Falling Angel | a Mafia Story

Chapter XXII

"We are bound to each other's hearts,

Caught, torn and pulled apart, this love is like wildfire"

After we sat in silence for a long time, both of us caught up in our own thoughts, Ellie eventually got up and excused herself before she headed upstairs to go to bed.

I couldn't deny the tiredness deep in my bones, but I wasn't quite ready to go to sleep yet. And even if I had wanted to, as I opened the door to my room, I saw the sleeping form of my brother sprawled out on the mattress and I didn't have the heart to wake him.

Carefully pulling the door shut behind me, I stood in the dimly lit hallway for a moment. It was eerily quiet; everybody was either out or had already gone to their rooms and the loneliness of this otherwise so lively household started to creep up on me.

It was almost eleven o'clock and Antonio still had not returned, so I decided to wait for him, the pit of anxiety in my stomach keeping my tired eyes wide open.

Walking over to his room I felt like I was doing something forbidden as I opened the door, so I quickly slipped through and closed it behind me. It felt odd to be there without his amber eyes watching me, but I stepped further into the room and looked around.

Pale moonlight fell through the tall window and caught on the stark white sheets of the empty bed, almost inviting me in. I didn't even have to turn on a light, the nearly full lunar globe hanging high and mighty in the night sky plunging the entire room into a milky haze.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed I took a deep breath. Antonio's familiar scent was still lingering on the duvet and I had to fight the urge to wrap the soft fabric around my body and curl up in his bed.

But I was determined to stay awake until he came home. Something deep in my soul was aching for his body to be close to mine, for his hands to roam my skin like they did earlier and for his soft lips to meet mine in a wordless promise to stay by my side.

He had stirred something deep within me that I had never even known to be there, but now that it was awake it hungered for more. It longed to feel the fire that had flickered up in my soul and that could only be ignited by the man that had my heart pounding every time his amber eyes caught mine.

It wasn't that I had never been kissed before. No, I have had a couple of people kiss my lips and even touch my skin, but none of them had caused such a spark as Antonio and now my soul was ablaze, consuming me like a wildfire.

Let's just hope that I don't get burned...

My swimming head was going in circles and I was slowly getting dizzy from the turmoil that was raging within me. I thought back to the clueless girl I had been not too many months ago, seeing the world in black and white, convinced that I had it all figured out.

But here I was, feeling at home in the house of a man that I had believed to be the devil after having fired a gun at my own father. My view on everything I had believed to be righteous and good had shifted to a point of no return, and even though I felt a pang of guilt for purposefully inflicting pain on another human being I could not deny the sense of justice that it had given me.

I hadn't noticed my body sinking back into the pillows. Without realizing it my eyes had closed and I was sinking into a deep sleep, the countless thoughts still spinning around in my tired mind, merging into grotesque imagines of a familiar nightmare.

°

"Stay together," the voice of our captain bellowed over the deafening sound of bullets firing into the darkness, a wounded soldier clinging onto his shoulder for support as we made our way deeper into the building.