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If sunlight grazed the marble at just the right angle, the name seemed to gleam in response. Appropriate, as only someone asbright and shining as her deserved to have the sun smiling down on them.
It was hard to imagine the Don as anything other than the ruthless man that he was.
A criminal mastermind. A cold-blooded monster. A merciless killer.
Those things were easy to see him as.
Very few people thought of him as a grieving father, however.
King, Jack, and I were among those few.
There existed a unique link between us and the Don. Thin, but strong. A shared connection that no one else could ever understand.
For him, there was no one in the world who had known his daughter as well as we had. As for us, the Don was one of the only few things that we had left of her. We cherished every little reminder of her, precious fragments that she had been made of. The Don was a more tangible entity than our cloudy memories, a proof that she had existed once, even if she didn’t no longer.
Dahlia was one of the first people I had ever loved.
It had been a childish love — one that was entirely pure and knew no bounds.
She was also my first encounter with guilt, something which had since become a lingering presence in my mind.
But I had gotten used to that by now.
For some reason, thinking about Ludovica had made me remember Dahlia.
Maybe it was because her eventual disappearance from our lives loomed over our heads, much like Dahlia’s did.
But Ludovica’s departure wouldn’t be as instant as it had been with Dahlia. Ludovica’s was more gradual, slowly slipping away from us as easily as grains of sand slipped in between fingers.
She had said loud and clear that she wanted to leave, even though she immediately took it back afterward. However, once certain words were spoken into the world, they became irreversible.
Ludovica’s entrance into our lives had been nothing short of explosive, leaving a trail of death and blood behind her. I wondered if her departure was going to be the same.
Her presence had caused a disturbance in my everyday life, completely shaking up the routine that I had carefully established. But like a burst of sunlight, she had also brought brightness into our otherwise dull existence.
It was difficult to imagine a life without her in it now.
Madam Alfera had once given us advice, one of the very few when it came to matters of the heart. She said that we should find someone whose darkness perfectly matched our own.
Never would I have thought that there existed someone who could match the bright parts of it so perfectly as well.
Our.
That was another important element.
King, Jack and I had never shared a girl before.
The thought of it had been so unimaginable that something like that had never even crossed my mind. But somehow, it made perfect sense. Like the missing piece of a puzzle being slotted into place.
A puzzle that we had never even realized was missing a piece, and would have, unbeknownst to us, remained incomplete if it hadn’t been for her.
Of course it made perfect sense that she’d be ours.
It had only been the three of us for so long — four a very long time ago — and we were too connected to even try to exist separately now. But, in a surprising twist of events, someone had managed to fit into the open spot without me even noticing.
However, what I thought didn’t really matter, did it?
The most important thing was how Ludovica felt, and she had made her feelings more than clear.
