“And I assume he threatened his”—she nodded in Damian’s direction—“life.”
My hands fisted, hidden at my sides and blocked by the car door. “Yup.”
“Good thing I have my army.”
How could someone so devious smile so pretty?
“Yup.” I nodded, my movements halfhearted. “Good thing.”
It struck me again how calculated Maman was. She’d gathered a veritable army in the strongest mafia territory in the world. In helping Damian ascend to the De Luca throne, she’d garnered the favor of a strengthening syndicate. For good measure, she tried to intertwine our families by pushing me and Damian together.
Maman had Vince’s heart and support, which meant she had the Romano family’s backing. This explained why the Romano allowed her to live in their territory all these years. Plus, the Romano family had to play along with this tactical gathering because doing otherwise meant admitting they had unknowingly let a sleeper into their territory.
The Andretti family was finally at peace with the Romano family, something I suspected Maman and Vince had played a hand in. Going against the Romano family would restart a war that had only just ended.
The Rossi family connected with the Romano family in heritage. Bastian Romano’s mother was a Rossi, who shared an arranged marriage with Bastian’s dad. So, if the Romano family was okay with Maman gathering here, the Rossi family would be, too.
And finally, the Camerino family couldn’t go against four families, and they were already too spent on their territorial war with the Rossi family to take on Maman. So many little pieces created this puzzle, a feat no other man or woman had achieved. If I weren’t so disgusted, I would have been impressed.
Maman had taken over the Vitali, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
“I’ll let you and your boyfriend talk before you leave.” She arched a brow and stared me down. “Unless you’ve decided to appreciate all that I’ve done to procure this empire for you and would like to be an adult and talk with me.”
I shook my head. “No, thanks.”
“Hmm.” Her lips flattened. “You may not realize it now, but this is a good thing, little warrior. Look around. This is unity. For the first time in history, the five syndicates are unified. We’re stronger together.” She reached out to touch me, thought better of it, turned, and walked away.
My eyes met Damian’s again.
Maman spoke of unity, but I’d never felt so divided.
Patience is the weapon that forces deception to reveal itself. It is insurance against being deceived or making wrong decisions.
Michelle McKinney Hammond
In a weird, messed up way, Maman’s words spoke of peace. Cooperation. Solidarity. The irony made me snort.
“Laughing to yourself?” Damian rested a forearm on the top of my SUV door and leaned forward, peeking in my window at me. It was so casual, I would have thought we were okay, had it not been for my conflicting emotions and the tense lines on his face.
I’d wasted my window of opportunity to leave on wallowing at the state of my life. I’d had two major relationships in my life—the mother-daughter bond I shared with Maman and what Damian and I shared. Now, I had nothing.
I stared up at Damian, wondering how this conversation would go. So much had been left unsaid between us, and my anger hadn’t abated. Neither had my heartache. Damian looked just as tired as me, which satisfied the part of me that needed to know he still cared.
He heaved a sigh. “How have you been holding up, Princess?”
So, we were going the civil route. I could live with that.
There were so many ways to answer his question. Instead, I swallowed the urge to yell at him and settled for my go to phrase. “I’m not the princess.” The familiarity only heightened my nostalgia, which rose to my throat and formed knots until I couldn’t breathe.
“Knight.”
“I’m not the knight either. I’m the pawn, Damian.” Bitter laughter bubbled in my throat like a bath bomb churning in hot water. “A fucking pawn.”
“You’re a pawn like I’m a fairy princess.”
“My mom used me as a pawn, and then you accused me of being complicit in that. I lost my mother and the love of my life in the same day. There’s no trust between us. I shouldn’t be surprised. The first thing I did when I met you was lie about snooping in your room, and then I stole your phone. What a way to start a relationship.”
He heaved a sigh. “Your mom told me what she did. I suspect not everything, but enough to explain that you weren’t involved in”—he waved his finger in a circular gesture—“all this. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. There’s no excuse for how I reacted, but I’d like to explain.”
“Okay.”
“Everyone in my life has lied to me, and it was easier to run from you than accept that our relationship isn’t as perfect as I wanted it to be. But the thing is, I conflated my relationship with you back then to my relationship to you now. That’s not fair to either of us. We deserve a second chance, not a continuation of a first chance that was destined to fail.”
“I can’t give you another chance, Damsel. I can’t handle it. I like to pretend I’m strong, but I’m human, and nothing drills that into me more than when I’m around you.”
We were silent for a moment. Too much needed to be said, but none of it would be easy.
He broke the silence first. “For what it’s worth, I thought it was hot when you stole my phone. No one else in the town had the guts to go against me. Except maybe my dad.”
“Fuck Angelo De Luca.” I bit back a smile when he barked out a surprised laugh. This got too friendly for my liking. I needed to remind him that we weren’t friends. “You and my mom seem cozy for someone who accused me of being her coconspirator.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
I wasn’t even going to dignify that with an answer.
