by Lia Lee
“Or what?” I asked. “You’ve already hurt me in ways you can’t even begin to understand.”
We faced off to each other, my dad close to the door and me close to where Luke was lying on the floor. This wasn’t just about family and doing my dad’s bidding. This was a battle of wills, a fight for my freedom.
Luke groaned at my feet, and I was distracted. His eyes were still closed. I kneeled by him, checking the wound on his temple. The blood had stopped flowing but he would need medical attention. Maybe not stitches but he would have a concussion.
“Look at him,” my dad sneered. “You’ll care about a man who can’t even stand against me, but you won’t come home to a life with men who stand for what they believe in.”
“All your men believe in is power and blood and doing whatever it takes to get it. I won’t live like that. I won’t be a part of it. I hate having to hide who I am.”
“You’re a Santora. You should be proud of you who are.” My dad shook his head.
“You’re coming with me,” my dad finally said. “Sam will raise the child. He’s a good man, Anna. You don’t see it because you’re so angry, but Sam will take care of you. He’ll take you back.”
“I don’t want him to take me back!” I shouted. “I don’t want anything to do with him and the life he represents. He’s not capable of caring for me any more than you are.”
My dad was angry again, his dark eyes fiery, his mouth twisted into a snarl.
“So what, you want to stay here with him?” He pointed at Luke. “Live in this godforsaken cabin with a man who doesn’t know the meaning of loyalty, who doesn’t have the balls to finish what he’s started? He’s weak, Anna. I should never have taken him in, relied on him. He was a mistake.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know him at all. You don’t know me. You don’t take the time to know anyone who works for you or lives with you.”
“You’re not staying here,” my dad said again.
“I am,” I answered. I would fight for this for the rest of my life. “I love him, Dad.”
“Anna?” Luke said, opening his eyes.
“Luke,” I said and turned my attention to him. “God, you’re all right.”
“You love me?” he asked.
I nodded. I hadn’t told him how I felt about him, but I had realized I loved him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to have this baby with him.
Luke blinked at me. I wanted him to tell me he loved me too. I wanted him to fight for me. But he didn’t say anything. I frowned.
“Luke,” I started to say, but my dad stomped across the cabin toward me, and grabbed my wrist in an iron grip. He dragged me away and I nearly lost my feet, stumbling across the floor as my dad physically forced me to leave.
“No!” I screamed, kicking and clawing to get out of his grip. My dad marched on as if he didn’t even feel my attempts to escape his grip. “Let me go!” I screamed. I looked over my shoulder at Luke who scrambled to get to his feet, lost his balance again and tumbled to the floor. My dad dragged me through the door, and I grabbed his arm and bit him.
“Fuck!” my dad shouted and let me go. He looked like he wanted to say a lot of other things, but he bit his tongue. “Why are you always so difficult?”
“Why are you trying to force me to be someone other than I am?” I countered. “I was never good enough for you. Why is that?”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” my dad said.
“Is it because I’m not a man? Because you had a daughter instead of a son? I guess Sam is the perfect replacement then, isn’t he?”
“Anna,” my dad warned, but I was on a roll. I was angry, and everything I had bottled up for years came streaming out of my mouth, now.
“Or is it because I look too much like her? It’s hard to look at the person you blame for your wife’s death, to see her eyes in mine, isn’t it?”
My dad looked for a moment like he was going to crumble. My mom had died soon after childbirth because of complications. We had never spoken about it because my dad had hurt too much. But I knew he blamed me. I knew he hated me because he had lost her. And I was going to push that button until my dad broke and gave me what I wanted.
“Maybe it’s because I’m not willing to accept this shitty life you’re offering me when Mom did. She had been happy with it, accepting who you were, and now you’re upset that I’m not the same.”
“Anna!” my dad shouted to get me to stop, but I was going to keep at it. The dam wall had broken, and the pent-up anger came at my dad like a wave of fury.
“Well, I will never be like her. No amount of grooming and training and forcing me to marry the wrong man is going to change that, and I won’t ever stop trying to get away from you!”
My voice danced through the trees around the cabin, and when I’d said my piece, the silence was almost overpowering. The snow all around us was so white it hurt my eyes, and my dad’s face was wrought with anger.
“You have twenty-four hours,” my dad said. “You can take that time, spend it with that useless piece of shit inside. Say your goodbyes. When your time is up, I’m coming for you, and I expect you to come with me without a fight.”
His voice was low, his quiet anger so much worse than his loud anger.
“If you try to run again, I will find you, and I will kill him. If you fight me again, I will kill him. If you do anything other than exactly what I ask, if he follows you or does anything to jeopardize my plans, I will kill him. Do you understand?”
“You can’t do this to me,” I said, but my voice was thin, now. My dad had reached the end of this line. He was angrier than I had ever seen him.
“Twenty-four hours, Anna. Don’t ever say I don’t do anything for you.”
He turned around, giving me his back like I wasn’t a threat, and walked to the SUV. I watched him open the door and climb in, turning around in the small clearing among the trees before he drove away. I stood in the cold without my coat, barely registering that I was shivering. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel had turned out to be nothing more than a big, black hole.
