King of Stars (The Next Generation #2)

43. Matteo

Chapter 43

Matteo

T wo words that put me out of misery and brought me into it.

She’s ready .

Those were the two words my wife didn’t have to whisper to me after I picked her up off mamma’s dance floor and carried her away from the place where she’d forever leave stains of her blood. She’d danced in heels, and maybe her feet were not used to doing it anymore, because her toes and heels bled. Somehow it smeared all over her face, her chest, the spot right over her heart, and on her Sunday dress.

Apropos.

Instead of going back to mamma and papà ’s house, I took my wife to my grandfather’s land out in the middle of nowhere. He’d inherited it from my great-grandfather, and it had become a special place for a lot of the women on mamma’s side of the family. It was quiet, peaceful, and I was still able to keep my men close with all the cottages.

Stella didn’t ask where we were going, but she seemed to understand why. And when I brought the box in with all the things we had collected that had belonged to her mamma, she nodded to a desk and told me to leave it there. She walked like a woman who had a body but wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of herself yet, as she sat down in the chair and opened it up.

It took her all night to read through the things in that box.

A woman’s entire life.

A woman my wife loved with every fiber of her being.

Stella’s openness to love after all she’d been through reflected how much of a force her mother was. I’d felt it the first time she looked at me.

How hard she was going to love me, and I knew she’d always be the brightest thing in my life. The only woman who could pull me out of my own darkness and show me a different way, even if it was just for the two of us.

No one, not even my family, could ever relax me enough to get me out of my suits to ride fucking rides at some kiddie amusement park. But she had, and she had me smiling. My men laughing.

All of us eating out of the palm of her hand.

And now my life, my wife, was sitting at a desk, as frozen as ice, looking over the last contents of her mother’s things.

After she was done, set her head down against the desk. I moved from my place in the corner and picked her up, about to bring her to the bathroom to wash her from head to toe, but she shook her head and said, “bed.”

I set her down in it, and when I went to change her clothes, she told me no again. Then she curled in on herself and closed her eyes.

She wasn’t sleeping.

She was letting the pain flow through her, and I had no idea how to fucking stop it.

I couldn’t.

The worse fucking thing for a man like me. A man who thrived on discipline and control.

But a woman was a soft creature who leaned on a man for physical strength, deserved to be protected and cared for, wined and dined, read poetry to and sang to. She deserved to feel how hot passion could run through a man’s veins for her, to be totally consumed by his love and devotion. To be in awe at the things he said, and not because a boy would find them ridiculous, over the top, or too embarrassing to say—heat of the moment or not.

To take those things and create strength out of them.

So, I knew when a woman entered the state that my wife was in, she needed my strength more than ever, even if it was subtle, quiet and strong.

Deep down in my heart, though, in the darkest part only she could shine light on, her grief was killing me.

I couldn’t save her from it.

I sat down on the chair she’d been sitting in and set my hands over my face. I listened to her breathing, but it seemed all I could hear was her shattering heartbreak. I heard her sniffle but felt the tears that refused to fall because they were as thick as blood.

I listened. I heard. I suffered with her, though, tapping into the control I thrived on, I kept my shoulders squared and my heart calm.

And when the day came that she sat up, her hair a tangled mess, her eyes red and puffy, along with her face, though she hadn’t been crying, and asked me, “Is she dead, Matteo?”

I couldn’t answer her right away.

She was ripping my heart out before I ripped hers out with the truth. I hadn’t given her the coroner’s report. She didn’t need to see it. See something so cold and calculated when it came to her mamma.

“I want you to tell me,” she whispered. “You love me enough. You’ll tell me with love. If not…when you look at me, it’ll be like looking at an animal that’s struggling to breathe, the truth the only antidote.”

Or fucking poison.

A sound ripped through me, a feral animalistic sound that seemed to tear a vital piece of my heart from its roots. It was silent outside of me, but my ears rang.

“She, ah.” I cleared my throat. “She’s gone, baby.”

She looked down at her hands, the little veins there apparent, like she was freezing, even though the cottages were on the warmer side. She nodded. Nodded. Nodded. “How?” If I wouldn’t have been paying such attention, I would have missed the question, but it sounded like a scream in my ears, the ringing even louder after it faded.

I decided in the moment to skip the more gruesome details and give her the one-word cause. “Régine.”

“Oh.” She curled in on herself, and a scream in the face of nightmares tore out of her, like she’d been holding it in for much too long. She started to sob so loud, I heard wings flapping outside of our room, the birds in the magnolia tree frightened away.

Three weeks later my wife, a skeleton of her former self, not only just in flesh, asked me to take her to her mamma.

We left the next day, and she curled away from the sun, any light, hiding herself underneath my arm, lost in complete darkness.