He paused for a response, but when I didn’t reply, he continued, “I talked to Bastian. He came to visit me in Oklahoma.”
“Did he find out about Ariana being your sister?”
“Yes. He wanted me to talk to her.”
“Have you?”
“She’s here, but we haven’t had a moment alone. I think I’d like to get to know her sometime. Not today when I’m being leveraged into defending a mad woman,”—I snorted—“but later. When I’m ready to talk to her.”
“I’m happy for you.”
And I was. I didn’t question why he told me this. I chalked it up to instinct. While I’d only ever had Maman and Damian, Damian had only ever had me. I wanted to be here for him like I wanted NBC to stop canceling my favorite shows, but we were too fractured to be together… maybe, at the very least, we could be friends?
Friendship.
It was a good goal.
His silence encouraged me to ask, “Why don’t you seem mad at me?” Not that I did anything worth his anger in the first place, but last I checked, he still thought I had a part in Maman’s scheming and lied to him about it.
I watched as he rounded the car and got into the passenger seat.
He shut the door as he settled into the leather seat. “Bastian also said something that’s kind of stuck with me. I’ve got to own my lies before I can own my truths.”
“Lies?”
“I’ve told a lot of them to a lot of people. Some on purpose. Some unintentionally. Those are the worst. They take the longest to realize.”
I leaned my head back against the headrest. I understood what he meant. I’d been telling myself I didn’t love Damian since the moment I started falling for him. I’d also been lied to over and over again. It didn’t feel good to be on either side of the deception.
I glanced at him and took in the severity of his expression. “So, you’re owning your lies right now?”
“Yes.”
“Confess away.”
“I first liked you when you stood up to my dad on your seventeenth birthday. I heard what you
said to him when anyone else would have cowered in that bath. I wanted you when you turned a debate of Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide” into a flirting opportunity—and don’t deny you were flirting, because I was, too. I fell in love with you when my dad punched me in the face, and you told me to get back up because you knew I was stronger than self-pity. Every moment after that, from our library dates to the dance to that night in my bedroom, I fell in love with you more.”
Holy hell. How did he expect me to survive this conversation with my ovaries intact if he kept going on like this?
Friendship, Renata. Pull yourself together, woman.
He continued, unaware of my inner turmoil. “When you left, Cristian would ask me, ‘How do you know you even like her? How do you know what love is?’”
I remembered why I’d never liked Cristian.
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I don’t know.” He gutted me with his words. “I told him that no one knows what love is, but there’s something about you I’ll never be able to let go. That’s the closest to knowing any of us get.”
He leaned back against the seat and eyed the ceiling of the car. “But I was wrong. There’s a way to know. I can’t define the feeling, but that doesn’t change the fact that I know I love you. I realized this when I saw you in New York. That piece of you I’d never been able to let go of didn’t loosen. It saw you, tightened, and tugged me closer.”
His words thrust me over a cliff, clinging onto the ridge for dear life.
“Oh.”
A stupid response, but I didn’t trust myself to say more. We needed to stay friends. We’d tried having a relationship twice. At least as his friend, I still had him in my life.
“You’re my first love, Knight. I gave my heart to you.”
Maybe that was the problem. He couldn’t let go of me because his first love was the only person who would ever get all of him. No matter how much time passed, I would always hold a piece of him no one else would.
It was the piece of him that discovered love. That learned love in late night library dates, when friendship transformed to love, when one soul lifted the burdens of the other, and in that first kiss we could never go back from.
How much of what he said was that missing piece he’d given me talking? How much of it was real? Truth was… I didn’t just want to be his first love. I wanted to be his last love. But here we sat. Civil, for reasons which blew my mind. We had an opportunity now to be friends, to always be in one another’s lives without risking losing each other.
“We have a choice right now to become friends and stay in each other’s lives without risking another ten years apart. I think we should take it.”
He let loose a humorless chuckle. “We have a lot of choices in life, but I know for a fact that this is not one of them. You can say whatever you want about outside forces involved in our relationship. But to me, meeting you will always be fate. I made the choice to befriend you. But falling in love with each other? That’s beyond our control. We can try to stop it all you’d like, but we will always be in love with each other, and anyone else would just be settling.”
“I can’t risk this.”
“It’s a bigger risk to spend our lives knowing we’re best together and not taking the leap. That ring you have tattooed on your wedding finger is permanent proof you’re in love me. That you will always love me. I’m imprinted in your skin, Ren. Forever. There’s no hiding from that. Do you remember when I drew that on you?”
“You drew this on me?”
I held my left hand to my chest and clutched it with my other hand. As if hiding my tattoo would change its origin, or the fact that I didn’t know where the original Sharpied line came from but my own intuition told me I needed it etched into my skin permanently.
