Ally squeezed my hand, as though in encouragement. I kept going. “I couldn’t cope with seeing the fucking light, I suppose. It was the first time in my life I’d been forced to lay there and think. It’s real easy not to feel a damn bit guilty about choices you’ve made when you’re always on the move; hustling, dealing snow, you know, the usual.”

Ally cast me a wry grin at that. She looked so damn perfect staring at me right now, her perfect face placed on her fist, her face open and accepting of everything I was saying. She was a fucking dream come true.

“Keep going,” she urged, and I lifted our joined hands to kiss at her soft skin.

Staring down at her fingers, I continued. “The more I thought about everything I’d done, the more angry I became. Real angry, Ally. I couldn’t deal with all the memories. They started giving me damn nightmares, still do. The guilt, it was unbearable.

“When I was physically getting better, one of the nurses who was real good to me, asked me about my tattoos. She asked me who designed them, and I told her it was me.” Ally’s eyes ran over my tattoos and her gaze darted to meet mine.

“You designed all these yourself?”

I nodded and Ally’s mouth dropped open. “They’re so beautiful, so intricate.”

I could actually feel my cheeks burning at her praise. “I designed most of Austin’s too.”

Ally shook her head and smiled. “So you can draw?”

I shrugged again and Ally leaned up to kiss my lips, whispering against my mouth, “You amaze me, every single day there is something new.”

Pulling back, she re-took her place with her hand on her fist, her dark hair now brushed over to one side, falling over her shoulder. And that was the shot. That, right there, was the image. This was her at her most beautiful.

“Axel, you were saying the nurse talked to you about your tattoos?”

Snapping back to the here-and-now, I said, “Yeah… erm… right, so, yeah, the nurse knew I could draw. She told the docs, the shrink, and the next thing I know they’ve enrolled me in an art program. At first I was pissed. I’d taken a business class and was doing okay. Aust was proud of that, so I wanted to keep going. But from that first day in that class, something within me just clicked.” I stared off to my tools hanging on my wall. “My whole life I’d been so busy dealing, working for the gang, that I hadn’t tried to find out what I could be good at. Ten seconds in that room and I knew I’d found my ‘thing’.”

“Amazing…” Ally sighed. “A blessing in disguise.”

“Yeah… I started drawing anything I could. I was okay at sketching, shit at painting, but when the teacher, a guy called Daryl, brought in clay, me and it, just fit.

“Before long, I was making clay sculptures. Pouring all my anger out into those pieces.” I laughed, remembering the look on Daryl’s face when I’d finished the first proper piece. “Daryl kept driving me more and more, until a few months later, he asked the warden if he could teach me how to sculpt marble. I had no real interest in it. But then one day, he brought me in a book of marble statues. I opened it at a random page. The very first thing I saw was Antonio Canova’s—”

“Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss,” Ally interrupted, her face all animated and glowing.

“Yeah,” I agreed, then frowned. “You like it too?”

Passion flared in her dark eyes. “It’s my second favorite marble sculpture of all time.”

My eyes narrowed when her face flushed with embarrassment. I wondered what her favorite was, but something in me stopped me from asking.

“Anyway, when I saw that sculpture, I looked up the artist, an Italian. An Italian who worked with Carrara marble.” I dropped my gaze. The Italian flag and the Firenzian Fleur de Lys tattoos on my arm both caught my eye.

As I stared at the green, white and red, a sense of pride flowed through my veins; the same sense I had on seeing the man who carved that sculpture was also Italian.

“I felt a link to my heritage as I looked at that sculpture. But more than that, I understood everything the sculptor wanted to portray in his work. I didn’t know shit about the story of Cupid and Psyche, but from that one sculpture I knew they loved each other… desperately. I got so much from that one statue.

“I told Daryl I wanted to try it and went from there. I had a ton of disasters over the next year. Daryl wanted me to use modern tools, but I refused. I’d become obsessed with Antonio Canova, so I insisted on only using the tools he used.”

I huffed. “Turns out that was a good thing. It gave me an edge, a uniqueness against other modern sculptors today.”

“But how did your work get noticed?” Ally asked, her face all impressed. I could feel the love for the art-form radiating from her smile.

“Daryl had a friend who knew Vin Galanti. He took photos of my sculptures and sent them to his friend, who sent them on to Vin. Next thing I know I had a visitation request from Vin and that was it. He became my mentor, took my sculptures from Prison, stored them at his studio in New York… then I got word he was showing one at the Met. I fucking went apeshit. I never wanted my work shown. They were mine, they were my guilt, my past, everything.”

“But Vin did it anyway,” Ally confirmed.

I shook my head. “Yeah, the fucker did. And after that, everything changed. People knew who I was. At least they knew ‘Elpidio’s’ work, ‘Elpidio’s’ name was suddenly known in the art world.”