Chapter 85 He Comes Home

Chapter 85 He Comes Home
I heard the car at seven fifteen and I was at the front door before the engine had fully stopped.

Three vehicles came through the gates and moved up the drive and I stood in the doorway with the light from the entrance hall behind me and my heart going at a pace that had nothing measured or composed about it and I watched the second car stop and the door open and him step out.

He looked up and saw me.

He walked toward the door and I walked toward him and we covered the distance between us at the same pace and met in the middle of the entrance hall and he caught me and pulled me against him and I pressed myself into his chest and his arms came around me so completely and so tightly that I genuinely could not breathe for a moment.

I did not care at all.

He held on and I held on and the entrance hall held us and neither of us said anything for a long time. His face was pressed against the top of my head and his arms were so tight and I could feel his heartbeat going fast against my cheek and his breathing, which was not as steady as he would have wanted it to be, and the specific warmth of him which was real and present and here in a way that the phone call two hours ago had told me but that my body had needed to feel directly before it would fully believe.

He was here.

Whole.

He had come back.

I gripped his jacket with both hands and felt the fabric under my fingers and the solid reality of him under the fabric and I pressed my face harder into his shoulder and let myself feel all of it, the fear from the whole day released at once, the hours at the kitchen table and the phone face up and the radio going in and out and Elena's hands over mine and the thirty five minutes from the phone call to the sound of the engine.

All of it let go.

His arms tightened even further.

After a while I became aware of the entrance hall around us. Nico somewhere behind Dante making himself very busy with something that required his complete attention in the opposite direction. Two coalition men near the door who had apparently discovered something fascinating about the floor tiles.

And on the staircase, sitting on the third step with his arm in a sling and his face doing something he was working extremely hard to manage, Marco.

He had arrived at the estate an hour ago, transported from the medical location when he was cleared to move, and Elena had put him in the sitting room with tea and instructions not to do anything dramatic and he had apparently ignored the second part of that completely and come to the staircase instead.

He was watching us from the third step.

His eyes were bright in the way eyes got when they were doing something the person attached to them was determined to deny.

He reached up with his good hand and pressed two fingers to the corner of his eye.

"Dust," he said, to nobody in particular. To the staircase. To the entrance hall ceiling. "There is an extraordinary amount of dust in this house and someone should really address it."

Dante lifted his head from my hair.

He looked at his brother on the staircase.

Marco looked back at him with the extremely bright eyes and the good hand that had returned to his lap and the expression of a man who had been genuinely frightened today and was processing that through the only emotional language available to him which was complete and utter denial.

"You look terrible," Marco said.

"You have your arm in a sling," Dante said.

"This is nothing," Marco said. "A scratch. Completely minor. Elena is being completely excessive about the whole thing."

"You were in the crossfire for eleven minutes," Dante said.

"Briefly," Marco said. "Very briefly in the crossfire."

"Marco," Dante said.

"I am completely fine," Marco said, in the voice of a man who was completely fine and had definitely not spent the afternoon in a medical facility and was definitely not sitting on a staircase at seven thirty in the evening because standing felt like too much.

Dante looked at him for a long moment.

Then he crossed the entrance hall and stood at the bottom of the staircase and looked up at his brother and Marco looked down at him and something passed between them that had no words available for it and did not need any.

Dante put his hand on Marco's knee.

Marco put his good hand over it.

Neither of them said anything.

After a moment Marco cleared his throat. "Right," he said. "Well. Good." He patted Dante's hand twice with the brisk efficiency of a man drawing a meeting to a close. "Now that that is settled someone should probably tell Elena that you are back because she has been making tea at intervals for two hours and the kitchen is beginning to look like a teashop."

He wiped his eye again.

"Dust," he said firmly.

Nobody believed him.

Elena appeared in the kitchen doorway and looked at Dante and her expression did the thing it did when something she had been waiting for had finally arrived. She didn't say anything. She simply looked at him for one long moment and then turned back to the kitchen.

Dante looked at me.

I looked at him.

"Come inside," I said. "All of you. Come inside."