Sons of Thunder (23 page)

She didn’t have to speak Greek for him to understand her meaning. Because she didn’t belong to him. Not really. Even after what they’d done, even after how she’d given him so much of herself, in the end, her heart would always belong to Markos.

Which meant, here he was, begging a woman who couldn’t truly love him, to marry him.

“But Sofia—I—we—we
need
to get married.” He hated the tremor in his voice, the way his shame lay right there, in the soggy night.

She touched his cheek, her fingers soft. “We made a mistake. We don’t have to make another one.”

“It wasn’t a mistake!” But his protest sounded just a bit too loud. Too raw. “I mean—it’s not a mistake to love you, Sofia.”

“There’s where you’re wrong, Dino. What you Stavros boys have never figured out. It is a mistake to love—”

“What are you doing out here, Danny?”

Even as the voice needled him, even as Dino made to turn, to shoot a retort back at Reg, he saw it.

Sofia flinched. More than that, she recoiled, her entire body moving into herself.

And just like that, time scrolled back, a gritty rewind. Sofia, pinned by Reg at the Thanksgiving party. Reg, ordering him to stay behind and work overtime at the hospital the night Sofia was attacked.

Dino turned and under the gummy lights saw the scars on Reg’s cheek, fine lines, two of them, through his beard, down his jawline.

On his neck.

I scratched him.

“You,” Dino said, almost under his breath.

“What?”

Dino launched at him. Reg’s fist slammed into his chin even as Dino tackled him. They bounced off the entryway, stumbled, hit the ground under the glare of the hospital lights.

The first time Dino brawled, only a few months ago, he’d experienced a sort of release. This time the anger coiled inside, tightening, like a claw.

He hammered his fist into Reg’s face, satisfaction sluicing through him when he grunted. “Get off me—”

“You animal!” Dino threw another punch—wanting to demolish that perfect, regal nose. Reg knocked him away.

Dino stumbled back.

“What is wrong with you, Scarpelli?”

“You were the one who went after her! You’re the one who attacked her!”

Reg recoiled, his gaze snapping to Sofia. Then—and Dino couldn’t be held accountable for what happened after that—he smiled.

Sofia gasped.

Dino sucked in a breath, so much fury inside it stopped him cold. Long enough for Reg to pounce. Dino landed with a breath-jarring slam, his spine nearly separating on one of the boulders along the pathway.

Reg followed with a fist. Dino took the hit on the jaw, saw the world explode, didn’t care.

He brought his knee up, tossed Reg over his head.

Reg landed with a
whump
on his back on the pavement.

Behind the roar in his brain, he barely heard Sofia— “No, stop, Dino! Please!”

But he could no more stop the wind. He tackled Reg just as the man came to his knees. “You filthy—” They flew back onto the cement, the rocky edge of the path.

Then, just like that, Reg stopped moving.

Dino bounced to his knees, his fist recoiled.

Reg’s eyes stared at him a second before they rolled back into his head. A pool of blood seeped out from under a jagged boulder jutting from the ground.

“Reg—?” Nothing. As Sofia whimpered behind him, Dino kneaded Reg’s head for the trauma. Sure enough, under all that blood, above his brain stem, he found a mass of broken bone, the flesh soft and meaty.

He stared at the blood a moment—too long, seeing Theo, seeing Kostas.

Then it all rushed at him and he came to life. “No, no—” He whipped off his lab coat, put it to the wound, turned to Sofia. “Get help! I need a stretcher!”

She bolted toward the building.

He’d never felt so ill as he did when they scooped Reg up and carried him into trauma. Dino watched Reg’s arm slip from the stretcher like some kind of doll.

And, as if his world couldn’t implode more, the doors shut on Dr. Scarpelli, directing the trauma team.

For a quiet breath, Dino stood in the bright lights, staring at the stain of blood, his heart in his throat.

Run.

No.

He couldn’t run, but he couldn’t follow Reg, either.

