by Olivia Gates
Before she could force her numb legs to move, Sofia started sobbing, and what she said robbed Lili of all power, made her sag to her knees.
“I held you only once after my C-section when I was still drowsy from anesthesia. You were the most perfect baby boy.”
Sofia was...was...his mother.
“When I fully came to, my family had sent you away. I threatened to kill myself if they didn’t return you but they told me it was too late, that an undisclosed adopter took you. I went mad. I tried to commit suicide.” She extended her hands to him so he could see the scars she still bore. “After I was saved, I knew I’d been stupid, since I couldn’t find you if I died. But there seemed no way to find anything about you, and I fell into a deep depression. Three years later I met my first husband, and he promised to help me find you. But his investigations only discovered that my parents and uncle had lied, that they’d put you in an orphanage. When Mark found out which one, I eloped with him and we went to the orphanage. But you were no longer there and we couldn’t find your trail. I drove myself insane imagining you’d fallen into the worst of hands.”
A vicious huff crackled from Antonio. “You can’t even imagine the kind of hands I fell into. They make slave traders look like Good Samaritans.”
The sob that tore through Sofia sounded as if it had ripped her apart inside. She reached her hands out to him.
“Don’t.” He pulled away, as if her touch would burn him. “I don’t need your pity or your guilt. As you can see, I far more than survived.”
She tried to approach again before her hands fell to her sides, defeated. “You’re right. I can’t even imagine what you went through, or how you conquered your horrific beginnings and then the world. I can only tell you my side, how I lived with the trauma of your loss, of imagining your fate.” A sob choked her, soaked her voice in tears. “But I did always feel you were out there, alive, strong. Then I saw a photo of you in a magazine and felt that I knew you. Then I saw you face-to-face and felt the connection between us. Your half siblings felt it, too, even if they couldn’t imagine what drew them to you like that. I thought I was crazy, but the way you looked at me, at them, made me hope you felt it, too. But today, I just knew who you are, and that you know who I am. I felt you didn’t want me to acknowledge our relationship. But I had to do it. Had to tell you I recognized you, that losing you tore a hole in my soul that nothing has ever mended, not even having more children, or adopting two boys who reminded me of you. My father and uncle died years ago, and my mother is now senile, but I still curse them every day as I did for the past forty years, for what they did to you and to me.”
This time, when she reached for him, he let her cling to his arms. She looked up at him, her eyes beseeching. “I know I can never undo what’s been done to you. I can’t do anything...” Another harsh sob escaped her throat. “Nothing but hope that you’ll let me know you, and maybe one day, in some way, I’ll make it up to you.”
Lili was a mess of tremors. Sofia’s impassioned confession shook her far more than her father’s had. To imagine what some of those Accardis—his family like they were hers—had cost him, was beyond endurance.
Then he finally spoke, his voice darker than the night. “When I discovered what your family did to me, what I thought you agreed to, I planned to exact punishment, on you and on the whole family whose rules dictate throwing away unwanted children. I wanted to buy your ancestral assets, lure you all into a merger with the promise of saving you from bankruptcy, so I’d end up in control of your very lives, before I took my time destroying you, each in the way you deserve. But even in their desperation, the Accardis rejected my life raft because, of all the irony, I wasn’t ‘family’.”
The realization hit Lili so hard she felt her head would burst with it. What she’d always felt but couldn’t even guess at. The reason he’d approached her in the first place.
He’d needed an in into the family.
It had been her.
That was why he’d pursued her, why he’d proposed to her.
It all made sense now. He’d never loved her. Never even wanted her. He’d only wanted revenge. She’d been nothing but his means to his lifelong retribution.
The blow of realization was so brutal it interrupted her very heartbeats.
“But now after you told me how—”
Antonio’s words were suddenly cut off as he tensed and turned to look in Lili’s direction.
There was no way he could see her in the darkness. And she hadn’t made a sound. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe.
“Liliana?”
He did feel her. Or it was her devastation he felt. Now she realized that everything between them had been a lie.
Suffocating, feeling she’d rather die than face him now, she scrambled up, stumbling as she ran back out of the room.
“Liliana!”
His shout punched her between the shoulder blades, intensifying her desperation.
She had to escape him, escape the agony. But she couldn’t pass through the others on her way out. She had to find another exit.
Spilling into the next barricaded room, which must open onto the same wraparound veranda leading to the garden, she rushed to open the closed French doors, growing frantic as his thundering footsteps drew closer, his shout begging her to stop another lash propelling her forward, making her more frantic.
Then everything happened at once. Sofia’s shrill warning, Antonio roaring, and she was falling.
Pain exploded, sharp and searing, tearing through her midriff. A simultaneous agony splintered through her thigh, almost fracturing her awareness.
Then she was on her back, staring up at the stars as they blurred, the night darkening around her.
The whoosh of blood in her ears receded, only to be replaced by Antonio’s frenzy as he begged her not to move.
Not that she could. Even drawing enough oxygen not to pass out was excruciating. She lay there, paralyzed with pain, watching his massive silhouette, an avenging angel jumping down a steep drop to crouch over her.
