When I arrive, Grendel is already inside, waiting for me on his haunches as I burst out of breath through the door.
Beside Grendel, a single red rose lays on a chair, standing out starkly against the drab background of sandstone.
I suck in a breath and whirl around, but no one is there.
“Luca?” I whisper. “Are you here?”
Only silence answers me. Goosebumps raise on my arms as I stare at the blood red petals of the flower in front of me. Luca cut roses for me before he disappeared and only Luca knows of this room.
“Has he been here, boy?” I ask Grendel, absently patting his head as I pivot, looking around the room. Everything looks untouched since I was here with Luca last.
None of this makes any sense. If Luca were here, he’d come to me, especially after I’d left him the message about the baby. He wouldn’t leave a flower in an unused room in the tunnels.
But what other answer is there?
I snatch up the rose and walk quickly back toward the atrium door.
When I emerge inside the house, the utter silence is startling. There is no hustle and bustle of staff, there is no noise at all. It’s unsettling. Each step I take seems to echo, to carry loudly through the halls and before I know it, Damien is standing in front of me. He looks relieved to see me.
“Eva,” he says, placing his hand on my elbow and turning me around. “We need to speak to you in the study.”
Luca’s study, I want to tell him. It’s Luca’s study. Not the study. But it’s a childish thought, a tiny detail and so of course, I don’t voice it. Instead, I follow him obediently and sit in a chair. Damien thrusts a glass of scotch at me, which of course I don’t drink. I simply hold it in my hands along with the flower that I still carry.
“What’s wrong?” I ask slowly, looking from Damien’s grave face to Christoph’s. Christoph’s is filled with pain, his eyes giving him away. Something has hurt him. “What happened?”
Damien motions to my glass. “You might want to drink that.”
I shake my head, alarm flooding me, causing my hands to shake so much that my drink sloshes against the sides of the glass. They are both so somber and grave, so pale and quiet.
“Just tell me,” I whisper, clutching the crystal.
Damien moves to the chair next to me, reaching over and grasping my hand.
“This is hard to say,” he says slowly, his eyes trained on my face. “But you need to know. Luca’s car was found in the sea this morning. It washed up on the rocks down the road.”
My blood runs cold as it thrums through my veins, throbbing into my temples and blurring my vision.
“No,” I breathe. But that’s the only thing I can say before I can’t see anything more. It’s too much for my body to handle and blackness overtakes me.
I don’t know how long the black fog surrounds me, keeping my mind safe from overload. The human body is magnificent in the way it is self-protects. I find myself counting internally, unconsciously, as I try and swim out of the murkiness.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
What I’m counting toward, I don’t know. But I continue to count, continue to swim. Out of the darkness, toward the light.
“Eva?”
Five.
A voice comes through the tunnel, making its way into my ears. A squeeze of my hand, a hand on my brow. Cold skin. Warm skin. Strong fingers.
“Eva?”
Six.
My eyelids are heavy, but I open them anyway. Groggy. Blurry. Pain. Luca.
“No,” I say. The first word that comes from lips, wrenched from my heart by the news. “No. It can’t be because he was here. He left me a rose. It had to be him.”
Damien is cradling me to his chest, my legs looped over his arms. He stares down at me, as Christoph grasps my hand.
“Are you all right?” he asks quietly. “Can I set you down now?”
No, I’m not all right. Yes, he can set me down. But I can’t seem to make my lips work.
Damien sets me in the chair anyway, and Christoph hovers by my knee. I sway woozily, trying to focus.
This can’t be happening.
“It was only his car,” Christoph says softly. “There was no body.”
No body. No Luca.
My mind is a chunk of wood. Driftwood brought in by the sea and bleached by the sun. It doesn’t work, it simply splinters, the thoughts that I have falling apart and lying limply in the sand.
I close my eyes.
Luca’s not dead. I’d know it if he was dead. Grendel would know it.
I freeze, remembering Grendel and how he had whimpered at the wind, toward the sea.
Had he known?
I open my eyes and stare down at him, into his large golden eyes. There’s an expression there that I can’t read, because he’s a dog and I’m not, but it seems to be pained, tortured even.
I slide from the chair onto the ground, and cling to Grendel’s neck, my face buried in his fur. I don’t cry because I’m numb now, numb to the devastation, to the loss.
Hands pull me away and arms carry me to my bed, placing me within the softness and pulling the blankets over me, the same hands pull the rose from my fingers. A minute later, they place it on my nightstand in a glass of water.
“Luca couldn’t have left this,” Damien tells me gently. “His car… Eva, it was totaled. There’s just no way that he….survived. I’m so sorry.”
I don’t answer and Damien eventually walks away, closing my bedroom door behind him.
I’ll stay here forever, I decide, as I close my eyes. I don’t have to face a world without Luca in it. No one can make me.
Chapter Seventeen
Luca
“Don’t be dead,” Eva whispers, each painful word grating into my heart through the voicemail that she leaves. “They’re telling me you’re dead. But you were here. You left me a rose. And I don’t feel it, Luca. Wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t my heart know? Please don’t be dead. I love you. I love you.”