Until Sofia grabbed him by the arm, fed her hand down to his. “I told you—I’m poison, Dino.”

She gave his hand a squeeze, started to turn away. He grabbed her wrists. “What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Yes. Okay. Go back to the house. We’ll talk there—I have to—I have to stay.”

“No—I’m leaving—”

“Sofia. We’ll figure this out.”

She met his eyes then, a haunting look that reached in and took out his heart. Then she pressed a kiss on his cheek, turned, and folded into the night.

Everything inside him turned to ash as, God help him, he didn’t stop her.

CHAPTER 17

Dino stood at the window, watching the rain weep against the pane, shivering. Fatigue had long since turned him raw, shredded his nerves as he paced the corridor.

Please, Reg. Live.
Live.

His lungs burned with the scream, every muscle simmering. He closed his eyes, pressing his forehead to the glass.

He hoped Sofia had gone back to the boardinghouse.

And then, as he considered the dark specter of his reflection in the window, he didn’t. Maybe neither of the Stavros boys deserved her.

“There you are.”

He turned, and his father, or rather the man that
felt
like a father, entered the room, hands sunk deep in the pockets of his lab coat. “I don’t suppose you got that cut looked at.”

Dino’s hand went to his cheek, where Reg’s knuckles had separated the skin. Swollen. Raw. He winced, relishing, however, the sting.

“If you’re wondering, yes, you’re beating yourself up enough. You can stop now.”

“I doubt that.” He turned back to the window. “Please tell me he’s going to live.”

“He hasn’t yet woken up.”

Dino closed his eyes.

“His vitals are good, though. And his pupils are responsive.”

The claws in the flesh around Dino’s heart loosened, just a bit.

“Wanna tell me what that was about?”

In the silence, Dr. Scarpelli treaded up beside him, staring out onto the wet street. The rain pattered on the window, eroding the glow of lights on the pavement. It had long since washed away Reg’s puddle of blood.

“I always liked your brother, you know.”

Dino glanced at him. Dr. Scarpelli—he never got used to calling him Father, or Papa, or anything but—Doctor. Still, it seemed more a term of affection than a title. The elderly man wore his hair slicked back, not unlike the way he had on the boat. Now age grayed his temples, carved experience into his healer’s eyes.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t think he could take care of you.”

Outside, a trolley car splashed through a puddle, threw water against the curb.

“It was that he was so angry. He carried it inside him, like he needed it to survive.”

Yes. Even Dino had seen that.

“But it wasn’t so much his anger that bothered me. It was his fear. He tried so desperately to protect you, to protect Sofia. He bore it all on his own shoulders, unwilling to ask for help. It felt to me like he was raising his fist to God.”

Dino sat on one of the stools, exhaustion tugging at him.

“I knew, because I too raised my fist to God, Dino. When we lost our son—I saw my wife die too. In spirit, if not in body. I let my grief turn me inside myself, let it stir my bitterness.

“Until you. I saw you on the ship, your hungry eyes watching us, and I realized I’d spent enough time feeding on my own pain. It was time to become a healer again.”

He turned then and placed a hand on Dino’s shoulder, kneaded it. “Son, you never really escaped Zante. Or what happened the night you left.”

Dino glanced up at him, met his eyes, bounced away.

“Yes, Gabriella told me. I know about Kostas. I know about your part of the fight.”

Dino flinched. Ground his jaw even as he looked away, seeing the nightmare afresh that had awakened him too many times in those early days.

Saw himself leaping onto Yannis’s back. For a second, he could taste the old man’s sweat, smell the wine on his breath, feel the rage ripping through him as Kostas tried to wrestle Dino from his back.

And then came Markos. Screaming—or maybe it had been his own terror, he wasn’t sure. Just Markos, launching himself at Kostas. Dino couldn’t remember being thrown off. Just the clear shout of pain as he crumpled into the corner, then clearing his vision just as Markos slammed Kostas against the wall.

