Dark Saint [Romano Brotherhood, #1]

55 | Santo

The hardest thing about it all is returning to normal life—not the funeral, if one could even call it that. 

The funeral consists of the six of us, including Leah and Samuel, watching some men Simo hired lower our brother's casket into the ground. Tommaso is high out of his fucking mind, Simo might as well be a stone statue, and I'm the one who's left somehow keeping everyone together. 

There's three of us now. 

The bitterness I feel towards my brothers for checking out of Nico's funeral is a huge part what gets me through the day. Nina is the other part. I know I border on crushing her hand in mine for nearly half the day as I haul her with me wherever I go. She doesn't complain once, and I can only guess she sees how close I am to losing it. 

I wish I could say that having her with me is enough in and of itself to keep me going, that it makes it easy. But it doesn't. The grief I feel threatens to consume everything, including my feelings for her. It begs me to lay down and give up. And I want to, so desperately, and that's just fucking real. 

Sometimes, there's just nothing and nobody that can make things better.

Still, I hold onto her. It takes effort I don't know I have, but there's simply no other option. She's a part of me now; letting her go would be like severing one of my limbs and trying to live normally after that. So I hold on and I try to give her moments where I'm present and I try to push through and move on and do all those things everyone says about grieving. 

Except that's all bullshit. There's no getting to the "other side" of this kind of thing, there's only absorbing and accepting and enduring. What come next, I'm not sure. 

Nina doesn't leave me alone. She's there when I need her, when I don't realize I do, and when I think I don't. And in the days following the funeral, when I'm looking for the next thing, whatever I can find to occupy my time and energy, and I throw myself into the search for my father... that's when I realize.

She's been such a silent, strong support that I haven't known it's just been her holding me up all this time. On that first day of the search, I leave her in bed and meet Simo in his office before dawn. It's after about seven seconds of sitting in that cold room that her absence registers, and it's like there's a chasm that's suddenly opened in my chest, and I can't breathe. 

I feel so strikingly alone, so utterly fucking lost. I know she's just upstairs, that she's safely in bed and peacefully resting, but the panic that infiltrates my chest is somehow realer than that. 

Then, like she knew I needed her, she's there. Sleep still written on her face, holding three cups of coffee and my fucking heart in those small hands. 

She must think me fucking insane when I jump out of my chair like it's on fire, grabbing the coffees so I can fold her into my chest and breathe properly for a minute. But I crave her closeness like I never have before. It's a simple thing—when she's there, I'm okay. 

So, there she stays. 

Once I realize that the days keep passing, that the world doesn't just stop spinning even when it feels like mine has, I'm forced to reckon with a little bit of reality. And in that reality, I see every time she stood by me, every time she helped with the funeral or stopped a fight with one of my brothers. Every time she brought me back to myself, every time she helped keep our family together for a minute longer. 

Every day that we search for Antonio, something in me feels like it's rotting. At first I think it's just the grief, or maybe the anger at what my father has done, but one day I realize. Everything in me is rebelling at the thought of giving Antonio Romano one more fucking ounce of me.