Page 51 of Crowned in Sin
I dip the cloth again and press it flat between his shoulder blades, and a thought that I can’t shove away surfaces as soon as I do.
A week ago, I tore a bedsheet into a rope and threw myself out a second-story window in an attempt to escape this man. Now I'm sitting behind him with my legs in the water, washing his blood off him like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I keep waiting to hate it, but the hate never comes.
Maybe it’s the gratitude, I tell myself. It’s not every day that a Don takes a bullet for me. And any normal person would say thank you for that. Tending the wound he took for me is natural. That's all this is: me paying down a debt of life that I owe him.
But that’s not it, is it? The same small voice that’s been in the back of my mind from the moment our paths crossed more than three months ago asks.
The truth is far simpler.
I stood on the steps of a church’s furnace room and passed the judgement for my husband to take another man’s life.
I did it calmly and evenly, without a shiver in my voice or a drop of doubt in my heart.
The action alone should’ve horrified me. And in another time, itwouldhave horrified me. But that part of me wasn’t there in the furnace room. Or if she was, she'd moved out of the way to make room for someone new.
You don’t get to sentence a man to death and still call yourself a prisoner.
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? The thing that nobody ever warned me about? There, in that furnace room, Lydia Palomino died. And in the din of gunfire with a spray of blood and bone, Lydia D’Ambrosio was born.
And now, I sit here as a Don’s wife, doing my duties for a man who’s proven time and time again that he’ll burn the world down and kill everyone in it for me.
Maybe this is what I’ve been waiting for this whole time.
Maybe, for seven years, I’ve waited for a door to open, so that someone can come down the stairs to tell me that it was finally safe to go back and fix what I left broken.
And it took Nico D’Ambrosio to show me that there’s no waiting for that door to open. I had to walk down those steps myself.
And if I'm going to live in this world as Lydia D’Ambrosio, then I have to accept my role in it.
I can’t be just a complication that he tied up neatly. And I’m certainly not just a pretty thing he took to piss off his enemies.
I am his wife. His equal.
Whatever that means and whatever the cost.
But perhaps most disturbing is how much I find myself truly liking it when he kills for me. Vindictiveness had thrummed down my spine watching Nico pull the trigger to end Stavros’ life. The tension that loosened in my shoulder had felt better than sex.
Which is why after the doctor left, Iinsistedon washing the blood from his body myself.
His body is warm underneath my fingers–far warmer than the water. And as I lay the cloth aside to let my fingers find the line of his shoulder, I press a soft and gentle kiss against his skin.
“That feels nice.” He closes his eyes, and I do it again.
I let my thumb drift higher, up the side of his throat and towards the silver line I've stared at without an answer.
"Will you finally tell me now?" I trace the puckered seam of the scar down his face from behind. "About where this one came from?"
He goes still beneath my hands, and for a moment I think he’ll refuse me again.
It won’t surprise me if he does. I’ve been told enough times not to pry about it. But just as I prepare for his refusal, he exhales through the steam curling up from the hot water and speaks.
"I was nine.”
My finger stops on the scar as I listen intently.
"My father had a temper he liked to spend on whoever was closest.” His voice is slow and his throat bobs with every word. “Most nights, that was my mother. He had the sense to never beat her in front of us, but not that night."
