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There were still a couple of hours left till the dawn broke, and I would like to spend them finding out more things about my amazing boys.
King let out a sigh. “Alright.”
His finger began tracing invisible patterns on my shoulder. “You know that Jack, Ace, and I all lived in an orphanage.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think that you told me about that before.”
But then Ace had interrupted us and I forgot to bring it up again.
It was… I had also lived in an orphanage once, before Francesco had taken me in.I suppose that I thought…I didn’t know what I thought.
“We met and befriended a little girl our age there. She later turned out to be the Don’s daughter.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
King was quiet for a couple of moments before he eventually spoke again. “She died.”
I could hear the heartbreak in his voice even now.
Who was she, I wondered,that she had managed to stay in his heart for so long?
“I still think about her constantly. We all do.” There was a sense of melancholy in his voice. “I don’t think that the Don has ever gotten over her death. She passed away before they could see each other again, the poor man.”
“And that’s how you met him?”
King hummed. “Yes. He came looking for her but he found us instead. Since we’d been so close to his daughter, he decidedto take us in and raise us.” King’s eyes were closed, his voice becoming fainter the more he talked, close to falling asleep.
That sounded like quite the story.
One that was sad and had an unhappy ending, but at least the three of them still had each other.
Expect for the girl. The girl who had died and yet…
What was the probability of the three of them growing up in an orphanage, befriending a little girl whom they continued to love even after all these years… because she was still loved, I could hear it clearly in King’s voice.
“King?” I spoke, my voice no more than a whisper. “Can you tell me what your real name is?”
My heart was beating a drum in my chest and I was afraid that he’d be able to hear it too.
There was a pause, a moment of suspended breath, before he spoke a name I thought I’d never hear again.
“Marcello.”
My heart stopped in my chest.
Marcello… Marcello… Marcello…
The name echoed in my mind.
“And the girl that died. What was her name?” I asked in a broken voice.
The name fell from his lips was spoken softly into my hair, and the pieces of our shared past fell into place.
“Dahlia.”
* * *
In the hushed stillness of the night, King lay next to me, asleep. On the other hand, I’d never been more awake, my thoughts setablaze with incredulity and disbelief.
