The Mafia Princess’s New Groom Chapter 13
She had warm eyes and a quiet smile.
“When Dominic was little, he was the smallest kid in school. Skinny as a stick. Got pushed around every day.”
She took my hand. “Then one afternoon, this girl came marching across the playground with a stick in her fist and chased off every last one of those bullies. Didn’t even break a sweat.”
She laughed. “He came home that night and wouldn’t stop talking about you. Started waving a wooden sword around the backyard, telling everyone he was going to grow up to be just like you.”
“You have no idea how much he looked up to you. You got to go with your father to the docks every day, right in the middle of everything. Meanwhile, he was stuck at home fighting imaginary bad guys.” She patted my arm. “To him, you were never just a girl. You were a hero.”
Heat crept up my neck. I glanced at Dominic. He was studying the ceiling like it held the secrets of the universe.
The question slipped out before I could stop it.
“Dominic, doesn’t it bother you? That I’m not… soft? Not gentle like other women?”
He didn’t care that both his parents were right there. He crossed the room and pulled me into his arms.
“Are you serious right now?”
“My wife runs the waterfront. Every man in this city answers her. She’s worth a hundred of those girls who can’t do anything but whine and bat their eyes.”
I looked at him and saw nothing but honesty. No games. No angles. No keeping score. Just a man who loved exactly who I was and never once wished I were somebody else.
I smiled. Something that had been wound tight inside me for twenty years finally came loose.
All that time I’d spent trying to be enough for a man who was never going to see it. And the answer had been right here all along. The right partner wasn’t someone who tore you down to feel tall. The right partner stood beside you — not above, not below — and never once flinched at your fire.
Married life with Dominic was sweeter than I ever expected.
When I practiced shooting in the courtyard, he’d sit on the steps and watch me with his chin in his hands, eyes wide.
“You’re unreal. Every single shot, dead center.”
“Honestly, I think they came up with the phrase ‘born marksman’ just for you.”
Somewhere in that steady stream of earnest, shameless, completely over-the-top praise, I lost myself. I floated through my days in a kind of happiness I didn’t know existed. The kind that made me laugh for no reason and forget, for hours at a time, that the world outside our walls was still turning.
Then one evening, Dominic brought out a canvas he’d been working on in secret for weeks.
An oil painting of me.
Hair caught in the wind. Eyes alive. Gun raised. Every stroke full of motion and light.
He’d somehow put on canvas a version of me I’d never seen in any mirror, fierce and free and burning with something I didn’t know I carried.
I stared at it for a long time.
“This belongs in a gallery,” I said. “It looks more like me than my own reflection.”
Dominic rubbed the back of his neck, grinning. “If you like it, I’ll paint you one every day.”
“Deal,” I said. “We’ll keep every single one. And when our kids grow up, we’ll show them who their mother was.”
His face lit up. The real kind. The kind that can’t be faked.
‘They say the best love is when one person adores and the other one glows in it,’ I thought.
‘But we adore each other. We both glow.’
‘What do you even call that?’
I have no idea.
I was still drunk on that happiness when the news hit.
Vincent was dead.