Chapter 26
Luke
I heard them fighting outside the door. He hadn’t managed to drag her away. I heard Frankie swearing and knew Anna had done something to him.
I felt pathetic and weak for not being able to go after her when he had dragged her away. My vision swam, my balance was questionable, and I felt like I was going to throw up. Those were bad signs. I had a concussion and a bad one at that. But I hadn’t been able to save Anna, and that had pissed me off.
I hated Frankie. I had disliked him before, but I hated him, now. He had made me look like a fool, like someone who couldn’t stand on his own two feet. I had been so shocked by the news that Anna was pregnant that I had frozen, and he had used the opportunity to knock me out, to catch me off guard and take me out.
And Anna had said she loved me. At least, I think she’d said it. I had heard it when I’d just come to, but my head had been pounding, and I had struggled to figure out which was up, never mind respond to a confession like that.
Fuck, everything was a mess in my mind.
Anna had gotten away from him and that had been amazing. She was a fighter. But with Italian blood in her, being the daughter of a mafia boss, I wouldn’t have expected any less. I had thought she was the fragile one, but I had been wrong. We were equal.
I only hadn’t known about any of it because Anna hadn’t told me who she was. She hadn’t told me who her dad was and why she was running from him. There was a lot she should have told me.
I listened to their argument outside, heard him give her a time limit and threaten me. He could fucking try to kill me, but I was like a cockroach. I would survive no matter what. It wasn’t physically what I had expected, but I had expected her to tell me what was going on in her life.
Anna was pregnant. She had been a virgin when I had met her, and I had knocked her up. And she had lied to me about
it. I had done everything for her, taking care of her and letting her stay with me, and I had asked her directly if she was pregnant and she had said no.
I didn’t know why she hadn’t told me, but I wasn’t okay with that.
When Anna came into the cabin, her eyes were swollen, and her cheeks were bright red from the cold. She had been out there without her coat on.
“Are you okay?” she asked when she closed the door. She rubbed her arms. The fire had gone out.
“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. “I guess so.”
Anna gestured to my wound. “Can I look at that for you?”
She was careful of me, now. I wondered why. Was it because she was scared of me now that she knew I had worked for Frankie? Or was she nervous now because she had lied to me and she had been found out? Whatever it was, there were miles of distance between us where there hadn’t been before. I hated it, but at the same time, I was grateful for it because I was upset. I was upset that I had been assaulted in my own home. That the woman I had fallen for had lied to me. That everything I’d thought was real had crumbled before my eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me you are pregnant?” I asked.
Anna sighed and sat down on the couch, squeezing her hands between her knees. She looked small and vulnerable, but I didn’t buy it. Not this time.
“I was scared you wouldn’t want me anymore.”
I shook my head. That she could think that of me was beyond me.
“You should have told me.”
She nodded.
“And your dad is Frankie Santora. Don’t you think that’s something you should have told me, too?”
Anna pulled up her shoulders. “I didn’t want to be defined by who my dad is, by the past I left behind.”
It was something I could understand. Hadn’t I run for the same reason?
“You told me your surname came from your mom,” I said.
Anna nodded. “I always tell people that because I don’t want to be associated with my dad. Wouldn’t you do the same?”
I didn’t shake my head because it hurt too fucking much.
“No, I would have told the person I had fallen for.”
Anna blinked at me. “Are you referring to what I said or are you telling me that’s how you feel about me?”
She wanted me to respond to her confession. That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t ready for that.
“That hardly matters now,” I said. “You lied to me. Your dad, the pregnancy. What else did you lie to me about?”
Anna sighed. “Those are the only two things I didn’t tell you about. Everything else I told you is true.”
I pushed up from the floor where I was still sitting and moved to the coffee table, balancing on it. I didn’t want to sit on the couch with her, but it was the only seating in the room, and I was worried that if I stood, I would fall again. The coffee table would have to do as a makeshift seat.
“How can I trust you again?” I asked. “You’re telling me now that you didn’t lie to me about anything else. But you lied to me about that. I don’t know what to do with that information.”
Anna pursed her lips, and I wondered if she knew how much she looked like her father. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. But I hadn’t wanted to see that in her, even if I had known who she was. I had pushed everything about Frankie out of my mind because he was the one person in my life I had never wanted to think about again.
“You know, you may not be able to trust me, and I have to live with that. But I can’t exactly trust you, either. Can I?”
I shook my head and regretted it immediately. It hurt like hell when I did it, and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to breathe through the wave of nausea that came with it. I waited until the worst subsided, and Anna waited patiently with me.
“I have never lied to you,” I said.
“So, you’re really running from your family because they disowned you?”
I sighed. She was right. I hadn’t been honest about what had happened with my family.
“You’re right,” I said. “I lied about my family. They didn’t disown me. I disowned them.”
“And you knew my dad.”
“I didn’t know he was your dad. I wasn’t about to tell you all my dirty secrets. You don’t meet someone amazing and lay all your baggage on them, do you? He was in my past.”