He remembered—oh, how he remembered—the gut-wrenching tic of seconds as Kostas crumpled.

As if he might be again fourteen, bile flushed into his mouth, acrid, sour. He swallowed it down.

He’d spent years swallowing it down.

Trying to change the past, leave a different mark on the world.

He stared at the torn, scraped flesh on his knuckles.

Dr. Scarpelli’s voice gentled. “Markos wasn’t the only one holding on to anger, Dino. The guilt followed you from Zante. It’s time to let it go, let God heal you.”

Heal him of what?

He pressed the heel of his hands to his eyes.
When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer…

Yes. His bones had waxed away, his body dry, heavy.

Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.

Oh, how he wanted to live without guile.

He expected his father to leave, to hear his footfalls echo.

Nothing. He opened his eyes, turned. The old man considered him. “I have to apologize to you, son.” He held up a hand to Dino’s protest. “I let you take my name, thinking it would help you start over. Maybe that was wrong. Because you will always be Dino Stavros.”

“I know.” The words twined out of him, almost like a groan.

“Oh, Dino.” The kindness in his father’s voice could break him in half. “Don’t you know? That day you appeared on my doorstep, God reminded me that He does heal the brokenhearted. It’s time to stop worrying about what you’ve lost, start to see what you’ve gained.”

He smiled, in it so much affection Dino looked away. “You are not alone, son. And you are not lost—you just think you are. But I promise, you cannot find yourself by looking inside.” He glanced at the window, where the rain splashed upon the pavement. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

He stood up, again squeezed Dino’s shoulder. “That is how you will discover the man you want to be.”

The man he wanted to be.

Not Danny Scarpelli, the image he saw in Lizzy’s eyes.

But he didn’t want to be Dino Stavros either—angry, arrogant, reckless.

However, if he looked closely—no, he hadn’t seen that man in
Sofia’s
eyes. No, she’d looked at him—
really
seen him, and kept smiling. And in her smile, he’d glimpsed the man he longed to be.

“Oh, God…” He covered his hand with his eyes, his shoulders shaking. “I am so foolish. As lost as I was the night I ran from Zante. Please—please forgive me. Make me into the man I should be.”

The man he should be.

I’m leaving.
He heard Sofia’s words even as he shucked the moisture from his cheeks. No.

He washed his hands in the sink, scoured back his hair, cleaned the wound on his cheek. Please let him do one thing right.

Dino had nearly reached the exit when he saw her, curled in a chair, outside the trauma ward. She still wore her black trench coat, but this time had covered her head and part of her face with a silk scarf. “Lizzy? What are you doing here?”

The words
because I was worried about you
flitted through his mind, followed by a pinch of guilt. But even as he thought it, he knew.

He hadn’t loved Lizzy. Not how he loved Sofia. The thought caught him full on, swept through him. He
loved
Sofia. He glanced out the doors, to the splash of rain, the puddles of light.

“What have you done?”

He’d expected worry, perhaps compassion, from Lizzy. Not the fury in her beautiful eyes as she rounded on him.

Huh? “What are you talking about?”

“Reggie!” Her voice broke, she covered her mouth, turned away. “Just because he loves me. Just because he came to Pearl when you didn’t.”

He stared at her, unable to comprehend her words. “I, uh—
what
?”

“For the past three weeks, he’s been there, trying to persuade me to come home. He asked me to marry him. Reggie loves me, even after what—happened. And you—you—”

“You agreed to marry Reggie St. John? Then why were you in my room, waiting for me—
just last night
?”

She glanced through the waiting room, and he realized his voice reverberated.

She schooled her voice, her eyes hot. “I came to ask you for the truth. He told me about you. That you’d been lying to me. That your name was Dino or something like that. And he told me about the woman. I know she was the one at the door, Danny. I should have heard it from your mouth instead of through crude hospital gossip. But you kept lying—just looked right at me and lied.”