Page 74 of Until You Break
EMILIO
The gallery after hours didn’t look like the same room they’d toasted in earlier. Spotlights off. Crowd gone. Only the echo of shoes on marble and the faint scent of champagne. Security lingered beyond the glass doors, two shadows in a pool of light. In here, it was ours for the night, emptied of everyone but us and the walls holding my work.
Damiano walked beside me, a final glass of champagne in his hand. The crystal caught stray light as we moved, each reflection folding into the silence between us. He brushed his knuckles along my cheek, a gesture that asked as much as it claimed.
“Are you happy?” he said. “Did you see it coming?”
Emotion still pressed behind my ribs. I swallowed against it. “I didn’t. Not the party. Not my brothers showing up. Not even the gallery…I never thought I’d see my work lit that way.” Gratitude flickered through me, sudden and unsteady, that he had given me more than survival. He had made the kind of night I used to only imagine, and somehow turned it real.
“And the answer?”
“I’m happy,” I admitted, voice rougher than I meant. “More than I thought I’d be.” The truth of it struck me even as I said it.
When had that happened? From being drugged and dragged into the Bellandi family, to being claimed, to wearing his ring, to standing here now with a glass in my hand and calling it happiness.
He lifted his own glass, drank slow, then pressed the rim to my mouth until the sharp dryness slid over my tongue. Champagne burned sweet down my throat. He didn’t let me stop, but tilted the glass higher until it spilled cold past my lips, down my chin, onto my throat. His mouth followed, stealing the taste back, licking the corner of my lips, then lower, over my jaw, my throat, each stroke filthy with ownership disguised as tenderness. His tongue caught the fizz as it slid down, licking slow, making me swallow under his gaze. The kiss lingered, wet and hungry, his teeth grazing until the sound of our glasses knocking together broke it. He set the flute aside with a soft clink against marble. Damiano’s mouth brushed my skin once more. “Mine,” he whispered against my throat. He pulled back just enough to take my hand. “Come. Walk with me.” The echo of our first steps carried into the hush of the gallery.
We moved deeper inside, candlelight bending over each canvas. Damiano paused before one, tilting his head. “What did you mean when you painted this?”
The chandelier study wavered in its frame, droplets of light falling across dark paint. “It was my neighborhood,” I said after a pause. “One broken chandelier outside a bar, light falling across the street like it was trying to make something beautiful out of nothing. I caught it once in a sketch and wanted to keep the moment before it disappeared.”
His mouth curved. “Light like that doesn’t belong to the street forever. It reminded me of you, bright even where it shouldn’t be, impossible to ignore.”
Another painting. My mother’s hands, unfinished. His gaze lingered there, heavy. “And this?”
I hesitated. “Absence. What’s missing still shapes you.”
He didn’t mock me. He only touched my jaw again, thumb dragging heat along my skin. “Then absence is mine too, because you let me see it.”
We moved on. His gaze snagged on a canvas I hadn’t meant to show, the one painted in a night of rage, broad black strokes tearing across the frame like a wound. I froze when he stopped in front of it.
“What is this?”
“Anger,” I admitted. “The year after she vanished. I painted until my hands split. It never belonged on a wall, not really.”
He studied it too long. “It belongs. It looks like prophecy.” His thumb brushed my neck, hot against my pulse. “Keep it. It tells me you’ve always had fire in you. I only lit it brighter.”
We strolled past canvases crowned in candlelight. Shadows moved across brushstrokes, stretching what I had painted into something that looked larger than mine. Damiano paused here and there, studying quietly, letting me breathe beside him.
“Tell me,” he said finally, tilting his glass toward the work around us. “Where do you see yourself? In all of this.”
I shook my head. “Not in the art. Not only in the art. I want to work, yes, to keep painting, but not as a way to live. What makes me happy is knowing I can build something that lasts. That I can stand beside you, not as decoration, but as your right hand.”
His gaze cut toward me, weight sharp but not unkind. “Even if it means stepping into the fight?”
“That depends against who,” I said. “Not my family. I can't. I really hope that one day the Valentis and the Bellandis walk side by side. No more fighting. No more tearing each other apart.”
Damiano’s mouth curved, dangerous and sure. “Good. I want that too. I need it. Together we’ll rule Palermo,piccolino.” His thumb stroked under my jaw, a rare softness in the steel. “And if we burn it down along the way, at least we’ll own the ashes.”
Heat flooded me, dizzying. The word Palermo rolled through me like a church bell, shaking ribs, blood, breath. I saw the city in my mind, streets slick with rain, balconies heavy with flowers and laundry, men smoking in corners, women watching from behind shutters. I imagined walking there at his side, no longer hidden, no longer second to anyone, the weight of his hand at my back making space where none had been before. Papa would look at me differently then, not as an enemy to oppose, not as a hostage to pity, but as an ally standing beside him. Respect, even trust, might come slow, but it would come. The thought twisted heat through my chest, half dread, half triumph. For the first time, the idea of belonging to him and to this city didn’t feel like a prison. It felt like power, and it felt like peace.
Papa, who hadn’t been here tonight.
I set my glass down on the nearest table, condensation marking a ring on the polished wood.
“My brothers said something tonight. About my mother. About the warehouses. They think someone’s sniffing around.”
Damiano’s gaze stayed steady, not surprised. “That’s why Salvatore was allowed as far as he came the night of the fight. Up on the roof, guards at his back, thinking he could trade riddles for your safety.”
