Page 112 of Masked Don

“Ask me again.”

He blinks. “What?”

“Ask me again. I want all the bad memories of this room gone forever. And turning it into the room where you asked me to marry you twice is what I need for them to go away.”

“Then I’ll ask you again, as many times as it takes. Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” I say. “God, yes.”

The room explodes. Hundreds of people are on their feet and cheering. Enzo climbs to his feet and wraps me in his arms and pulls me close. But he doesn’t put the ring on my finger. Instead, he presses it gently into my palm.

“Put it on yourself,” he says.

“I want to.”

So I do. I put it on.

“Smile, dolcezza,” he murmurs, so only I can hear. “Let them see.”

This time, nobody in the room is laughing at me.

And we all dance.

Later, much later, when the room is slowing down and I’ve been congratulated and embraced by more people than I can count, Enzo takes my hand into his and nods toward the stairs.

The stairs leading to that room.

“That night five years ago,” he says, “was a night of good and bad. But there was one part that was, without a doubt, one of the best moments of my life.”

I grin. “You mean the night you wouldn’t take off the mask?”

He laughs. “Can I interest you in revisiting a very, very good memory?”

I glance over my shoulder and look at those stairs, and I think about the woman who climbed them that first night, starting a journey that’s still going on. That was the night we were together for the first time. The night we made our son.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think that’s one trip down memory lane I wouldn’t mind taking.”

I take his hand, and together, we climb the stairs.

Because I want to.

Because it’s mine to choose.

We reach the same room. Enzo shuts the door behind us, and the lock clicks, and when he reaches for me, I put one hand flat on his chest and stop him.

“No,” I say. “My turn.”

His eyes darken. He lets me walk him backward to the armchair across from the long mirror, and he sits when I push. I take the plain dark mask out of his jacket pocket, the one he wore through the ballroom, fold his pocket square over the eyeholes, and tie it back over his eyes. Now he’s blind.

“Stevie.”

“Hands on the arms of the chair,” I tell him. “You don’t move them until I say.”

His fingers close around the carved wood. His jaw goes tight. A man who has never in his life been told to keep still, keeping still for me.

I take my time with the green dress. I let him hear the zipper. I let him hear the silk hit the floor. He can’t see any of it, and I watch what that does to him, his chest rising faster, his knuckles going pale on the chair.

“Tell me what you’re doing,” he says, rough.