Vaguely, she realized the veranda she’d tried to escape through wasn’t there. She’d fallen through its skeleton, getting stabbed on the way down by protruding concrete-reinforcing steel bars. From the agony now emanating from her left side, she realized she must have damaged some internal organs. Probably her spleen, intestines, maybe a kidney. Her left femur was also fractured. Muscle damage was a given, maybe nerve damage, too.
She couldn’t see Antonio’s face, could only hear his strident breathing as he swept her in the bright beam of a flashlight.
Then she heard the tremor of dread in his voice as he pressed down on her side. He’d assessed her injuries and was applying pressure to slow the bleeding. “I’m here, mi amore, I’ve got you. Just don’t move.”
“Dio mio, dio mio, is she...?”
Without looking up, he hissed, “Leave now, Sofia. Tell no one.”
Sofia’s gasp at Antonio’s harshness carried to Lili’s wavering consciousness, but the woman complied, disappearing from Lili’s field of vision. Then Antonio started talking, barking sharp, concise orders. To Paolo, to fetch his medical kit from the limo. To his pilot, to get a helicopter. To the medical center, to prepare his OR.
Working at top efficiency, Antonio, the miracle worker who put people back together, had everything ready in minutes to reconstruct her. After he’d broken her, torn her apart.
He bent over her, raining frantic kisses all over her face. “You’re going to be okay, mi amore, I promise.”
She tried to cringe away. “You...shouldn’t...”
“Don’t talk. Just let me take care of you.”
“You shouldn’t...” Her teeth clattered, more with desolation than with blood loss or pain. “...have done...this to me...”
A groan escaped
him, his shudder transmitting to her trembling body. “Whatever you heard, whatever you understood, whatever you think I did, you’re wrong, mi amore, I swear.”
Tears oozed out of her very soul. “I...loved...you...”
“And I worship you. You’re everything to me. Everything.”
All light faded, taking his image with it as blackness sucked her under. “I—I think...it’s better...this way...”
As she slipped away, she wished it would be forever. So she wouldn’t live knowing she’d never had him, or with the agony that would never go away.
* * *
Antonio watched Liliana’s eyes flutter closed, felt her bloodied body going limp and still, and went mad.
His roar almost tore out the heart that had been exploding with every beat since he’d watched her plunge into that jagged maw of concrete and steel.
He’d done this to her. This was his fault. All of it.
She was lying here, torn and broken, because he’d lied to her. Because he’d overridden her disinclination and accepted his mother’s invitation. Because she must have picked up on his weirdness, because he’d left her behind without explanation, making her follow him, hear what had made her escape him so desperately through the house they shouldn’t have been in.
If he lost her...
No. He’d never lose her. He would save her. He’d pay his very life and far more to restore her, body and heart.
But before he could do anything, he had to suppress the insanity of terror and the violence of self-hatred. He had to go through his perfected motions. Everything he’d ever learned, every skill he’d acquired, every bit of experience he’d accumulated through the long years of slavery and struggle and success, had all been for this moment.
Everything he was had been made for her. Everything he could do, he’d learned to save her.
From the injuries he’d caused her.
* * *
Antonio raced against time in a crazed fast-forward, spiraling through all levels of hell.
In what seemed like minutes, he’d flown Liliana to his nearest medical center where he’d had to cut her open, literally this time, so he could mend her. He’d poured all his expertise, all his being, into saving her. It had driven him insane, not only the extent of her injuries and the reason she’d sustained them, but the feeling that she was resisting his efforts. He might have been unhinged with terror and guilt, but he did feel as if she wanted him to fail.
It had been when she’d flatlined, when there’d been no medical reason anymore that she should, that he’d become sure.
She’d wanted to die.
In the horrific lifetime until he’d managed to restart her heart, he’d known. If he’d failed, his heart would have stopped seconds after hers.
Now she lay in the ICU, just like Ivan’s mystery woman had three weeks ago. But the latter had fought to survive. He could feel Liliana still fighting to escape. He’d hurt her so much, it was as if she didn’t want to wake up to face the agony.
Some of her last words revolved in his mind again, hacking it to pieces. You shouldn’t have done this to me. I loved you.
He’d been a coward, avoiding a confession that could have caused a passing crisis, a pain he could have healed. He’d been self-deluding, thinking she wouldn’t pick up on the turmoil that racked him every time he saw his mother. Liliana had always felt he’d been hiding something, but because of his evasions, when she’d overheard him, she’d concluded the worst. What had once been the truth.
And it had destroyed her.
Sagging to his knees beside her bed, he let the tears he’d never shed before pour out of his very soul.
“You’re my life, mi amore. I can’t and won’t live without you. I beg you, don’t punish me by harming yourself.”
In response, her vitals only grew more erratic.
Exploding to his feet, he rummaged for medications, roaring for his assistants to prepare emergency resuscitation.
Just as he was about to inject the cocktail into her drip, a deep voice broke over him.