He eyed my hand and nodded. “That night Laura drugged you, I took you back to your room. You asked me why I helped you. I told you that the only time I don’t feel like I’m just going through the motions is when I’m with you. That’s still true, by the way. You told me you thought you liked me, and I told you that, if things weren’t so complicated, I could see myself with you forever. And then, I drew that ring around your wedding ring finger.”
He reached for my hand, and I let him grab it—couldn’t help myself. “I didn’t realize it until recently, but things don’t have to be so complicated. We can simplify it.” He leaned forward, brought my hand to his lips, and pressed a kiss to my tattoo. “Choose me, and I’ll choose you. We’ll put each other first. Everything else is just background noise.”
I wanted to. I did. But I couldn’t make the choice right now. What would help me to take the leap? I wasn’t the type for grand gestures. I wasn’t even the type for little ones. So, knowing what I wanted escaped me.
“I don’t have an answer for you.”
“That’s okay.” He studied my face. “But I’m going to keep trying.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t change your phone number again.”
My smile slipped past. “Okay.” I finally let loose a laugh, and it felt free. “Was changing my phone number dramatic? Maybe. But in my defense, it—”
A screech of tires pierced the air. Damian flung his body across mine, covering me in an instant. I didn’t need his protection, but he did it anyway. Across Maman’s courtyard and driveway, soldiers drew their handguns and assault rifles to a ready position.
Four unmarked Escalades stopped in the driveway, over two dozen men armed with rifles evenly distributed between them. Papà’s tactical team. They took one look at our group, which outnumbered theirs four to one, and paused their movements.
Maman stood on the steps to her home. She leaned against a column, one foot hooked around the other, the picture of nonchalance. And why would she care? She was well-connected in the mafia world. She spent her time gaining allies, whereas Papà spent his time making enemies.
Maman and the intruders stood at a standoff. Still, she looked unconcerned. Confident, even. She had an army. Papà had a small tactical team. They’d retreat, and the Vitali family would be hers.
The opposition team’s cars retreated, backing out of the driveway. Damian pulled back a little, and our eyes met with hardly a hand’s width separating us. His eyes dipped to my lips. I leaned into him before remembering that I wasn’t ready to risk losing him by entering a relationship with him.
I leaned back into my seat, and he backed away from me. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Instinct.” He paused. “And even if it wasn’t instinct, I would have done it anyway.”
I couldn’t be mad at that. “Thank you.”
And despite everything, despite the years of deception from all sides, I realized that he always made me feel safe.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
Arthur Conan Doyle
One Week Later
Damian: Still no answer?
Renata: Ask me again tomorrow.
Damian: It’s tomorrow.
Renata: Observant.
Damian: Cute.
Renata: Tomorrow.
Damian: I’m starting to think you just want me to text you every day.
Renata: …
Damian: Let me guess… Tomorrow?
Renata: …
I nodded a greeting at Bastian, who sat on the customer side of the empty bar. At midday, the bar was closed as it prepped for dinner service.
Ariana glanced from me to Bastian. “I’ll give you guys some space.”
“Actually, I came to see you.”
Bastian looked between us. “Fucking finally.”
Ariana shooed him away, then returned her attention to me. “I was wondering how long it would take for you to show up.”
“Hey, you could have come to me.”
She rubbed a rag across the counter in large circles. “We’re still short staffed.” A smug smirk crossed her lips. “My former bosses may have filtered out all the qualified job applic
ants, so I’d get the job.”
It still blew my mind that I, one, had a sister; two, she was a fed; and three, Bastian Romano fell in love with a goddamned fed.
“And those former bosses are just okay with you working here?”
“I don’t work for them anymore. There’s not much they can do.” She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask. “You’re not like your dad, are you?”
“Fuck no.” I paused. “Technically, he’s your dad, too.”
“Is he that bad?”
“Worse.”
She sighed. “I guess my mom was right to run.”
“She was probably better off outside Devils Ridge,” I agreed.
“She died giving birth to me.”
Shit. “I’m sorry.”
And I was. Not just because she was my sister—and holy shit, I had a sister—but because I liked her as a person. The night shift came and went, and by the time all the employees left, Ariana and I still sat in a booth, talking.
Ariana shrugged. “There are a lot of issues when it comes to my mom, but I didn’t really know her. I miss something I’ve never had but know I should love.”
“Are you always such an open book?”
We’d dived straight into the deep stuff, not bothering with the pleasantries. In one night, I learned more about her than I knew about some of the kids I’d gone to school with my whole life.
“No. Never, actually.” She took a sip from her coffee mug and looked up at me. “We have decades of lost time to make up for.” I already knew firsthand how that felt with Ren. “I figured if it took you this long to come see me, you had to talk yourself up to it, and the least I can do is be open and honest with you since I couldn’t bring myself to see you either.” She looked around the bar and sighed. “I’m also averse to lying. I used to work undercover. It gets so damn tiring.”
Dark Romance Collection: A Sexy, Dark Bundle Page 21