by Bethany-Kris
Great.
“Sure,” Vanna said, sighing.
“Thank—”
“Mario, we got a problem.”
He swung around, and Vanna followed the same path, although slightly slower. A problem for Mario usually meant good things for her, if only because it got him away from her for a little while. Vanna wasn’t about to complain should that be what this was, too.
“What do you mean, a prob—”
Mario’s words cut off as a group of men flooded the entrance of the restaurant. Vanna’s heart stopped for a split second as her gaze landed on the man fronting the group dressed in black, tailored three-piece suits, their aloof auras spilling throughout the room and bringing the restaurant opening to a fast, silent stop.
All at once.
With just their presence.
“Bene,” she whispered.
Thankfully, neither man standing there heard her.
But God …
She felt Bene.
From all the way across the room.
Worse was the way she felt his gaze when it turned on her after scanning the large space. It was as though he just knew she was in the place, and he intended on finding her. The two of them stared at one another from across the floor, and she swore the room disappeared for a moment.
Everything else went away.
It was just him.
And that rage in his gaze.
It burned.
She deserved it.
Did he know now?
Had he figured it all out?
The hatred in his eyes said yes.
“What in the fuck are they doing here?”
Mario’s sharp question brought the situation back into sharp focus for Vanna. She tore her stare away from Bene, though it was the very last thing she wanted to do. Quickly, she counted the six men who accompanied Bene, two of which were his brothers … and the third, well, apparently his older brother’s—Christopher—twin came back into town because a third brother that looked identical to Chris stepped around from behind the other men to stand with his brothers.
“They know we’ve been trying to get in on their racket with the distribution company for the last couple of weeks while they’ve been trying to get a handle on their legal issues, and—”
“Shut up,” Mario snapped.
The man did.
His gaze slid to Vanna, but she stayed neutral, her expression holding that same indifferent stare while his burned with fire and fury. She could see his silent questions and demands without him needing to vocalize it, too.
Did you get them here?
You better not have done this.
Keep your fucking mouth shut.
“What do we do?” the guy to Mario’s left asked.
The silence in the restaurant stretched on.
“Get them the fuck out.”
“And cause a scene? It’s not just the clan in here. Outsiders, Mario, think about it.”
“Fuck.”
His snarl slithered across the quiet floor.
Vanna saw the way it made Bene smirk.
“Go assure my father I have this handled,” Mario ordered, eyeing his father fuming at the table nearer to the middle of the dining section, “before he blows a fucking gasket.”
The man didn’t hesitate.
Then, Mario turned on her, his back to the room, and his viciousness coming back out to play when he grabbed her arm hard enough to make it ache.
“And you,” he muttered.
Vanna gave him a look. “What about me?”
“You stay put—don’t draw that prick’s attention while he’s here. If anyone finds out you were fucking him, I will put a bullet in your skull, Vanna. Do you hear me?”
Yeah.
She heard him.
“Answer me.”
“Yes, Mario.”
“Have another drink. Don’t even look at him.”
Involuntarily, her gaze drifted over his shoulder to find Bene again. Now, the group had come a little farther into the restaurant, and Bene currently snatched a drink up from a table. One that another member of the clan had just ordered, but never even got the chance to enjoy before Bene downed it in one go, and then set it back to the table.
Mario yanked on her arm, bringing her attention back to him. “What did I just say to you, huh?”
“They’re just flexing,” she told him, “they know the Camorra was fucking in their business while they were distracted, and now they’re here to show you how big boys play. If you’re going to make moves like you did in their world, you better be prepared for them to answer you. Move is on you—keep throwing your threats at me or focus on making sure they know you won’t be pushed around. It’s your choice, but everyone is watching, Mario.”
That did it.
She knew it would.
He let her go and turned to face the room again.
The room watched on.
Now, Mario walked the thin line.
Vanna liked that better.
The restaurant separated into two distinct sections, with a row of tables directly in the middle with regular patrons who didn’t seem to have the first clue about the danger they were currently in that Vanna had dubbed no man’s land. On the left side of the business, the Guzzi men dominated three tables, passing drinks back and forth, laughing at the jokes told between them, and ordering more food every so often.
On the right …
Well, the Detti clan fumed.
Perhaps it was because they couldn’t actually do anything here when the Guzzis had yet to cause a problem. And that was the thing, wasn’t it?
They just were.
Their presence, solid and loud.
A power play if she ever saw one.
Mario hadn’t been ready for that.
“All right, I think it’s just about time you cafones take your leave here,” came the thundering voice of one of Senior’s closest men as he stood from his table. With a narrowed gaze locked on the Guzzi men across the way, it seemed he had at least reached his limit of dealing with the outliers. Silence stretched on in the business, and for the first time, Vanna figured some of the diners who were just regular people off the street were starting to understand this situation wasn’t normal as they glanced between the two groups.
