Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller

completely around our daughter’s waist, and he bounces her up and down
each time the water laps at them, their laughter carrying down the beach to
where I’m sitting, working on my query letter.
I didn’t end up going back to school; in the months following my return
to Aplana, I watched the life I knew in Boston crumble to ashes, my sisters
suddenly finding themselves displaced and having to come stay with us on
the island for a while. Kal was busy throwing himself into investments, trying
not to let the fact that he hadn’t heard from Violet since the spring bother
him, even though I could tell it did.
Still does.
Then, even though I was dutiful about taking my birth control, I got
pregnant, and while Kal was hesitant at first to show excitement because of
his past, he was amazing about holding my hand through the entire
pregnancy, relying on his own medical knowledge to reassure any questions
or concerns I had.
I was hesitant, too, because of the way he’d once said he didn’t want to
bring children into the world, but when I told him we’d be having a little girl,
I learned it wasn’t that he didn’t want kids, it was that he didn’t think he
deserved them.
He’d been punishing himself for what my parents did to him. My mother
especially.
But when Quincy was born, any doubt I had about his ability to love her
or abandon violence disappeared the second he looked into those big, brown
eyes.
Not that he’s given it up completely. I sometimes find him in the old
outbuilding late at night, “tying up loose ends” from the life he has never
gone back to. When he left Ricci Inc., he left it for real.
Or, as much as one can leave the mafia.
Sometimes, when he nicks my skin while we fuck, or he reopens the
initials carved on the inside of my thigh, lapping at me like he needs it to
survive, I wonder if that’s his way of keeping that part of him in check. If he
cures his bloodlust by tasting mine.
Not that I’m complaining.
Their laughter draws my attention from my letter again, and I sigh,
slipping the page into my notebook and setting it off to the side, wrapping my
arms around myself as I start down the beach toward them.
I finished my first book, a fictionalized account of how I fell in love, a