Page 50 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

“It is as if,” Alceu said when Tolis was an intense eighteen months old and they were taking the family walk that had become their nightly habit, “she is trying to redeem herself.”

“I hope she does,” Dioni replied happily, watching his mother—still dressed inappropriately, but less so—walk with the determined little boy who insisted he needed to walk himself everywhere.

“Of course you do,” Marcella purred. She looked back over her shoulder and lifted a shaped brow. “Vaccaros must always have an exit strategy.”

“I will confess that I have none,” Alceu told her, his mouth at her ear. “That is how much I love you.”

“I am happy to hear that,” she said, tilting her head back to look at him. “Because I love you too.”

Especially because, by then, they had another baby on the way.

She and Alceu spent more time in the village at the base of the mountain, so that he, too, could spend time with Grazia’s parents. Because time had not stopped as their daughter’s life had. And they bore him no ill will, though they also liked that he had no intention of acting the way his father had. Ever.

“We have always known that if it was up to you, the ending would have been different,” Grazia’s father told him on one of those occasions. “And this is a good thing. I have told everyone I know that if a Vaccaro can be different, it is you.”

“I promised her first,” Alceu told the old man, his voice rough. “That was the only reason she agreed to talk to me.”

“She was her mother’s daughter,” Grazia’s father said, his eyes damp. “Hardheaded.”

Dioni would always think that was what finally got Alceu to make a decision about what he would do with the castle. He did not tear it down. He did not burn it.

Instead, he kept his promise and made it over into a kind of retreat center for those seeking solitude. Peace. A reset.

It wasnota hotel, though Apostolis laughed uproariously every time he came to visit his namesake, because he couldn’t believe that there were nowtwofamous hotels in the family.

And he never did get around to punching his best friend—long his brother in name, and now in fact—in the mouth.

Possibly because even an Adrianakis could see that the castle had become a place of serenity. A place to lose oneself in the silence, the sea and the sky, and to come out whole.

Dioni and Alceu moved their growing family to the cottage she’d stayed in only that one night, bringing the surly staff with them, and slowly, they all learned how to smile more. How to dance. How to laugh uproariously and chase the little ones around and around in the garden.

“My darlingcamurria,” Alceu murmured to her in the bedroom where they hid away from their brood and reminded themselves of all the reasons why they could never manage to keep much more than a year between them, “you are appallingly fertile.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like me pregnant,” she whispered as he rolled her beneath him and let his hands move where they would.

“There is nothing I don’t like about you,” he replied, letting his teeth graze down the side of her neck. “But I will always love you ripe.”

Dioni found that, unlike many women, she loved being pregnant. She thought it might be because they had left the castle and its curses and its legacies behind. They lived in the cottage now. Marcella lived in another cottage, and dressed in fewer and fewer evening gowns as the years went by. Their children were funny and adorable and frustrating andtheirs, and there was no history bearing down upon them.

They spent as much time as possible with Apostolis and Jolie, and the cousins that they soon provided. On pretty Mediterranean evenings, the four of them would sit together in Greece or in Sicily, laughing as the sun sank gracefully into the sea and their children argued over which was better, a whole castle or the Hotel Andromeda —that the whole world could agree waslegendary.

But it was not old buildings made of stone and dead men’s dreams that Dioni and Alceu talked about when they crawled into bed together and tangled themselves up in each other the way they always did.

It was the dark eyes of their children. Their shouts of laughter and howls of injustice. Their unique and fascinating little personalities and the young men and women they became as they grew.

Funny. Interesting. Beautiful in ways that Dioni found healing, and frustrating, and endlessly entertaining.

The family neither she nor Alceu had ever had, so they doted on the one they’d made.

Sometimes he disappointed her, but she disappointed him too, but they didn’t dwell on these moments. Sometimes they fought. He could be stone and darkness and she was never afraid to poke, and that was not always the right mix. Feelings were hurt. Tears were shed.

But they laughed much more than they cried.

They listened far more than they got loud.

They ruined each other nightly and saved each other repeatedly.

And always—always—they loved each other.

---