"How did you spend your Christmases growing up?"
We lie almost nose to nose as the sun begins to rise, but we don't pay attention to that, to the infiltrating day or what it means. Because today is the day that Santo leaves.
Instead, we try and talk about what we'd talk about if we were normal. If only all we were thinking about right now was the holiday, what we were going to be eating, what presents we had bought for others.
But even our normal isn't that normal.
"We never did much." His eyes glaze over as he's transported back to his childhood. "Our parents were too insane to ever start any traditions, and by the time it was just me and my brothers, we weren't really able to. It's always been just another day. It was once we met Samuel and he started bringing Leah around that we started celebrating those things. But it's not really celebrating. It's just..." he trails off, becoming distracted pushing a tendril of hair from my forehead.
"Being together?" I smile softly.
"Yeah," he says on an exhale. He suddenly flips to his back, sighing up to the ceiling. I frown, but refrain from asking what's wrong immediately. It looks like he's thinking hard about something, struggling with whether to speak or not.
"I want to tell you what happened to my parents."
The words sit between us, hanging, waiting to be picked up by him or left to fall and shatter on the ground. I nod, not wanting to disrupt him, so I silently let him gather his thoughts.
After a few moments, he turns to look at me. "Well don't stay all the way over there," he grumbles.
"Oh, right," I breathe, quickly fitting myself up against him as chuckles shake his chest. He traces ticklish circles on my shoulder, and they seem to calm him.
Minutes must pass before he opens his mouth. "My father committed suicide. My mother was killed six years later."
A chill spreads through me, and I peer up at his face, blanketed in an expression that betrays nothing. No pain, grief, or discomfort.
"My father, Antonio Romano, was good at what he did, which was run a tight business. When his business went to shit, he didn't have anything else to live for. And he left my mother, a child herself, with four young sons. She couldn't handle it. She had these episodes. She was mentally ill and she never got any help for all the shit that was wrong with her. She'd almost kill my brothers sometimes, but that was accidental. I was the only one she actually wanted to kill."
My heart gives a painful clench, and I know that what he tells me next is the thing he's kept close to his chest so I don't have to see it.
"When she gave birth to me, that last sane part of her broke. I was just... I don't know. I don't think I was a particularly difficult child. There was just something off with me." His voice becomes bleak, and I feel a tsunami of anger towards a woman I know hardly anything about. "One night when I was twelve, she almost succeeded. She had a knife to my chest." My hand goes without thought to trace the scar on his chest, and he shivers. "She would've killed me if Simo didn't kill her then."
We remain silent together as I process his pain, what it means, how it's torn him open. So much more makes sense now, and I press myself tighter into him, absorbing the sigh he releases into my hair.
"Massimo's scar..."
"He gave it to himself. He would always tell me that when she hurt me, she hurt him. I guess he meant it literally."
I swallow drily, understanding more about the Capo now too. How is it possible, that they could grow up in so much turmoil?
"What happened after they were both gone?"
"We raised each other," he says wearily. "Those years, I honestly don't remember much of. We were either starving or freezing or defending ourselves on the street. We were like wild fucking dogs. We had to kill or be killed. When I turned eighteen, I started Serpentine. Simo took his title as Capo. Survival became something we didn't have to fucking fight for."
I flatten my palm over his chest, feeling the thrashing of his heart. Right then, I deliriously wonder how he has even opened up to me at all. The kind of pain he's experienced would warrant anyone completely closed off. Yet, here he is.
"You feel like the final piece of my life falling into place," he murmurs. "The thing I've been missing for all this time. Trying for so long just to survive, you forget why you're even trying. You lose your purpose. Trying begins feeling like a punishment in and of itself, because all it brings is more pain. You showed me why it was worth it, all those horrible years, and why it's worth it now to keep..." He breaks off, his voice cracking.
My own traitorous eyes begin leaking, and he doesn't finish his sentence. I press my face into his shoulder, and he turns into me, hooking his chin over my head. His arms bring me to his chest, big body curling around mine until I feel completely surrounded by him.
"I'm proud of you. You might not see it all the time, but you have a family worth being proud of, too. What you've created for yourselves goes against all the fucking odds, Santo."
"As long as you're part of it," he says quietly. Then seems to have a thought he doesn't want to acknowledge because he tenses, murmuring, "tell me something."
And it's easy to tell him, "my mother was killed right in front of me. Luciano did it. He was mad she had cheated on him, or something. I don't remember much of it, just that it happened, and I think... I think she was holding me? Because I think I remember her sliding down the wall, her blood getting onto me before she put me down. Made me go stand in the corner and not watch." I must have obeyed. The burnt orange of those stupid walls is seared into my memory. I think it was what I was looking at while I listened to her die mere feet away.