Perfect.
So much for not causing a scene.
Marcus Guzzi spoke first. “We’ll leave when we’re ready—sit down, don’t make none and there won’t be none.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?”
“A problem,” Bene said over his shoulder, but passing something that looked like a card to his brother across the table. “Don’t make a fucking problem, and there won’t be one.”
“I—”
“If your boss wants to have a discussion about why he’s been encroaching on our business on the east side, then we’ll chat,” Marcus said, “but otherwise, I’m going to continue enjoying my food, and then maybe I’ll leave when I’m done. And unless you’re going to make me do something different, I would love to see you try, I suggest you sit down, and shut the hole in your face before someone else does it for you.”
The air sucked out of the room.
Silence reigned.
Marcus went back to cutting the piece of chicken in front of him as though he wasn’t bothered at all by the turn of events, and he hadn’t just threatened a man. “This is good, not dry at all,” he told the man to his left at the table, “so someone give the chef my compliments.”
It took another ten minutes.
The Dettis conversed in hushed tones.
And then chairs were moved.
Tables pushed together.
On one side, Marcus sat with his plate of food, now alone at his table as the rest of his men scattered to all the corners of the room. On the other side of the table, Senior and Mario sat in their own chairs to face him for the chat he wanted to have.
With no one watching her … or so she thought, Vanna took the chance to s
lip into the back hallway leading to the bathroom. She needed a breather, a second to be alone, and deal with the emotions warring in her mind and heart.
She didn’t get the moment.
Bene followed her.
And when she spun around to face him as he entered the bathroom behind her, she swore the only thing she saw in his stare was pure hatred. It only worsened when his gaze dropped to the large engagement ring glittering on her finger.
Yeah.
He definitely knew.
“Were you engaged to him the whole time?”
Bene wasn’t sure why that was the first thing he decided to ask Vanna when he got her alone—a dangerous thing to even attempt, considering their circumstances, and yet he couldn’t control the urge to follow her when he saw her leave the dining room. No one was even watching them when everyone’s eyes were trained on the men sitting at the table opposite to one another.
God knew he should have asked her a million other things. Who in the fuck did she think she was coming after his family, to start, and had he been her target from the very beginning because she saw him as the weakest link in his family … or was he just a chance encounter that she couldn’t help but take?
No, instead he asked about that man.
The one he saw touch her.
Get close.
Who he had been told, just recently, she was engaged to.
Engaged.
Vanna shook her head. “No, that was—”
“No suffices,” he bit out.
“It’s not the whole story, though.”
“You think I care about your story?”
She blinked. “If not for an explanation, then why follow me back here at all?”
“Maybe I wanted the chance to choke the fucking life out of you while I could.”
He expected to see fear from the threat.
She showed none.
Because of course …
She had to know it was an empty threat.
A lie.
One of many he was sure to speak with her.
“My whole life,” she tried to say, “I was told this was my purpose … to take from your family the way they took from mine. That I didn’t have a family because of yours. And by the time I started to think a past I had never even experienced wasn’t enough to justify what I was doing, it was too late for me to fix it. No one knew what I was doing with you, or about my plans until much later when I was already trying to figure out a way to make it better, and it went downhill fast.”
Things made sense, then.
It clicked all at once with the shit he knew about Vanna—information he had been able to get pulled about her family history, and where she came from—with the stuff he knew about his parents’ history. How their worlds had intertwined before either of them even knew one another all because of a manipulative woman his father married before he ever even met Bene’s mother.
Pasts always came back to bite.
And it hurt.
“I don’t need you to tell me anything, you know?” he said, shaking his head as he sneered a bit. “Once I finally decided to really look into you, it turns out you weren’t very fucking hard to figure out. Where you came from? Why you did this to us? I don’t need you to say it because I know.”
“I—”
He didn’t care to hear what she had to say.
At all.
“No, it’s my turn now,” he snapped, taking one risky step toward her, “because I think you’ve had more than enough time to lie and tell me stories, didn’t you?”
She said nothing.
Bene nodded, expecting that. “Yeah, you know, our parents never hid shit from us. They didn’t want us to be ashamed of their life—of this legacy they made for us. I bet you think I didn’t know about my father’s first wife, huh? Or is it you that doesn’t know very much about her, Vanna?”
Her brow dipped. “I only know what my father told me.”
“Another bastard made by Gabriel Canali—the only thing he ever gave my father’s first wife was his last name, and she was so desperate to get rid of that small piece of him that she was willing to trick my father into a marriage with her to do it, too.”
Vanna straightened a bit.