She cries before she hangs up, haunting sobs that impale my heart, like a knife that twists and twists. I can feel her pain as if it’s my own, it breathes with its own life. It is that tangible.
“You’re a fucking monster,” I say to the darkness.
I don’t know if Adrian is here, but I sense that he is. I know for certain that I didn’t leave Eva any flowers. But one person would know what strings to pull to manipulate Eva’s strained emotions. One person would know what to do to extract every ounce of pain that he could, every ounce of hope so that he could eventually crush it. I know he’s here, because he’d want to see my face for this particular brand of torture.
A low chuckle answers from somewhere behind me. Or in front of me. I no longer have any sense of direction, which is what happens when you’re kept blindfolded for so long.
“Isn’t this better than a simple death for you?” Adrian asks sharply. Out of nowhere, something brushes my face. His hand, or his arm, then it is gone. “Isn’t this so much more fun?”
“For you, because you’re a monster,” I tell him again. “You might have the upper hand now, but someday, you’ll get yours. If you think you’ll get away with this, you’re mistaken. My brothers will hunt you down and kill you slowly.”
Adrian laughs again, a sound filled with true pleasure. “I’m not worried,” he answers cockily. “If I can bring down the great Luca Minaldi, I won’t worry about his brothers.”
Coldness floods through me, even more so than I was before.
Eva thinks I’m dead. She’s devastated and feels alone.
“I’m not dead,” I whisper to her, knowing full well that she can’t hear me. “I’m not dead.”
Adrian laughs.
Chapter Eighteen
Eva
I lay on my side, staring from my bed at the sea… the sea that might’ve taken Luca from me. The moon shines on the water and I find myself taking comfort that
somewhere, Luca might be staring at the same night, at the same sky, at the same stars and moon.
Damien feels sure that Luca is dead, that there can be no other explanation now for his prolonged absence, that there’s no way Luca could’ve survived an accident like that.
Christoph would like to hope otherwise, but even he, the eternal optimist, can’t dismiss the likelihood that Luca didn’t live.
I can’t bear the thought of a world without Luca in it.
The Polizia have been here. Something I once wanted, but now it makes everything seem so final, as the detective seemed to agree with Damien.
“I’m sorry for your loss, m’am,” he’d told me. As though they had a body.
“You don’t know I lost him,” I answered him simply, lifting my chin into the air. Everyone looked at me sympathetically, as though I’m a grief-crazed woman with no hold on reality.
Perhaps I am.
I don’t know anymore.
The rose that even now wilts in the glass next to me…I don’t know where it came from. But I know that Grendel thought something was out at the cliffs, and I felt someone watching me, and then this rose appeared. Did Luca leave it as a sign that he was gone now, but that everything was going to be all right?
Is that possible?
I sigh, realizing how insane I must be.
They talked to Damien about the process to have Luca declared legally dead, a discussion that got a swift reaction from me.
“No!” I’d cried out, shocking them all with my insistence. “You can’t do that yet. You don’t know for sure.”
And even though he didn’t have to, because I have no legal say in the matter since Luca and I haven’t gotten married, Damien agreed.
“We’ll not talk of this right now,” he’d told the detective. “It’s too soon.”
“When you’re ready then,” the detective had answered.
I’ll never be ready.
I look again toward the water, the water that had supposedly taken my Love from me. It looks so innocuous, so innocent and beautiful as it laps peacefully against the shore.
I curl onto my side, my arms wrapped around my waist, shielding the baby within. I haven’t yet spoken of it yet, not to Damien or Christoph. I desperately miss Marianne. She was my confidante. And because of that she had died.
My life is a vortex of pain.
Chapter Nineteen
Sunlight has the audacity to shine upon my face and I squint before covering my head with the pillow. The light is persistent however, and I can still see it from the corners, from the spaces the pillow doesn’t cover. With a sigh, I throw it across the room.
Grendel snaps his head up from where he’s resting the foot of my bed.
“It’s okay, boy,” I assure him.
He lowers his head again, resting it on his paws and I can’t help but remember when I first saw him. He’d been suspicious of me. Luca didn’t leave Chessarae much, so Grendel was suspicious of everyone. I’ve apparently won him over now, though. Or perhaps I’m just the closest thing he has to Luca… although I’m still curious that he doesn’t attach himself to Damien or Christoph rather than me. They’re family and I am not.
He must feel that I’m the closest to Luca. I’m certainly the only one who hasn’t given up on his life.
I tighten my arms around my waist, curling onto my side, reveling in how I no longer feel nauseous.
My new doctor in town estimates that I’m sixteen weeks pregnant. I’ve been hiding my tiny baby bump with baggy shirts, but soon, it will become apparent. For some reason unbeknownst to me, I feel reluctant to share my news, even with Luca’s brothers.
I like my little secret. I like not answering to anyone about it. Once I share the news, they’ll press me for answers… for my plans. And I don’t want to think about that yet.
Luca would want me to be strong. He’d also probably want me to leave this place and return to America. But I can’t do that yet. Not when I’m not convinced that he’s gone. Perhaps I’m in the denial stage of grief… but until I’m convinced that he’s coming back to me, I’m staying at Chessarae. I feel Luca here… I feel him all around me. I feel him in the trees, in the cliffs, in the walls of his study, in our bedroom.
