Marco's POV | Flashback
Before everything turned to smoke and blood, there were Sundays, sacred Sundays, not in the way of church pews and whispered prayers, but in the quiet holiness of a sunlight spilling through the open windows, of the music curling through the air like the steam from Mama's coffee cup, and Jazz, soft and honeyed, the kind that made the walls hum. Mama always used to move through the kitchen in her linen apron, the one with the frayed edges and the stubborn stain of red wine near the pocket, a tucking wildflowers behind her ear like they were her small secrets.
"Look at you, my little moon," she'd murmur, brushing flour from my nose with her thumb.
I still can smell it, the cinnamon, the jasmine, the warmth of her perfume clinging to her skin like a second shadow, and I still can hear the way she'd laugh when the record skipped, the sound bright and unguarded, as if the world outside our kitchen didn't exist, as if the only things that mattered were the sunlight on the tiles, the syrup in our pancakes, and the way Dante, would let himself be pulled into her orbit.
I was ten the last time I saw my Mama dance.
She twirled barefoot, her sundress flaring, while her dark hair ripple against the gold of the afternoon, my father always stood there, stiff at first, as a carved man from stone and cigarette smoke, but then... whenever she took his hand, he always followed.
The man who barked at waiters, who carried a lighter like a weapon, and who looked at the world like it owed him something, he laughed, not the sharp, mocking sound he reserved for strangers, but the kind that softened his face, that made him look, even if its just for a moment, like someone who could be loved.
Maybe we're not like other families, I remember thinking, watching them. But maybe we're okay anyway.
Dante wasn't always the man he became, back then, he was sharp edges, but not yet a broken glass, he wasn't quiet in a way that felt heavy, but he was the warm dad, who's always there, the kind of person who will ruffle my hair after dinner, not gruff and awkward, but with an affection that was a language he'd only just started learning while being with me and Mama. Far from us, there were whispers, men in heavy coats who came and went, conversations that stopped when I walked into the room, but Mama was a shield, she smoothed the rough parts of him, and kept the darkness from creeping under the door, but then she was gone.
Just like that.
A car crash, they said, in a rain-slick roads, skid marks, instant, as if a word could make it hurt less.
They wouldn't let me see her, I was thirteen, sitting on the edge of a hospital chair with scraped knuckles and blood beneath my fingernails since I'd punched a wall when they told me, while Dante sat across from me, motionless, her wedding ring pressed into his palm like a wound.
He didn't cry. Not once.
That night, I heard him destroy the dining roomm the chairs splintered, the glass shattered like rain, and then, silence.
The next morning, he wasn't my father anymore, he burned her apron, threw out every wildflower, and smashed her records one by one, the needle screeching as it died, he erased her, her voice, her scent, her music, until the house was nothing but a tomb.
And me?
I became the heir, that I never wanted to be, but he didn't care.
"It's time you stop playing artist," he said weeks later, slapping a ledger onto the table. "This is your future. Ours."
I can clearly remember flipping through it, codes, routes, names, deals, and guns, I still remember throwing up afterward.
"You think this world will let you be soft, boy?" he snarled.
"You think your mother danced her way into keeping us safe?"
"She protected us," I shot back.
"No," he growled. "She distracted us, and that got her killed."
I didn't believe that, not even for a second, but he did, and in that belief, he buried her, as well as the part of him that had loved her, and just after that, everything was a test.
Could I shoot? Could I lie? Could I kneel and kiss the rings of a men who once bowed to my father?
At sixteen, I failed. He handed me a pistol and told me to deliver a "message" to a man who owed him, that guy was small, trembling, and his daughter with a broken leg propped on a chair beside him. I looked at his hands, rough, shaking, and saw my own. I couldn't do it, so I lied, saying I had, but Dante found out.
I still have the scar from that lesson.
That night, I packed a bag, a pair of boots, my mother's scarf, still faintly smelling of jasmine, and ran, knowing well that the world outside was colder, with no money, no name, just a ghost of whom I'd been and the fear of the unkown future, of who I might become. I worked in kitchens, slept in bus stations, washed my hands until they were raw even when there was no blood on them, and never stayed in one place too long, never let myself look too closely at the faces in my sketchbook.
Until Florence.
Until her.
Elina, with her wide eyes, her stubborn honesty and the way she laughed like moonlight had a sound, the first person who looked at me and didn't see something broken, just something wounded, the first person who didn't flinch when I reached for her.
She reminded me of my mother in strange, aching ways, not in how she spoke or moved, but in how she made space for beauty, even in the wreckage, and how she could find music in silence, beautiful color in the dark.
The day I almost left her, I remembered something Mama once told me: "You're not your father's shadow, my dear Marco. You are your own sun, and even the darkest things in life fear the light."
Back then, I didn't understand what she meant, but now, sitting in the hospital waiting room, while my Elina is behind glass and wires, her breath a fragile rhythm on the monitors… I finally understood.