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26
CHRISTIAN
I wake up to the sound of Lara’s piercing scream as it reverberates off the stark walls of the enclosed hospital room. She’s panicking, “It’s gone!” she screams as she thrashes about in the hospital bed, pulling out the IV attached to a fluid drop. “Oh my God, what happened? Christian, what happened?”
“Shh, shh,” I say as I jump out of my chair and rush over to her. Lara’s eyes are wild in panic, and I have to nearly restrain her before she finally listens to me. “Calm down, it’s okay. Everything is okay. You were going into premature labor. We brought you here and the doctor admitted you right away. The birth was early and high risk, so the doctor put you under and delivered the baby via cesarean.”
“What? The baby survived?”
“Yes,” I smile as she stops crying and lifts her head to look at me. “A girl. Our daughter. And she’s the most beautiful creature on this earth, right along with her mother. She’s tiny but she’s a fighter, and the doctors and nurses say she’s going to be okay.”
“And what about Roman?”
“Matteo and Rex went back with soldiers from theborgatato find and deal with Roman,” I explain. “I didn’t want to turn him into some kind of martyr for his new followers, so instead of killing him I had him arrested. I got him locked up on charges of arson and attempted murder. He’s going to be in jail for a long time.”
“What a relief,” she says as she wipes the tears from her eyes and winces. I call for a nurse to come back in and fix the IV and then coax Lara to lay back down in the hospital bed again. Then, after the nurse leaves to inform the doctor that Lara is now awake, I sigh deeply as I sit in the chair beside her.
“You were right,” I say, not taking any pleasure in it. “It’s too dangerous here for us to raise a child. Even with all of my power, money and best efforts, I can’t guarantee our daughter’s safety. Maybe weshouldleave the city and the mafia life together and move someplace nice and safe like upstate.”
At my suggestion, Lara recoils. “No, we can’t,” she says abruptly. I’m surprised, especially since she spent the better part of her life trying to run away from being here. “I had a dream and I know now that we need to stay here. She’s so much like you. A little too much like you, maybe.” She pauses her nonsensical rant to chuckle over what she said for a moment. Whatever she’s trying to impart to me, she’s certainly feeling passionately about it. “She’ll die of boredom upstate. We have to stay here in the city now. We can’t doom our daughter to a mundane life where she’ll one day likely wind up as an unsatisfied closet alcoholic.”
“What are youtalkingabout?” I ask in complete confusion.
“You don’t understand. I saw her in my dream while I was passed out, or maybe while I was under anesthesia, it’s difficult to say. Regardless, she’ll be so miserable that she’ll be desperate for the life we can give her here. God, I can still picture it—the backyard barbeque with plaid-shirted neighbors and chit-chat about who’s running the school bake sale. She’ll wind up killing everyone by the time she’s thirty, and will wind up at one of those all-female prisons.”
I’m utterly confused but also finding Lara’s colorful descriptions of our daughter as an angsty PTA mom with anger management issues amusing. “But I thought you wanted to be sure she’s safe,” I remind her.
“I do, but I also want her to be happy. If she’s not happy, she’ll wind up doing more damage to herself than any outside threat ever could. I want to stay here in the city and within the Grecoborgata. This is where our family belongs.”
“That means you’re going to have to get used to a life of constant danger, then,” I say, wanting to make sure she truly understands what she’s signing up for if we choose to stay and raise our daughter here in Hell’s Kitchen. “And so is our daughter.” As much as I want to make our whole little family untouchable and impervious to danger, that just isn’t how life in the mafia works. There will alwaysbe danger just a few feet or a few moments away. “You said you wanted our child’s safety to be guaranteed,” I remind her. “And although I’ll always try with my life to protect her, she’ll never be entirely safe in the city.”
Lara looks deep in thought for a moment and then answers me with resolve flashing across her eyes. “I think it’s more important for us to stay here with our daughter. She’s going to need the kind of life you can give her here, not one that plays it safe at the expense of her inner flame.”
“And what about you?”
“I think I’ve gotten better at dealing with the mafia life,” she smiles. “Killing my father opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes violence is a necessary tool to put down a great evil. I’m not afraid of this life anymore, and I don’t want my daughter to be either. Perhaps that was my problem all along. Perhaps if I had been stronger from the start, then I—”
“None of us know how things might have changed if we would have acted, or thought, or evenfeltdifferently in any past situation,” I interrupt before she falls into the rabbit hole of self-blame. “We can’t live in that space of our heads because it serves no purpose—it doesn’tchangeanything. When we learn how tobebetter, then we act better and choose better, and that is how things grow—people, companies, and evenborgate.” Lara looks at me with an expression I haven’t seen before. “What?” I ask, hoping she didn’t take what I said as some sort of condescending or overreaching insult to her intelligence. I know how irritated she can get when she thinks that I’m trying to explain something to her.
“You’re so different from every other man I’ve ever known in the mafia,” she says. “You see everything as an opportunity, and you don’t give a shit about breaking any of the rules that don’t serve you. I find myself frequently in awe of the man I’ve married.”
I laugh because it feels strange to be put on a pedestal by someone who has held such contempt for the entire infrastructure of the system I hold a large stake in. “Oh, you shouldn’t be in too much awe,” I tease. “I can still gut a man with my switchblade without blinking an eye.”
“You don’t scare me anymore, Christian,” she says with a laugh. “I never would’ve married you if I thought you were really a monster.”
“Is that so?” I grin at her as I lean forward and kiss her gently on the forehead. “So, what exactlydoyou think I am, then?”
“I think you’re a strong, powerful and protective man who loves the little family we’ve created together and will do anything for them.” She’s not wrong. “And I think our daughter will be just fine here in this life,” she continues with a knowing expression. “Something tells me she’s going to be a lot like her father.”
“Do you want to go and see our daughter?” I ask as Lara’s eyes light up.
“Yes! Oh, but first, we need to do something. She doesn’t have a name.” That’s right—we had just been starting to discuss names when Roman showed up to torch my restaurant. “I think I have the perfect name for her,” she says. “Camille.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” I say. “But doesn’t that name mean ‘acolyte?’ Are you sure you want to give a mafia daughter such a docile name instead of something more fearsome-sounding like Lola or Delilah?”
“I want to call her Camille because she’ll need a strong name that has its roots in a pure concept—to be an arrow of truth and justice and not to fall prey to being manipulated or controlled. I want her to start her life in this world with every chance for her to stay good like her father, instead of becoming corrupted like mine.”
I nod in agreement. “Camille it is, then,” I say. “It’s a lovely name.”