Pulling one of his shirts from his closet, I pull it on and button it up, remembering how he looked in it. How the chambray complemented his skin and dark eyes, how he usually wore this one out to the sea, so when he came in, I could taste the salt on his skin. I picture how his hair always fell into his eyes, how he brushed it away like it was a bother.
I open my eyes and look into the mirror. I look ridiculous. His shirt hangs to my knees. But in addition to feeling close to Luca in it, it will also help me hide my belly. And Damien and Christoph will simply think I’m being sentimental.
I pull on a pair of leggings and make my way to the kitchen for fresh juice. I don’t feel like eating at all, but I make sure I do for the baby. Everything I do lately is for the baby.
Eating a bagel, I stare out the windows at the sea. Here in Malta, staring at the sea is practically a national pastime. But I have another reason for doing it. I always pray that I’ll see Luca walking from it.
I know it’s irrational. If Luca is still alive, it’s because someone, somewhere, pulled him from the water and kept him safe. Perhaps he doesn’t even know who he is. Maybe he hit his head and has amnesia. I’ve seen that tired storyline in a hundred different movies. It could happen.
And I could be delusional.
I know this, too.
But maybe my delusions are keeping me sane. They’re all I have right now.
When I return to my room, I catch a glimpse of Melina’s leather journal lying on my desk, and an idea comes to me. I need to keep my baby a secret until I’ve decided what I will do.
I quickly set out to find Damien… and quickly find him in Luca’s study.
I quell the sense of annoyance I feel when I see Damien sitting behind Luca’s desk. It isn’t Damien’s fault that Luca is gone. And of course he needs to step in here, to take care of things in Luca’s absence. He needs to sit in Luca’s chair to do it.
“Eva,” Damien says in surprise, rising quickly to kiss my cheek. I turn my body so that he doesn’t feel my burgeoning bump. “How nice to see you.”
How nice to see you come out of your room, I’m sure he means. I shake that off and smile in return. A tight, small smile.
“Hi Damien. I’m sorry that I haven’t been very social of late.”
Damien shakes his head. “There is no need to apologize. This is a difficult time for us all.”
“Have you found Adrian yet?” I can’t help but ask. I’m prepared for the disappointment when Damien shakes his head. I’m used to that answer.
“He’s like a ghost,” Damien answers softly. “We’ll keep looking, but… my guess is that with Luca gone, Adrian will be gone too. He has no interest in the rest of us.”
“But why?” I ask suddenly. “His entire premise for revenge was based on the Minaldi family, not simply Luca. He focused on Luca for years, but now that we all know that Luca wasn’t cursed, and now that Luca is…gone, what will prevent Adrian from targeting you or Christoph? Why would you think he wouldn’t?”
Damien looks surprised by the question. “I don’t know,” he answers slowly. “That’s a good question and you have a good point. It’s just that we haven’t seen any sign of Adrian. We still don’t have any proof that he didn’t die at sea. But you’re right. Christoph and I should most definitely use caution. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
I can see on his face that he doesn’t consider Adrian a threat because he most certainly believes that Adrian is dead, too. He believes that Adrian has always been dead. That Luca went crazy and killed the cat, before he drove his own car into the sea to escape his drug-addled reality.
I blink hard to keep away the tears.
“I came to see you to ask for a favor,” I change the subject. “As you know, I’m h
aving a hard time dealing with… everything. I’d like to move into your mother’s wing, at least for a while. It provides more privacy. I’d like to immerse myself in memories… in the solitude, so that I can come to terms with everything that has happened, so that I can decide how I’ll move forward.”
Damien stares at me, his eyes widening just slightly, before he masks his surprise. “Are you sure that’s wise?” he asks hesitantly. “To seclude yourself like that… it doesn’t seem healthy.”
I shake my head. “I’m a psychiatrist,” I remind him. “And everyone handles grief in their own way. I’ll be fine, Damien. I just… my future as I thought it would be isn’t going to happen. I need time to wrap my mind around that, time to think in private, to decide what I’ll do instead.”
Damien nods thoughtfully. “Of course,” he answers quietly. “You may do whatever you like. Please consider Chessarae your home for as long as you wish.”
“Thank you,” I whisper.
He turns away, before he looks back at me, an uncomfortable expression in his eyes.
“Eva… we have to discuss having Luca declared legally dead. There are business implications that I must address. I know it’s difficult---“
I cut him off, my heart pounding. “Please not yet,” I plead. “I can’t… just not yet. Please just let me pull my thoughts together. I have to come to terms with it, Damien. Please.”
He nods silently. “Of course. We can discuss it again at a later date.”
I am grateful that he’s heeding my wishes. He doesn’t have to.
I enlist the aid of a couple of maids to help me move my things (and some of Luca’s shirts) into Melina’s wing. When they leave, I close the double doors behind them and turn, surveying the vast quiet space that surrounds me.
It is here, surrounded by Melina’s memories, that I must either come to terms with the fact that Luca is gone… or maintain hope that he isn’t.