Determination

Sofia’s POV

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

I did not cry.

I had promised myself I wasn’t going to cry and I kept that promise with the focused stubbornness of someone who understood that if she started she might not stop for a while.

I looked at the ring on my finger.

Simple gold band. Warm in the lamplight. Matching the one on the hand of the man at the end of this corridor who had pressed his lips to my forehead in a courthouse with no flowers and no guests and made me his wife.

I had known it would cost something.

I had stood in that courthouse and looked at the priest and the rings and the man holding my hands and understood completely and without self-deception that this was going to cost something significant and I had said yes anyway.

I had not fully understood until this moment exactly what the cost felt like.

You disgust me.

From Valentina.

My Valentina.

I pressed my fingers flat against my sternum and breathed with the deliberate focus of someone reminding themselves that breathing was something they knew how to do.

I had told Luca I was going to win them back.

Every single one of them.

I had meant it when I said it.

I meant it still.

But sitting in the lamplight with Valentina’s word still in the air I understood for the first time the full weight of what I had said yes to. Not just the marriage. Not just the family’s shock or Romano’s war declaration or Bianca’s threat.

This.

The specific pain of a best friend’s specific word.

The particular silence of a door closed rather than slammed.

A knock.

I looked up.

The door opened.

Luca stood in the doorway.

He looked at me sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap and the particular expression I was apparently wearing — composed on the surface and not quite making it all the way through — and he said nothing for a moment.

Then he came in.

He didn’t sit. He stood in front of me the way he had stood in front of me in the entrance hall — close, present, giving me the full weight of his attention without qualification.

“She came,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I said.

“What did she say?”

I looked at my hands.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Sofia.”

“It doesn’t matter, Luca. She said what she felt. She was honest. I would rather—” I stopped. Reorganized. “I would rather she said it than kept it.”

He was quiet.

He crouched down in front of me.

This surprised me enough that I looked at him directly — Luca Virelli, the Don, crouching in front of me so that we were at eye level, his arms resting loosely on his knees, looking at me with an expression that had nothing performed in it.

“The penthouse,” he said.

“No,” I said immediately.

“Sofia—”

“I said no.” I held his gaze. “I am not leaving. I told you that and I meant it. Valentina said what she said and she meant it and I am going to give her time and I am going to be here and I am going to show her — show all of them — that I am not going anywhere and that I am not ashamed and that what we did was—” I stopped.

“Was what?” he said quietly.

I looked at him.

At this man crouching in front of me in the lamplight of my childhood bedroom with his dark grey eyes doing the thing they did now — open, fractionally, the door off the latch.

“Ours,” I said. “It was ours. And I am not going to apologize for it.”

Something moved in his face.

He reached out.

His hand covered mine where it rested in my lap — warm and certain and still, the way he was still when he meant something.

“Good,” he said quietly.

We stayed like that for a moment.

Then he stood.

“Sleep,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m going to sleep,” I said honestly.

“Try.”

“Luca—”

“Sofia.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Try.”

I almost smiled.

He went to the door.

He stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back at me once — just once, just the specific quality of a look from a man who had things to say and was choosing, for tonight, not to say them.

Then he was gone.

I sat in the quiet of my room.

I looked at the ring.

I thought about Valentina’s door at the end of the corridor — closed, probably locked, the particular silence behind it of someone who needed time and was going to take it.

I thought about what I had said to Luca.

I am going to win them back. Every single one of them.

I lay back on the bed without changing out of my dress.

I stared at the ceiling.

I thought about the long road between here and every single one of them and I let myself feel the full length of it for exactly five minutes.

Then I folded it away.

Tomorrow.

One day at a time.

One person at a time.

Starting with the morning.

Down the corridor in her own room Valentina sat at her window and looked at Rome at night.

She had said it.

The word.

She had felt it building from the moment Luca said we’re married in the entrance hall and she had felt it building through her father’s office door and through Matteo’s noise and through her mother’s silence and by the time she walked down that corridor she had been carrying it so long it had become the only word available.

She had said it.

And she had seen Sofia’s face.

Not the flinch — Sofia hadn’t flinched, which was somehow worse, which told Valentina something about what Sofia had been prepared to receive that made something in her chest pull uncomfortably.

She had seen what was underneath the composure.

She had seen what her word cost.

She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window.

She thought about a seven year old girl with a bag that wasn’t hers.

She thought about a hand grabbed and a decision made.

She thought about sixteen years of my sister.

She thought about the word she had just used.

She thought about Sofia’s face.

She closed her eyes.

She was not ready to take it back.

She was not ready to forgive.

But she already knew — sitting at her window in the dark with Rome glittering below her — that the word was going to live in her the way wrong things lived in you.

Heavily.

And without permission.

For a very long time.