Page 63 of Crowned in Sin
I don't know what kind of man I married. I think, watching the water slide by, that maybe Nico doesn't fully know either. Maybe that's the actual thing sitting between us, not the ring, not the debt I owe my mother, not any of it. Just two people trying to figure out what they're made of out of the wreckage somebody else left behind.
The Sorrento house waits at the end of the dock, pale stone, shutters closed against a pale, early sun. It looks staged, waiting for someone to actually live in it. No shoes by the door. No photographs on the walls. No mail piled on a counter, no jacket thrown over a chair. Just rooms, kept, waiting for someone to finally move in and mess them up.
Nico unlocks the door and stands back to let me through first, quiet, and there's nothing easy in it. Something in him cracked open back in that garden, and he's been holding the pieces together with his own two hands the whole ride home.
I don't let him keep doing that alone.
I turn in the doorway and reach for him instead, both hands flat on his chest. For once, he doesn't step back from it. He doesn't change the subject. He doesn't reach for a joke to put between us. He just stands there and lets me hold on, his heart going hard and fast under my palm, his forehead coming down to rest against mine.
"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean all of it. The chair. The knife. The name he's never once said out loud, not even to me.
"Don't," he says, but there's no edge in it. Just tired, all the way down.
We stand like that in the doorway for a while, his breath slowing against my hair, mine slowing to match it.
My stomach picks that exact moment to growl, loud enough there's no pretending it didn't happen.
Nico huffs something that's almost a laugh, low in his chest, his mouth moving against my hair.
"Come on," he says. "I'll make you dinner."
22
NICO
The beans have been simmeringfor an hour before Lydia even asks what I'm making.
"Pasta e fagioli," I say, not looking up from the pot. "My mother's recipe. What's left of it in my head, anyway."
She's sitting on the counter, bare feet swinging, watching me like she's never seen a man cook before. Maybe she hasn't. Not one who does it himself, without staff hovering, without a taste-tester standing by in case someone wants me dead through the soup.
"You cook."
"I cook this. One thing." I stir. "Everything else, I can afford to pay someone better than me."
The quiet that met us in the doorway an hour ago has filled in with steam and the smell of dried garlic. Stone walls two feet thick, cool even in the dead of summer.
A kitchen my staff stocks and nobody touches. A dining table long enough to seat twelve, and I don't think it's held more than two at a time since the day it was delivered.
The doors on the far wall stand open onto the garden, lemon and olive trees in crooked rows down the terraces, the bay spread out flat and dark blue beyond them, Capri a shadow on the water where we just came from.
I bought this house because a Don is supposed to have a house in Sorrento. I never once thought about what it would be like to cook dinner in it.
I press the lemons myself. Squeeze them into a jug with sugar and water, without taking any shortcuts. My father broke a lot in me over the years. He never got this. Small mercy, maybe the only one, that some nights when I was a kid, mother would let me stand on a chair at her elbow and teach me which pot to use. By a stroke of luck, that part stayed and refused to be ripped out.
Garlic first, browned soft in the oil. Rosemary from a bush growing wild against the garden wall, still in its stem, pulled out before the beans go in. Half a rind of parmesan dropped into the pot to melt down into the broth, exactly like she taught me. I add salt by feel, and taste twice to make sure it's good. Somewhere in my chest, doing this, I'm nine years old again, and for once, I'm remembering the good part.
Upstairs, through the window over the sink, I can see the edge of the balcony off our bedroom, hanging out over the water toward Capri across the bay. We haven't used it yet. I've been meaning to bring her up there since the day I bought the place, to stand next to her and look at nothing in particular for once.
"It smells like actual food," Lydia says. "I didn't know that was a category you had access to."
"Careful."
"I'm complimenting you."
"Doesn't sound like it."
She grins, and something in my chest goes warm and stupid and undefended. It's been happening more and more since Capri. Since the boat. Since I watched my mother take my own worst memory and pry the rest of it open in front of the one person I never meant to let see inside it.