“I don’t think she needs that.”
He swung around to blast whoever was interfering, then rocked on his feet with the aborted aggression when he saw Ivan.
His head nurse was scurrying away. Had she fetched Ivan to deal with him? He sure would have blasted her, as he’d done every member of his medical team all night.
Ivan approached him as if he were approaching a wounded tiger. “I know she doesn’t need that because you never second-guess yourself, never up your meds. You get it right the first time. Always.”
“But it’s Liliana. And I doubt I’m even sane anymore.”
Ivan’s hand clamped his, forced it down. “Come with me, Tonio.”
He glared at his friend through his tears. “She needs—”
“She needs you to leave her alone for now.” Ivan dragged him away, his pull inexorable in Antonio’s shaken state. “You told me...she would feel me in her sleep, and it would give her strength, make her fight. When she woke up, she told me it was true. Now your lady feels you, too, and to me it looks like your presence distresses her. You might be the very thing compromising her survival.”
It killed Antonio to admit this had to be the explanation. There was no medical reason why Liliana shouldn’t be stable.
Letting Ivan tug him to the observation area, he sagged down, his gaze pinned on Liliana’s inert figure and inanimate face. He plummeted into a deeper hell of guilt and desperation.
It was only when Ivan’s assessment proved right and Liliana’s vitals stabilized that he finally choked out, “How did you know? How did you come?”
“Paolo called me, and I called the others. As for how...she insisted she is stable, can spare me for hours and told me to go to you. If it had been a choice between being by her side or yours...”
“You would have chosen her.” Antonio looked back at Liliana. “I’d choose her, too, over anything or anyone. Starting with myself.”
Just then, his brothers and their mates began arriving.
It wasn’t long before he told them to go away. His sanity was hanging by a thread, and their empathy, their every bolstering word, the very sight of them together, was about to snap it.
Finally, they reluctantly left, with Ivan promising he’d keep them updated. He told Ivan his presence wasn’t helping anymore, to leave, too, but the icy Russian just ignored him.
As the last of his brothers disappeared from view, Ivan turned to him. “I take it from your condition, and her unconscious reaction to your presence, this isn’t just an accident?”
Suddenly feeling the crushing need to share everything with his oldest and closest friend, Antonio told Ivan everything.
After he fell silent, Ivan’s gaze grew contemplative. “This is good for you, you know?” Anger exploded inside Antonio, making him lunge to grab Ivan by the lapels. Ivan crushed his hands in the vise of his, forcing him to listen. “You were always too serene, too untouchable. I always knew this meant what’s inside you was even more nightmarish than any of us. And this woman has reached inside you and dragged out your chaos, so she could dispel it. She also released every emotion you never thought yourself capable of.”
“She created them. And I am the reason she’s lying there. Because I lied to her, because she thinks I never loved her.”
Ivan shrugged. “But you’ll prove you do, and that you had some stupidly noble reason for hiding what you hid from her. But even if she thinks you don’t love her now, I suspect deep down she feels that you do, since she’s found the perfect method to brutally punish you.”
“I’d take any punishment but this.” His eyes burned with more tears.
“But this is what she’s choosing, even unconsciously, hurting you by showing you how you hurt her. So you’ll t
ake it, until she believes you’ve had enough, until you believe you’ve atoned. Then if everything the brothers say about her and what she feels for you is true, she’ll take you back.”
Antonio didn’t even dare hope it would be that easy, or that it would come to pass at all. But somehow Ivan’s prophecy stopped the spiral of madness. He couldn’t have Liliana wake up to find him totally deranged.
And she would wake up. He’d transplant his very life into her if that was what it took. He would have her whole again at any price.
* * *
For the next two days as Liliana remained asleep, Antonio discovered that hell was bottomless.
He’d forced himself to heed Ivan’s theory that her deterioration was directly proportionate to his proximity. Though despondent, he’d watched her from afar, every second he could.
On the third day she woke up while one of his assistants was tending her. He watched every nuance of her return to consciousness, then awareness, feeling as if he were waiting for a verdict of life or death.
Her lashes fluttered open, a hand jerking when she found herself hooked up to drips and monitors. Her whole body tensed before slumping back, realization replacing confusion on her face.
Through the open mike where he’d listened to her every breath, he heard his nurse explaining her condition and reassuring her. Liliana only listened, but as his assistant finished checking her, she said something he couldn’t hear in her ear.
A minute later his assistant came out and, with a wide smile, told him he’d pulled off another miracle. Liliana was far better than expected after such an extensive surgery.
And she’d asked to see him.
Afraid to breathe, to hope, he didn’t know when he’d moved, but he found himself standing over Liliana.
She spoke without raising her eyes, her voice hoarse from intubation, chafing his every nerve ending. “Thank you for saving my life. Even if you no longer need me.”
He must have misheard her. She couldn’t have said... “What?”
Her eyes rose to him now, but they were no longer hers, but a stranger’s. “Since you’ve revealed yourself to your mother, I’m sure you can now enter my—your family to destroy it from within on your own.”