Santo's choppy breaths fill the silence between us. "I didn't know that."
I shrug. "I don't like talking about it. I don't like trying to remember it. I think some things are better not remembered."
I exhale a breath I didn't know I was holding. It feels safe to have told him here, now, in the dark. It feels like him and I aren't too different when you think about it. He doesn't say anything, just cups the back of my head and kisses my forehead, the warmth of him so solid and comforting.
"I didn't think I could want to kill Luciano any more than I already do," he says after some time, and I breathe my amusement into the warm space between us. "Your strength... it's unimaginable, tesoro. You could teach the toughest of us a few lessons."
We let silence envelope us again. The sun is too high in the sky, leaking over the tips of the trees outside this dark sanctuary.
"My father shot himself right next to me. He didn't see me," he whispers suddenly.
The breath becomes choked in my chest. "What? How old were you?"
"Six."
"I was five." I pick my head up from his chest. "When my mom died. Almost the same age. How weird is that?"
He's looking at me with worlds in his eyes. "You are an angel. An angel sent to a sinner too far gone to deserve it." I'm reeling at his words while he continues. "How do you remember her?"
I like that question. "I remember her hair. It was so pretty and long. She was so pale, too. She was beautiful. And what she always called me, gioia."
"Joy," he murmurs, letting a small smile play at his lips. "It suits you. She sounds wonderful."
"How do you remember him? Your dad?"
His face darkens. "Anger. That's what I remember of him. He rarely yelled or raised his voice. But he was always coiled tight and you could feel it spilling off him in waves. He was a Son of Serpentine, and he drew on his anger. I suppose I'm like him in that. And I remember the day he died. He just... pulled out his gun so casually. It was as natural an act as taking off your shoes when you come inside or making yourself a glass of whiskey after a long day." He shakes his head, seeming to have said more than he intended.
"What else do you remember?" I encourage.
"He liked books." He absentmindedly starts squeezing my hip, rhythmically, almost like one would a stress ball. "He had a book. The Brothers Karamazov. That one you're reading, with all the faded notes in it. Part of me wonders if he liked it so much because the man in it is so much like him. Wealthy, powerful, and lacking any feeling towards his children. His only goal in life being making money and seducing young women." He scoffs angrily. "Of course, in the story, it's one of his sons who kills him. I wish one of us did."
"Do you think... do you think he believed in God?" The question slips out almost without me willing it. But I'm thinking about what I've read of that book so far, about what stuck out to me when I read it. That God or beauty or goodness only exists if you believe in it.
Santo scoffs. "I think he wanted there to be a higher power who could take responsibility for all the pain he was causing. I know that pain breeds pain. He had probably been through so much and done so much that the idea was appealing to him."
"Is it appealing to you?" My voice is barely audible.
"No," he eventually says, sliding a hand up my back. "I don't want to rely on an invisibility or a hypothetical for my hope. I think that if there's a God, I'm pretty far from his reach." Dark humor cracks his tone, like there's an inside joke I'm not a part of.
"Why?"
"He cast Satan out of heaven, didn't he? I don't know much about God, but I do know that he detests evil. Sin."
I hum, turning my head to watch as the sun appears in the window, brightening the room. "Do you wanna know something?"
He squeezes me in reply.
"My mom was religious. I remember her teaching me to pray when I was super young. She taught me to pray for my family, for my father and brother. To thank God and ask him for things I wanted. But..." I chuckle, shaking my head. "I would pray for Satan. I prayed that he would realize that if he was nicer, everything would be fine. I prayed that he would apologize to God and everything would be okay."
Santo draws my face to his with a hand on my chin. I melt at the look on his face, the wonder and softness making him look so wholly mine that it hurts so much. It nearly kills me, how much I love him.
"But who prays for Satan?" He says, so quietly that I need to lean in even further to hear it. "Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
I recognize the words. "Mark Twain," I whisper, loving the way we can communicate through other people's words. Clearly there's some goodness we can both choose to hold onto, clearly it means something. Now it's a matter of seeing if we'll be allowed to keep it.
Then I'm kissing him, kissing away the pain on his face, absorbing the tremble of his fingers into my skin and holding his suffering, keeping it away from him for a little bit. I think that's what you do for someone you love; and I'm realizing that I love him not because he's a good person but because I recognize his darkness. His shadows—they dance with mine.
Love, I think, is found in the darkness.
We kiss until the sun has completed its ascension, signaling the start of the day that everything could change, and he has to leave. We kiss until day breaks and I tell him I love him and he looks like the words are tearing him up from the inside—and he doesn't say them back and he's so scared and I can feel it choking the air around us.
Then he leaves me and I'm not sure if he'll be coming back.