Page 153 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
"I don't have a ring," I say, voice low, steady. "I should, but I don't. All I have is this moment and the promise that if you say yes, I will spend every day trying to give you the life you fought so hard to keep."
Her gaze doesn't waver. "Say it."
"Marry me," I say, like I have known all my life that I would ask her this.
She nods, and it is the most powerful thing I have ever seen. "Yes," she says. "Even without the ring. Even without the lemon tree. Just don't get shot again."
"I'll try to keep it to once a decade."
She laughs, and it spills out of her like a thing reborn. Her head drops to my chest, and I hold her there, arms tight around her, and it is quiet again.
But this time, it's the right kind of quiet.
The kind that lives after war.
The kind that says we made it.
30
ARIA
A year later
We've built a life in the southern part of Italy.
The mornings here begin slowly, as if the land itself refuses to rush. Light drips in through the linen curtains like honey over the ridges of the hills outside.
The window is cracked open, and the breeze carries the scent of wild thyme and warm stone, the rustle of fig trees and birdsong echoing over the valley.
The house rests at the edge of the world, or at least it feels like it. It's remote enough that no one passes by unless they are invited. It's high enough up that the sky feels closer than the village, which lies down the slope and past the olive groves, quiet and small, and kind.
The house is carved from stone the color of old parchment, with pale green shutters that creak when the wind shifts through the valley.
There's no gate, no security system, no need for whispered passwords or quiet checks beneath the car. Just a low wall lined with rosemary and wild thyme, and a gravel path that crunchessoftly under our feet every morning when Gabriel runs out with his backpack half-zipped and his hair still damp.
No one knows our names beyond what we've given them. A place where no one remembers the headlines, or the bloodlines, or the men who used to speak our names like warnings.
The hills stretch wide and olive-green, and the sun burns slow and gold against the shutters by midday.
On Sundays, the church bell rings lazily, like even God has given himself permission to rest here.
The inside is small, but the house breathes well. A kitchen with sun-warmed tiles, a worn wooden table that still carries the grooves of whatever life came before us.
The bedroom smells of linen and rosemary, and the living room is scattered with Gabriel's comic books and dog-eared notebooks, his sketches sometimes left out on the counter where Enzo pretends not to smile when he sees them.
There are no cameras. No armed men outside. No one we report to, and no one who knocks after dark unless it's the neighbor's daughter asking if Gabriel can come play soccer by the field.
Aria Lombardi doesn't exist here.
Not the way she used to.
And Enzo—Enzo hasn't touched a gun in almost a year, except the one he keeps locked in a slot beneath the floorboards, just in case the past forgets how to stay buried.
In the mornings, we drink coffee on the stone steps while the cicadas start their endless song.
Gabriel feeds the chickens that came with the house, and Enzo reads the newspaper like he isn't scanning for old ghosts hidden between the lines.
He is slower now, not in the way of weakness, but in the way of men who have learned how to savor peace without constantly reaching for the next fire to put out.
