We had missed so much, but there was no way in heaven or hell I would have missed Giselle and Sinclair’s wedding. Alexander was in fine spirits after taking down the Order, even though his father was still free to rein over his realm of terror at Pearl Hall, so he actually capitulated to my demands. In fact, he went so far as to fly Mama, Sebastian, and Dante down to Cabo San Lucas with us on his private plane. Dante wasn’t allowed out the country when he was on bail, but Alexander was rich enough to grease the right palms to make it so. Neither Alexander nor I were comfortable with him out of our sight since he’d been released the week before, and I knew Dante felt the same.
Elena, of course, didn’t join us.
When I heard about Christopher’s reappearance in their lives at Giselle’s art show, I’d wanted to hop on a plane and take both my sisters in my arms just to feel for myself that they were safe from harm. It pained me to know that I wouldn’t be seeing Elena at the wedding, which was exactly why I had pressured Xan into going back to New York to attend the newlywed’s party at Osteria Lombardi.
Elena, I knew, would be there.
Something indefinable had happened when she interfered in Christopher’s assault on Giselle, some transition between my sisters from archrivals to hospitable foes. It wasn’t that they would ever be close. Like ink and oil, they belonged too much to different things, but it was the dénouement we had never thought they would achieve.
So Elena was there in the bustling restaurant that night along with everyone else my family loved; Dante, Cage Tracey, Willa Percy, Giselle’s friends Brenna and Candy, Sinclair’s business associates who had witnessed their affair in Mexico, and even some of my sister’s friends from France had made the journey. It was an Italian party, so it was loud, filled with boisterous laughter that gleamed brightly under the strung fairy lights, and too much wine was poured and imbued.
We hadn’t had a party like it since the restaurant opened two years before, when Sebastian and I had finally been able to hand our mother her dream in the form of brick and mortar.
I’d missed it, the comradery between us all, the way we orbited around each other, coming together and breaking apart in duos and trios of combinations every so often because we couldn’t stand to be apart.
Not anymore. Not after so many years of fractured family life.
Even Salvatore was folded into the bosom of our family. Sebastian unwittingly charmed his father with tales from Hollywood, unaware that the older man laughed not only because they were funny, but because he was learning about his son’s life from his own lips in a way he never believed he would. Mama lingered nearby, talking to Giselle and Sinclair, but her eyes were on her men, a small smile placed like a fading indentation in her doughy cheek.
“Theirs is a love story without an end,” Dante said softly from behind me.
I turned in the circle of Alexander’s arm, content to stay there while my husband spoke to Sinclair’s business associate, Richard Denman, about a potential joint venture in London.
“Maybe one day,” I hoped. “Maybe one day, they’ll get their heads out of their asses.”
Dante rewarded my coarseness with one of his loud, gravely laughs, his head thrown back so his black hair framed him like a dark crown. “What will I do without you when you are gone, tesoro?”
“You mean if you are gone,” I corrected gently with a hand on his iron forearm. “We won’t let that happen, though, D.”
His grin was wry, and he looked so very much like Alexander in his rare moment of self-deprecation. “I wonder if it is a Davenport curse that we always believe we have the ability to control things. Sometimes, I’m afraid, cara, it is the things that control us.”
“No, not anymore. We’ve come out on the other side of battle victorious and now to the victor go the spoils,” I teased, knocking my wine glass against his rocks glass. “If we can take down the Order, we can certainly take down the New York City police force and district attorney’s office.”
Another twisted grin that ate up his full, too-red mouth. “And if that happens? If I am free, I’ll still be here in the city, and where will my Cosi be? I doubt it will be here with me.”
“No,” I said again, this time with a genuine smile that branched off from the roots of homesickness dug deeply into my heart. “We’ll go back to Pearl Hall.”
“Noel is still there,” he reminded me pointlessly, just because he wanted to change the topic from his own trials.
I shrugged. “Alexander thinks it will only be a matter of time now that the Order has fallen for the MI-5 to have enough on Noel to incarcerate him for good. Apparently, they’ve found records of transactions between a shell company potentially operated by Noel and di Carlo, so they could even pin my attempted murder on him.”