Through the open mike where he’d listened to her every breath, he heard his nurse explaining her condition and reassuring her. Liliana only listened, but as his assistant finished checking her, she said something he couldn’t hear in her ear.
A minute later his assistant came out and, with a wide smile, told him he’d pulled off another miracle. Liliana was far better than expected after such an extensive surgery.
And she’d asked to see him.
Afraid to breathe, to hope, he didn’t know when he’d moved, but he found himself standing over Liliana.
She spoke without raising her eyes, her voice hoarse from intubation, chafing his every nerve ending. “Thank you for saving my life. Even if you no longer need me.”
He must have misheard her. She couldn’t have said... “What?”
Her eyes rose to him now, but they were no longer hers, but a stranger’s. “Since you’ve revealed yourself to your mother, I’m sure you can now enter my—your family to destroy it from within on your own.”
He didn’t know how he remained standing. He’d thought there could be no more pain than what he’d suffered in the past three days. He’d known nothing.
This, what she believed, was true agony.
“Per Dio, am I that big a monster in your eyes now?”
“You’re a vigilante, and you do what needs to be done to achieve your goal no matter the price. You’re also a surgeon and you save patients regardless of their value to you.”
“You think I considered you just another patient?” he choked out, unable to believe how horrible it had all become.
“It’s a fact you no longer need me.”
“I will need you, and only you, till my dying breath.”
Her gaze emptied more. “You probably didn’t wish it to end this way. I do realize you must feel bad about my injuries—”
He cut across her mutilating words. “I don’t feel bad, Liliana, I feel devastated.”
“You shouldn’t. I’m responsible for what happened to me. I barged into clearly labeled danger zones, repeatedly.”
Both the under-construction site, and his life.
He gritted his teeth against the mounting pain. “What devastates me is that I destroyed your faith in me, in yourself, so completely. And it’s why you almost...almost...”
“But I didn’t die, thanks to you.” She surveyed his agitation with a blank look, as lifeless as her voice. “And I do understand your need for exacting retribution on the family that threw you away. If only you’d told me in the beginning, I’d have helped you, if only for the possibility you’d find a peaceful and just resolution, and you wouldn’t have needed to go to these lengths to use me as your stealth weapon.”
“You must believe me, mi amore. Whatever I intended to do, I abandoned it all after I first saw you. I wanted only you since.”
As if she hadn’t heard him, she went on, “But now that you discovered you’ve misjudged your mother even worse than I have my father, I hope you’ll reconsider your revenge. The guilty ones are either dead or as good as. And I doubt no one else, no matter their faults, deserves your wrath. I hope you won’t destroy everyone indiscriminately for the crimes of some of their own. And that you’ll give your mother the chance she hoped for.”
It agonized him more that even in her own devastation she was thinking of others.
He dropped to his knees beside her, his hand trembling as he took hers. “I avoided even talking about your family, not only because none of them mattered anymore, but because I was afraid they’d hurt you. I only agreed to meet them when I realized how much you needed to settle their issue, and to be there to protect you from them. It turned out the only one I needed to protect you from was myself. And I failed. I failed you.”
“I failed myself. And now I’ll have the scars to remind me never to do so again.”
Before he took her hand to his lips, she pulled it away with surprising strength, as if she could no longer bear his touch. She turned her head away, closing her eyes. Her dry eyes.
It was as if she had nothing left to say to him. As if she had nothing left inside her.
He remained on his knees beside her as depletion claimed her again, at last learning the meaning of helplessness.
* * *
During the next two weeks, as Liliana recuperated, Antonio never left the center, always hovering around, trying again and again to get her to talk to him. But after that time when she’d first woken up, she’d given him nothing but silence. His presence seemed to plunge her into deepening despondency.
Everyone kept telling him to let her bounce back from the trauma, that she was hurt that much because she loved him as fiercely and that he’d eventually heal her with his love. But the days had passed and Liliana seemed to be drawing further into herself.