Page 84 of Forsaking All Others

The server returned and placed two frothy lagers on the table before whisking away again.

Dario took a long pull from the cold beer and nodded. “Once, when I was young, I found something that meant more than honor, duty, and loyalty.” He paused, gaze traveling far away to a past I couldn’t see. “I paid a very steep price for that lapse in judgment, Fiammetta. It scarred me in a way that can’t be seen on my skin but I feel every day in here.”

His fist thumped against his chest.

“I haven’t wanted anything for myself since,” he finished.

It was interesting, an insight into his past, however vague. Coupled with what I’d learned about his dead brother, it seemed Dario was defined by two significant losses in his life. It made me feel closer to him to know that, given I’d lost four precious lives the day of our wedding.

“Someone you loved?” I asked.

I couldn’t picture this man in love.

He was a man on lockdown; every emotion had to struggle and fight and beg its way to the surface, where it died a quick death before being buried six feet deep beneath ice once more. To love someone, you had to be willing to let your truest self go into the hands of someone else.

I didn’t think Dario was built to do that.

Or maybe he just wasn’t brave enough.

He inclined his head in answer to my question.

“Was she Russian?” I asked suddenly, thinking of the Cyrillic tattoo.

Once, in a fit of invasive curiosity, I’d taken a photo of the ink and sent it to Katya for a translation.

Любовь до гроба. Love until the grave.

It was such a romantic sentiment it seemed inconceivable that Dario would have it embedded in his skin. For a moment, when I’d read Katya’s translation, I’d felt a bone-deep jealousy, seeping like poison through my bloodstream.

So he was capable of love, I’d thought, just nothing of the sort with me.

But over the years, I’d accepted that if Dario had loved as a youth, he was simply not capable of the emotion anymore. He certainly didn’t seem to love either Lando—who he treated with barely concealed contempt—or his mother, who he had a kind of passive respect for but little else. He respected Cesare and Ciro, but I never saw him relaxing with them over a beer at the end of a long day.

I never saw him relax at the end of a long day, period.

He was, as the server had said, a lone wolf.

An unreachable island with no-trespassing signs on the shore.

He didn’t even want to be known, let alone loved.

Something in my chest shifted like tectonic plates, a fundamental rearranging of my worldview as it pivoted around the central axis of my husband.

Alone, I thought, but maybe lonely too.

Which spoke of a hidden capacity to feel.

“She was,” Dario confessed. “She was the Pakhan’s young half sister. This is why I do not think the Russians are behind any of the fuckery that’s been happening the last few years. We have a connection beyond a simple gentleman’s agreement.”

“A shared loss,” I whispered through my suddenly aching throat.

He nodded slightly, staring down at his beer for a moment before snagging my gaze. A mystery worked behind his eyes, like dark sea creatures beneath arctic ice.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

A flicker of a smile that had nothing to do with happiness.

“I think if something had happened to me, I would want you to know a little of the man you lost,” he confessed finally before raising his beer and draining it in a succession of long gulps.