Bene didn’t back off in the slightest. “Oh yeah … and then when she had what she wanted from my father—to get away from hers—she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. But don’t worry, she came back just long enough to almost get my mother and brother killed, before she swallowed a bottle of pills, making sure to kill my uncle’s child she was carrying while she did it.”
Her throat jumped as his words slashed through the still air between them, settling like a heavy weight. He could see the understanding dawning in her eyes, the fact that she knew he was telling the truth … or at least the truth as he knew it.
And it didn’t match with what she had been told.
Clearly.
“I get why you hated us—you thought we took from you, I bet,” he said, ignoring the thickness building in his throat the longer he spoke, “but it means nothing to me, and it won’t save you when the time comes for you to answer for what you did.”
“I’m sorry, Bene, I am.”
She reached out for him, but he couldn’t have that.
“Don’t touch me—don’t fucking even come near me,” he snarled at her. That surprise in her eyes, the hurt, had him barking out a bitter laugh. “How dare you look at me like I just did something wrong to you after everything? After what you did, you think you get to be hurt?”
“I do care, I care so fucking much, no matter what you think or say. It won’t make that less true. Nothing else you said was a lie, but nothing I just said was one, either.”
Bene glared.
Vanna held firm. “And I can’t touch you now?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because then you’ll be too goddamn close.” He pulled in a burning lungful of air, wishing it wasn’t so hard to breathe lately. “And when you’re close, all I can think about is how much I want to love you, but because you made me hate you, too, I don’t know how to do both.”
“But—”
“Don’t speak because when your lips move, you lie.”
“I don’t lie.”
“You do.”
“I don’t! Not right now. I’m not, I swear.”
Her staunch denial only served to have his control breaking altogether. Before he could think better of it, he crossed the three feet between them, the force of him coming forward for her making Vanna step backward until she hit the edge of the counter. Not that it stopped Bene from crowding her altogether, his hands resting on either side of the wall for the vanity to keep her locked in place.
Now, she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Go ahead,” he said, getting closer until their mouths were only a breath apart, “go on and lie to me again.”
She let out a shaky breath against the bathroom counter. “I am sorry. I would do anything to go back and—”
Still leaning over her, Bene dragged a handful of her hair back behind her neck so that he could murmur in her ear, “Except you can’t change what you did to my family—to my father, my mother. And I’ll do whatever to make sure I ruin you … like you could only try to do to us.”
She let out a cry as he pulled away from her. He turned to leave the bathroom. To just get the fuck away from her. He heard the shuffle of her dress as she, too, pushed away from the counter to probably come after him.
“Bene, please just listen to—”
“Fuck you. This is it. This is over.”
Vanna’s choked gasp made his shoulders tense. “Don’t say that.”
Again.
Again with that fucking shocked disillusion of hers. As though he was hurting her. Like she really fucking ever cared. As if this thing they had been wasn’t just manufactured by her lies and bullshit, and not from something that was real on her part.
He swung around on her before he
could think better of it. But she was already there. Right at his back. And turning so fast had him chest to chest with her. Her petite height caused her to still need to look up at him, and he leaned down further, too. Until their noses touched, and their eyes were level.
She needed to see it.
What she did to him …
She should see it.
“You don’t get to be the victim here. Don’t look at me and act like I’m doing something bad to you. Do you fucking hear me? You never gave a shit about me before, not when you only wanted to tear my world down, right? Well, good, you did it, Vanna. But just because the person I thought would be my world turned out to be a fucking liar doesn’t mean it stops turning for everybody else. And you don’t get to act like I’m hurting you right now when from the start, it was all just bullshit.”
Water lined her eyes.
Her bottom lip trembled.
He could already hear what she was going to say before she did—knew it would be the truth simply because her pain was most obvious, even if he was trying to ignore it while hurting her with his words because fair was fair.
Right?
They couldn’t be.
Even if her original intentions for him changed.
After everything?
No way.
“If you would only let me explain,” she whispered. “Let me tell you that I lov—”
“Don’t.”
He was so hyper-fucking-aware of their close proximity again. Of that sugary perfume lingering on every edge of her. How her makeup stayed perfect—a feat, he was sure—despite the tears that she freely let fall down her cheeks.
That she was more beautiful when she cried.
Somehow.
That he still wanted to kiss her.
Those lips, though.
And that something inside him just craved her—every horrible and perfect part of her.
Because he loved her.
But she didn’t get to tell him the same.
Not now.
He understood well this was exactly why he didn’t want to get closer to her when he first entered the bathroom. His entire mind went crazy around this woman. Stupid, maybe, if he were being honest. He reacted from emotions with her; he found himself willing to debase his integrity and raising for her.
To have her.
And that spelled bad news all over.