My prison.
This shower. This suite. This building.
My prison is only a prison because I believe I’m married, which I’m not.
Without the marriage, the suite is a residence and the building is a shelter. Dario can hold my body, but my heart and mind are free.
But… no. I keep thinking with the facts of the past. There are new facts now.
He has no claim to my body. He belongs to a woman with an aura of conviction and a voice that can’t possibly waver or sound unsure.
Of course, he married her out of choice. Who wouldn’t? She’s magnificent. Confident. Whole. Unbroken. She exudes a kind of competence that I’ve associated with men. I can’t compete with someone so beautiful and strong. I’m her exact opposite. Weak. Ignorant. Compliant.
Under lukewarm water, with my clothes sticking to me, Dario feels like the source of my terror. I’ve been deeply betrayed by someone I’m sure I love. I am torn to pieces, set on fire, ashes blown to the winds.
What’s left?
Dario.
I can smell him on my skin. It’s a scorched memory of his touch. I hear his voice. Feel that first kiss. His smile, so elusive and hard-won. His story—not the events, but the telling of it on a trip to the south and east.
I want him so badly it hurts. Another minute of thinking of his sweet cruelty and I’ll crack. But what will I do to stay whole? What’s the story of the next hours? The coming days? How long can I guard my heart?
Can I imagine a future without him?
I can’t, but that’s because I was never allowed to imagine a future for myself.
I don’t want to be Schiava, or principessa. I don’t want to be a Colonia or a Lucari.
I want to choose and be chosen.
I want to be Willa.
The ash of who I was may be in the wind, but Dario Lucari is still deep inside me. All the water in the world won’t wash him off.
Willa is the best thing that could have happened to me. If she’s his wife, then I’m just a woman.
Just a woman.
Not the princess of Colonia—an asset to trade for territory. I am not hindered, owned, promised, or betrothed.
I get out of his shower, dry off with his towel, dress in the clothes he chose for me, and sit on the bed he bought for the women he valued.
The wood box of art supplies sits on my dresser. Did I almost forget it? He got it to please me—and that makes it the only thing I own that’s truly mine.
I am not his. I never was. It was always all a lie.
And since I’m not Dario’s wife, I have no obligation to him. I do not have to please him, or obey him, or split my loyalties. There are no more rules. No more boundaries. No more husband.
I’m just me, alone, floating unanchored in a nameless void. The feeling of being his wife was terrifying. Not being connected to him is scary, but something in me has changed. Under the fear is a current of possibility. Hope. But for what?
At the kitchen counter, I eat with the art box at my side and a pencil in my hand. I draw landscapes and skylines. What’s in the window and what I imagine beyond it. The boundaries of the copy paper frustrate the expanse of what’s in my mind.
Dario’s in my mind.
I can’t see past him. He’s too close to me and this paper is too small to contain him.
Asking for something bigger is out of the question. Everything I need is right here, and when it’s not—when this space runs out of necessities—I’ll have to leave knowing who I am or die like a branch cut from a tree.
So I move the couch away from the wall, revealing a lighter space. I move the end tables away, leaving one close enough to hold my supplies… and I draw.
Mountains. Seas. Boats. Clouds full of rain and lined in silver. My arms are too short for a single line, so I walk along the wall. I stand on a chair to find the upper edges of my dreams.
They’re not defined in words, but I find them—and yet I find myself lost in small things.
His chin and lips at a mountain’s peak.
His hand on me.
The outer edge of his eye.
What I see when I kiss him. His sliced-off ear, the back curve of his neck.
I love this shape. This scar.
No. I won’t break for him again.
But what will I do instead of crack? What’s the story of the next hours? The coming days? How long can I stay in this suite?
Can I imagine a future without him?
I can’t, but that’s because I was never allowed to imagine a future for myself.
He’s lied to me and betrayed me. He’s worse in my eyes today than he was the first time he pointed a gun at me. I thought more of him when he put dirt in a water glass and made me drink it.
All that disdain will go away in time, and I’ll fold under the pressure of his touch. I’ll forgive him and I’ll come out… maybe in that order… or maybe not. But I’ll make peace with him on my terms, in my time.
These are my choices to make, and I won’t be rushed.
CHAPTER 4
DARIO
“Broken traffic light,” I say, looking out the window.
Connor’s on one side of me. Oliver’s on the other. Tamara’s behind us, decoding the dispatcher’s messages into a coded shorthand, and Sarah’s still behind a door.
Pedestrians make slow, steady progress below us as if everyone isn’t separated from everything they love in the world, but the car traffic isn’t doing as well. The light at the corner of Ninth and 47th blinks alternating flashes of red in both directions. The intersection is snarled with people who don’t know how to manage a four-way stop.
“There was a broken light reported right before the last three greenhouse SWAT hits,” Oliver says. “Could be coincidence.”
“It ain’t,” Connor says.
“How long do we have?” I ask, knowing full well it won’t be enough time to gently coax Sarah from hiding.
“Forty-five,” Tamara confirms what I already know.
Forty-five minutes isn’t enough to earn Sarah’s forgiveness… but it’s enough to escape and live to fight another day.
“Everybody out.”
The chainsaw’s tank has about a quarter cup of fuel in it. The way it stinks up the storage area in the garage, a guy could think that gas has been evaporating since it got those pine chips in the blade, years ago.
The red milk crate with the safety goggles and gloves sits on the floor under a sagging shelf of who even knows the fuck what. The single bulb hanging from a wire is so bright it hides details in hard shadows.
Behind me, the scrape of footsteps on the concrete is soft, but calculated not to frighten me into alertness. Careful and sure. Respectful but confident.
The gate is open, chain dangling with the open padlock at the end of it. Anyone could just walk in while my back is turned, but it’s Willa, and she doesn’t need an open lock to be dangerous.
“Dario.” She uses her social worker voice. There was a time when it soothed me. Now the bite of saccharine opens to a bitter aftertaste.
“Go home.” When I yank the chain, the motor spins and coughs. “Not to your apartment. Home, home.”
“When Sarah Colonia agrees to come with me.”
Never. My mind screams, but my lips stay shut as I yank the chain again. Any harder and it’s going to snap, but the motor doesn’t catch.