“But you’re running from him.”
So, my past was catching up with me. I had to admit, she had me on that one. I hadn’t been entirely open with her. But the only thing I had lied about was my parents.
“My parents didn’t disown me. I disowned them,” I said. “I left them behind and ran because I was scared Frankie would use them to get to me. I don’t know if you know what he’s capable of, but I was scared he would torture them or kill them to get to me.”
Anna nodded and looked at her hands. “I know what he’s like. There’s a reason I ran away.”
We sat in silence for a while, neither of us sure what to say.
Anna spoke up. “I don’t know if it’s worth anything to you, but I’m sorry. I wish I did it differently, but everything looks better in retrospect. I should have told you, but I didn’t want you to know who I was. And the baby—I was terrified you would reject me because you didn’t want to be saddled with that kind of responsibility.”
I thought about the condom and the rip and felt guilty that I hadn’t told her about it. Maybe it would have made a difference. I was upset with her for not telling me things, but I hadn’t been much better, had I?
“I am sorry,” she said again.
“I know,” I said. I wasn’t ready to tell her that it was okay, that I was fine with what had happened because I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what to make of any of it.
“You should put on a jacket or something,” I said when Anna hugged herself, clearly cold. “I’ll build up the fire.”
“I’ll do that,” Anna said.
I didn’t shake my head again because it would kill me to do it. Instead, I let Anna do a man’s job because I had to admit I couldn’t quite build a fire just yet.
She did an okay job of it by my instruction, and when the fire was crackling, Anna came to me with a dish of lukewarm water, a cloth, and Tylenol. She argued she had to take care of my head, seeing that her dad had caused the damage in the first place, and I agreed.
Anna took care of me. She carefully cleaned off the dried blood and sterilized the wound. It turned out it wasn’t deep enough to need medical attention, and with the Tylenol in my system, the pain became less. Anna was caring, and it was a great trait in a woman. Everything she was since she had arrived was the trademark of the kind of woman I wanted in my life. But after what had happened today, after what I had learned about her, I didn’t know what I thought of her anymore. I saw her in a different light, and I wasn’t sure I could live with everything that had happened.
We made lunch in silence. I was able to move around more, my headache subsiding a lot quicker than I had anticipated, leading me to believe I wasn’t nearly as concussed as I had first thought.
After we ate, I felt even better still.
“So, my dad said he’s going to be back tomorrow,” Anna said. “To collect me.”
I nodded. “I heard,” I said.
“I don’t want to go with him.” She looked up at me. “I meant what I said when I said I love you. I don’t want to go.”
“Maybe it’s better if you do,” I suggested. “He made all kinds of threats, and if I know Frankie, I know he’s good for his word.”
Anna chuckled bitterly.
“Yeah, when he wants to be. But you’re right, he did threaten to kill you.”
It wasn’t about me dying at all. Sure, Frankie had threatened to kill me, but I had survived the man before, and I could do it again. I wasn’t sure if Anna should stay because I wasn’t sure how I felt about everything anymore. This morning I would have given everything to have her in my life forever. But so much h
ad happened since then.
“I need to get out and get some air,” I said.
“What? You’re injured.”
I shook my head, and it didn’t kill me. “I need to get outside. You’re welcome to stay at the cabin. I’m not asking you to go. But I need to get out of here and clear my head.”
Anna looked like she was going to cry when I said it, but I didn’t have what it took to take care of her emotions and my own. She had made decisions, as had I, and we had to bear the consequences.
I put on my coat and boots before I headed out into the snow. There were mountain lions around, and the world was a lot less safe than I would have liked it to be, but the worst was inside of me. Hatred and resentment made a hell of a cocktail, and I had to decide if it was something that included Anna, now.
Chapter 27
Anna
While everything was happening, with my dad here and even the conversation with Luke afterward, I had been running on a heavy dose of adrenaline, and it had kept my emotions at bay. Now that Luke was out there in the snow, doing everything he could to get away from me even though he wouldn’t have admitted it, I was alone in the cabin, and I had time to digest what had happened.
It didn’t take very long before fear and sadness took over. I got up from the couch and moved closer to the fire that was slowly dying to keep warm. I sat down on the floor in front of the fire and wrapped my arms around myself as if I could physically stop myself from falling apart.
My throat closed, a combination of fear and wanting to cry. I was terrified of what my father would do when he came back for me tomorrow morning. He was adamant about taking me home. And that meant that I would have to marry Sam. If my dad took me home, there was no way I was going to live a life free of Sam. My baby would have to look up at a horrible man as a father, and no way would that be a happy ending for either of us. The only person that would be happy would be Sam, and I hated the thought of that.
I wanted to stay here with Luke. I wanted to be with him. I had thought about running away with him, about leaving it all behind again and to keep on running. But my dad had threatened me that he would find me again, and I believed him. He wasn’t the boss of the mafia for nothing. He had gotten where he was because he knew what he was talking about, and he knew how to put his money where his mouth was. Running would be a very risky thing to do.