongue out at him innocently. “You say worse.”

Marcello adjusted Valentino higher against his chest without missing a beat. “That’s because I’ve earned it.”

A smirk tugged at my mouth.

The kid in his arms looked deeply offended by the cold, bundled in enough winter layers to survive an arctic expedition. Watching the world with those same sharp grey eyes people used to warn others about when they looked at me. Only on him, they looked almost ridiculous.

He glared suspiciously at everyone like he was personally evaluating whether we deserved to exist near his mother.

My son.

The realisation still hit strangely sometimes. Because there’d been a time I genuinely believed I’d never survive long enough to have this.

“What are you glaring at?” Marcello asked dryly.

Valentino blinked once. Still suspicious. Marcello sighed like the child had exhausted him beyond repair before lifting him easily into his arms anyway.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Let’s get you inside before you catch a cold.”

A strange warmth settled inside me as I watched him disappear toward the resort with my son balanced against his shoulder like he’d been doing it forever.

Fatherhood had softened the edges around family without dulling the man beneath them. And that was the thing about Marcello that people got wrong. Everyone feared the violence first.

They never noticed the control it took for a man like him to choose softness instead.

Darius had survived the warehouse. For a while, anyway.

Nobody told me exactly what Marcello did to him after that. They didn’t need to.

For nearly a month, he came home some nights with blood across his knuckles and a silence in him that felt colder than usual. Roxanne never asked questions. She just cleaned his hands carefully while he watched her like he was trying to punish himself for not protecting her sooner.

And then one day, it stopped. No more blood. No more late-night disappearances.

Just Marcello standing behind Roxanne in the kitchen one morning, holding her a little tighter than usual while she laughed at something Kyra said. Like some part of him had finally buried a ghost that had been haunting her for too long.

Hours later, by the time the kids finally went to sleep, the resort had gone quiet beneath the storm outside. Alessia and Antonio disappeared into their room not long after, leaving the lower floor wrapped in low firelight and silence.

I walked into the sitting room and immediately stopped.

Roxanne stood near the fireplace wearing a black silk nightgown that barely covered the tops of her thighs.