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Ah, those damned dimples. Those dimples were what got me in the beginning: so cute, so disarming. That, and his eyes. They might be dark, but they weren’t anything like Rocco’s cold eyes. He always had a warmth about him. It was easy to feel at home with Luca.
“Good,” I whispered.
“Before I leave, I wanted to give you this.” Luca pushed the envelope toward me.
I was slow to take it, undoing the metal prongs on the edge closest to me and pulling out its contents. Papers, along with a business card of a divorce lawyer.
“They’re already signed on my end,” Luca informed me as he ran a hand through his brown hair. “All you have to do is sign them yourself and bring them in. I already paid the lawyer, so all he has to do is file them and it’ll be official. You will no longer be a Moretti.”
“Technically, I wasn’t really a Moretti, since I never had my last name changed legally,” I said. “But thank you, Luca. I know how much you don’t want to do this.” If Luca had his way—hell, if I was married to any of the others and they had their way—divorce wouldn’t be an option.
Luca grinned. “That’s all right. We never had a wedding. The next time you say ‘I do,’ I want a party after.”
“You think I’m going to say ‘I do’ again?” I wanted to smack him, but I held back. He knew my feelings about marriage. That said, maybe in the future things would change. No one could look into a spyglass and see what the future held.
“Maybe I do,” he whispered.
My gaze fell to my hand—my left, at the shiny diamond ring on its ring finger. If I was honest, I’d say I’d gotten used to the weight, to the constant added sparkle to my hand, so it was a good thing Luca would never ask.
I set down the papers and pulled the ring off my finger. I offered it to Luca. “Here.” It held no sentimentality to him; it wasn’t like it was his great-great-grandmother’s or something, but he should take it back regardless.
He held up a hand. “Nah. You keep it. It looks good on you, anyway.”
“Luca—”
“What? It does. Besides, maybe I’m hoping the more you wear it, the more you’ll realize it might not be so bad to be married to me.”
“And you’ll be okay with your wife having a few boyfriends on the side?” Again, I didn’t know what the future held for all of us, but by God, now that things will settle down, I really wanted to focus on myself and live. That meant following my heart, wherever it led.
Luca grinned. “Eh, you might be able to wear me down.” He got up, moved around the table, and stood before me. He took the ring… only to drop to his knees and slowly push it back onto my finger, and then those eyes of his glanced up at me, and something unspoken passed between us.
I’d never gotten a proposal. No wedding. No bachelorette party. Nothing to mark the occasion except being tossed aside like trash by Miguel.
If I was going to have a wedding… I supposed I’d like to do it right. That meant I’d have to don the color white one last time, but you know what? It’d be worth it. For Luca, for the others, it would be worth it.
His hand held mine once the ring was back on my finger, and he squeezed it gently. “Don’t get into much trouble while I’m gone, okay? I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He got up, kissed me long enough to make me ache for him, and then left.
I watched him go, and once he’d disappeared in the house, my stare dropped to the diamond on my finger. How it sparkled in the sun, catching the light and refracting it; the ring truly was beautiful. I’d overlooked it before based on principle, but I couldn’t deny it any longer. I might not have believed it in the past, but I understood it now.
There was still some beauty left in this world.
Two weeks passed, and I heard nothing from the Black Hand. Luca came back, his mother now safe with her sister. I didn’t know if Luca told her the whole story, or just how her husband wasn’t coming back. Either way, I hoped the woman was taking it okay.
It was one morning when we were eating breakfast—me, Zander, Cade, Luca, and Gianna—when Zander got a call. He excused himself from the table to answer it, and before he left the dining room, I couldn’t get a good look at the screen, so I didn’t know who it was who was calling.
A part of me wanted it to be the Black Hand, just so I could get it over with. This radio silence kept me trapped in limbo, a liminal space where I wasn’t here nor there, like I couldn’t fully move on until I cleared the air with the ruling criminals of this city.
“Who wants to place bets?” Luca asked the table. “Could it be his mommy calling?”
“It’s obviously Shay or someone with the Hand,” Cade harrumphed, mostly speaking to his plate as he scraped it clean. His hair was cut short, shorter than I’d ever seen it before, but at least it was blond again.
My hair? My hair was a bit of a patchy mess. I’d found this permanent hair remover that was supposed to open your cuticle or something and pull the permanent dye out. Mixing it together made the entire second floor of the house smell like rotten eggs—Zander and Cade had complained about it for days, and it actually made Gianna throw up.
I felt bad, sure, but it worked. Mostly. My hair was back to my natural blond… only there was a good chunk of it on the back of my head that was patchy, bits and pieces of it still darker than they should be.
Ah, well. It was good enough for me. My hair’ll grow out eventually, I’ll chop it off, and then I will have no memory of when I dyed it.
“Who do you think it is, Gianna?” Luca asked, trying to bring the woman into the conversation.
