Outside the narrow window at the end of the corridor, the sky is beginning to lighten. Pale grey at the edges, the particular colorless quiet that comes just before dawn decides to commit.
I stand in my father's arms, watch it happen, think about the man in the room behind me, the man holding me now, and everything that has to happen before this can look anything like peace.
It's going to be a long road.
But my father is here. He came.
That's enough for right now.
That's everything.
33
AXEL
She’s right. The ceiling in this room is forty-seven too.
I've been staring at it for twenty minutes.
How long does a reunion take? What does it look like when it goes well? Does she cry first or does he? Does Luca pull her in or does he stand there being stubborn until she breaks the distance herself?
I know Luca. I know him better than almost any person alive. I've sat across from him in negotiations that lasted sixteen hours. I've watched him bury men he loved without changing his expression. I've seen him make decisions that would hollowout lesser people and walk away from them without a backward glance.
But I've also seen him look at Aurora.
Even at the end, even in that room when everything was burning down, before the anger took over completely — he looked at her the way men only look at the people they would actually die for. The kind of love that doesn't consult the brain before it acts.
He'll see her, and he'll melt, I think. He has to. Because if he doesn't, if he lets pride override his love for his daughter—his daughter who has been missing him every single day—
I stop that thought before it becomes something I have to act on from a hospital bed.
She needs him. That's the only thing that matters right now. Not the history between Luca and me, not the seven years, not the fists in his office. Just Aurora, who forgives too readily and loves too completely and deserves to have her father in her life.
I would burn every bridge I have left standing to make that happen.
You're completely gone,I think to myself.You know that.
I do know that.
The strange thing is, I don't mind.
I spent forty-three years being a man who needed nothing. Built an empire out of that need for nothing, made it a weapon, made it a reputation. Axel Santego, who requires no one and can be moved by nothing. Seven years in a cell confirmed it — I went in alone, came out the same way, and told myself that was strength.
Then Aurora walked into a club in a green dress and counted her failures out loud like they were interesting instead of shameful, and somewhere between that moment and this hospital ceiling, I stopped recognizing the man I used to be. The man who was trying to be a father to a demented boy.
And there it is.
The thing I've been circling for hours, every time I get close to it, my mind slides away, finding the ceiling crack or the IV line or Aurora's name to focus on instead. But the room is quiet, and there's nowhere to go, and it finds me anyway.
Leo.
I think about him at four years old, sitting in the back of my car with both small hands wrapped around a juice box, legs too short to reach the floor, looking out the window at the city like it was something that belonged to him. He decided early that things belonged to him.
I think about him at nine, bringing home a school report that was mostly failures, and instead of embarrassment he'd looked at me with this extraordinary calm and saidthe teacher doesn'tlike me.NotI didn't work hard enough.NotI'll do better.Someone else's fault. Always someone else.
I think about the boy he was before he became the man he is, and I try to find the moment it forked. The moment where different choices might have produced a different person. I look for it honestly, the way I look at everything, and the answer I keep arriving at is one I don't like.
There wasn't a moment.
