Page 225 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

And when she smiled at him, he felt certain that he could hang the stars if she asked.

Five years after they left Sicily, they had a toddler named Bella and a baby named Alessandra, and, he suspected, another one on the way. They lived on a remote beach in New Zealand where they kept to themselves, loved each other deeply and totally, and marinated in the fact that they could do these things.

That they could be anything they liked.

Ten years on, Jovi had not relaxed his guard, but things had changed. His daughters and son were older and they’d moved closer into the village to take advantage of the schools and the community, so their children could have what they’d never had. Sometimes Jovi would watch his youngest, Luca Donatello, play rugby—happy and heedless, with nothing to worry about except winning—and feel that ache in his heart again.

But by then, he understood that ghosts were just another form of love. In some ways, the most enduring kind. And they sweetened over time—the more he allowed them access and told their stories. Sometimes they came and visited and he could really feel all the ways he’d changed. Not just inside himself, and the way he loved Rux more every day, but the fact that he’d disrupted the cycle.

His children were bright and silly. They were reckless and free. They complained about being bored and had the space to make up their own entertainments.

Every day, they had nothing to worry about but their own little lives. They had no concept of the great canopy surrounding them, the whole world that was out there, or the bad things that could happen in it.

They got to be kids, in other words. The way he and Rux never had.

Don Antonio D’Amato died of a heart attack while consorting with his mistress, but his bitterly loyal wife buried him in state, like he’d been taken while praying. Carlo died less than six months later, taken out in a fiery gunfight in a club in Palermo by his cousins, who resented his haphazard leadership.

Il Serpente shed its skin, but this time, with the help of some mysterious packages that arrived in police stations and at news channels, the snake did not rise again. Within a couple of years, there were more members of the D’Amato family behind bars than carousing in the usual Palermo hot spots.

Jovi took a long walk on the local beach and though he would never admit this to another living person save Rux, he had felt Donatello with him.

He thought, at last, that his father might have forgiven him for failing to save his sisters, his mother. And for who Antonio had made him.

He’d felt as certain as he could that Donatello might even be proud of him.

“Of course he is,” Rux whispered fiercely that night, their naked bodies slick and tangled tight together. “He loves you. Then, now, and always, you foolish man.”

And he’d taken great pleasure in punishing her for that impertinence.

Some twenty years after the night they’d climbed on that boat and left Sicily in their wake, their babies were grown enough to be in university or in the early stages of their careers, and so Jovi took his beautiful Rux to Buenos Aires for a season.

They danced on cobblestones and laughed into the night.

On one such night, filled with music and light, they walked back to the little flat he’d bought for them. There was no room for children. It was only theirs, and they were holding hands like they were young again as they whispered back and forth about all the things they planned to do to each other when they got back to the flat and closed the door behind them.

“I still can’t believe you’re real,” Rux told him, smiling up at him. He had put a ring on her finger before their first daughter was born. They had spoken the vows that they had lived since the day they’d met, giving them that extra power. He liked to play with the sparkling stone as they walked, reminding him that she was his. Always his. “Sometimes I think I’ll wake up in that bedroom in my father’s house and find this was all a dream.”

Boris Ardelean had met the unpleasant end he deserved. Rux’s stepmother, on the other hand, was thriving. She had done very well indeed, helped along by a little judicious aid from Jovi over time. It was too dangerous to meet up with her, but somehow, Jovi thought that a woman like Katarzyna would understand how and why she had a very specific guardian angel.

When Katarzyna had proved this by managing to find a way to get Rux the only picture that she’d ever had of her mother, Rux had cried and cried.I thought this was lost the way she was, she’d told him.This means more than you know.

But he knew. He knew too well, as he’d watched his children grow up with the faces of those that he and Rux had lost. Only better, because they were entirely themselves.

And wholly free.

“It’s not a dream,” he told her as they walked, both of them shimmering with tango and local cocktails. “It’s so much better than that,mia vita. It’s our beautiful life. It’s love. It’s us.”

Then he backed her up against the nearest wall and kissed her with all the passion they’d always had, and always would.

“You had better get me home,” she told him, her arms looped around his neck. It was an order, and she delivered it with that smile of hers that was still the whole sun to him.

“As you wish,” he murmured in reply, the way he always did.

And he hurried her back to the flat so he could get inside her, hold her close, and make sure she shined as bright as possible while she exploded all around him.

The way she always did, like fireworks.

Because the fire they’d made together never went out. It only got better.

And as long as they were together, all the rest of their days and the breaths that they took, it always would.