Ivan approached him as if he were approaching a wounded tiger. “I know she doesn’t need that because you never second-guess yourself, never up your meds. You get it right the first time. Always.”
“But it’s Liliana. And I doubt I’m even sane anymore.”
Ivan’s hand clamped his, forced it down. “Come with me, Tonio.”
He glared at his friend through his tears. “She needs—”
“She needs you to leave her alone for now.” Ivan dragged him away, his pull inexorable in Antonio’s shaken state. “You told me...she would feel me in her sleep, and it would give her strength, make her fight. When she woke up, she told me it was true. Now your lady feels you, too, and to me it looks like your presence distresses her. You might be the very thing compromising her survival.”
It killed Antonio to admit this had to be the explanation. There was no medical reason why Liliana shouldn’t be stable.
Letting Ivan tug him to the observation area, he sagged down, his gaze pinned on Liliana’s inert figure and inanimate face. He plummeted into a deeper hell of guilt and desperation.
It was only when Ivan’s assessment proved right and Liliana’s vitals stabilized that he finally choked out, “How did you know? How did you come?”
“Paolo called me, and I called the others. As for how...she insisted she is stable, can spare me for hours and told me to go to you. If it had been a choice between being by her side or yours...”
“You would have chosen her.” Antonio looked back at Liliana. “I’d choose her, too, over anything or anyone. Starting with myself.”
Just then, his brothers and their mates began arriving.
It wasn’t long before he told them to go away. His sanity was hanging by a thread, and their empathy, their every bolstering word, the very sight of them together, was about to snap it.
Finally, they reluctantly left, with Ivan promising he’d keep them updated. He told Ivan his presence wasn’t helping anymore, to leave, too, but the icy Russian just ignored him.
As the last of his brothers disappeared from view, Ivan turned to him. “I take it from your condition, and her unconscious reaction to your presence, this isn’t just an accident?”
Suddenly feeling the crushing need to share everything with his oldest and closest friend, Antonio told Ivan everything.
After he fell silent, Ivan’s gaze grew contemplative. “This is good for you, you know?” Anger exploded inside Antonio, making him lunge to grab Ivan by the lapels. Ivan crushed his hands in the vise of his, forcing him to listen. “You were always too serene, too untouchable. I always knew this meant what’s inside you was even more nightmarish than any of us. And this woman has reached inside you and dragged out your chaos, so she could dispel it. She also released every emotion you never thought yourself capable of.”
“She created them. And I am the reason she’s lying there. Because I lied to her, because she thinks I never loved her.”
Ivan shrugged. “But you’ll prove you do, and that you had some stupidly noble reason for hiding what you hid from her. But even if she thinks you don’t love her now, I suspect deep down she feels that you do, since she’s found the perfect method to brutally punish you.”
“I’d take any punishment but this.” His eyes burned with more tears.
“But this is what she’s choosing, even unconsciously, hurting you by showing you how you hurt her. So you’ll take it, until she believes you’ve had enough, until you believe you’ve atoned. Then if everything the brothers say about her and what she feels for you is true, she’ll take you back.”
Antonio didn’t even dare hope it would be that easy, or that it would come to pass at all. But somehow Ivan’s prophecy stopped the spiral of madness. He couldn’t have Liliana wake up to find him totally deranged.
And she would wake up. He’d transplant his very life into her if that was what it took. He would have her whole again at any price.
* * *
For the next two days as Liliana remained asleep, Antonio discovered that hell was bottomless.
He’d forced himself to heed Ivan’s theory that her deterioration was directly proportionate to his proximity. Though despondent, he’d watched her from afar, every second he could.
On the third day she woke up while one of his assistants was tending her. He watched every nuance of her return to consciousness, then awareness, feeling as if he were waiting for a verdict of life or death.
Her lashes fluttered open, a hand jerking when she found herself hooked up to drips and monitors. Her whole body tensed before slumping back, realization replacing confusion on her face.