Chapter Nineteen Larissa #2
“What?” I snap. “What? I know better than to continue to pet a dog that bites me. So go on, mutt. Thanks for the practice, I’ll find a real man to take my frustration out on.
” I shoo him away, and his eyes flare in anger.
“Go be another capo. Make sure you’re a typical mafia man, have your wife, and don’t forget your side piece.
Have kids you’ll neglect. Bring them into this life and mistreat them, hurt them.
Sacrifice them and destroy their lives before they begin. ”
“Not all men are your father,” he defends.
“You won’t love her!”
“I have no fucking choice,” he repeats, the chill in his eyes flickering as he watches another of my tears fall.
“Who is she?”
“It doesn’t matter. She isn’t you. If I’m capable of love, it would have been you. You have a life to live—”
“If you’re marrying her, agreed to marry her, I don’t care what you have to say.” I deny him. “Nothing you say will ever matter to me again. Live. Die. Marry her or don’t, I don’t fucking care. I was done with you when you agreed to his order.”
Reading the truth in my eyes, he ushers me out of the door and toward his car. Feeling stabbed, I glance around the parking lot. “Motels,” I laugh as I round the trunk and open my door. “I’m not even worth the cost of a fucking hotel room. That should have told me enough. I was a fool.”
“No more than I,” he says, choppy blue waves rolling over the top of the sedan and into me.
None of that logical or rational reasoning matters as I stand on the opposite side of the sedan and get lost in his eyes, in our history.
The ache inside paralyzing me, stinging me with every memory.
Who will I be without the boy I grew up with, the shadow who’s been watching over me for over half my life?
“I hate you for being the one good thing I had that went bad,” I croak. “I have no reason to come back now.”
“I hope you don’t.” The words pain us both, and he mercifully lets me see that in his expression.
“But I will be back, you know that. If I become donna, then what? Will you answer to me? Will your fucking wife? End this,” I beg, my chest roaring with the pain. “Please, just end him!”
“I can’t, and you know I can’t!” he booms as my heart shatters, along with the last of my hope.
“And what about your brother?” I remind him of his reason to fight.
“And your brother,” he counters forcefully, which has me clamping my mouth shut, my argument silenced by his loyalty to me.
To Iggy, whom he’s grown close to. Our safety seeming to be the only promise made between us that he’s willing to keep.
Expression pained, he closes his eyes for long seconds as I continue to stare into a future without him, my mother’s words forever ringing in my ears.
It’s the hemorrhage in my chest that refuses to let me forsake the images of the man standing feet away.
It was love, is love, or something close.
It’s as I gaze over at him that I recognize what my mother never did or could.
She settled for the first man who claimed to love her.
Who showed her any affection. Maybe I would have been settling had I remained with him.
I never once wanted to be with a man inside the life.
He knows that, has always known that. Even if we were somehow allowed to be together, being with him would have tethered me to a lifestyle I have no plans of maintaining.
My own plans of freeing myself superseding any love story I’ve dreamt up.
Maybe for him, I would have condemned myself to a life I despise.
But as I stare at him, I realize he’s resigned to his fate.
In the end, I would have been left fighting alone.
It’s all we’ve done in recent months—fight and fuck.
Maybe we’ve been ending for longer than I allowed myself to see. His inability to see beyond the limitations Ciro set in his mind, and my refusal to accept them, keeping us at odds.
“I never once looked at the stars with you.”
He slowly opens his eyes as my words carry on the heated breeze over the car.
“The man for me will make choices. Hard choices, and I will be his. I will be his sole purpose. I will be his decision, not because of who my father is, but to spite my fucking father. You were forced to be his dog, but now it’s your choice to be. You just did me a favor.”
Opening the car, I get inside, my heart breaking all over the leather as I sink into the seat. I look over to see him outside of his window, his back to it, as if he’s summoning the strength to face me.
As my ache sets in, an image comes to mind.
A day I’ve replayed a hundred times or more in the last month.
Hope sparking as the inkling I’ve been chasing since that day washes through me.
A glimmer of something I had long since lost sight of, since all of our efforts to bring down my father seem to have been in vain in the last year.
But as he gets into the car and starts it, it’s the childish ache, the foolish heart of a girl in love, that has me pleading with him one last time.
“Please don’t give up,” I croak. “I know we can finish this.”
“There’s no other way.” He condemns us both with his words as I allow one last tear to slip down my cheek.
Long seconds tick by as the air conditioner blows between us, the only noise in the cabin. I continue to study his profile as he stills in his seat. It’s when he finally puts the car into gear that I turn to him, eyes and head clearing.
“I’m not too blinded by hurt to see, so don’t deny me the truth. You love me and still do, as I love you, but the reason I’m not mad is because you’re not the man for me and never could be. You’re right. You’re already my past.”
He visibly flinches as I grip his hand and run the pad of my finger along the evidence of the pain we share one last time. “I’m not saying this to hurt you. It’s just the truth. Your decided fucking truth, and so I’ll live it. We both will. It’s over.”
“ángel—” he whispers, but I jerk my chin in refusal, denying any more useless words.
Whatever he does feel for me, it’s not enough and won’t change anything.
He’s too pragmatic and can’t see any future other than the one he’s been cursed with.
I refuse that fate. I’ll rage against it. I’ll die before I endure it.
“I’m not your angel, and you aren’t mine.
Angels don’t exist for us.” I pull away and stare out of the windshield, focusing on the image of freedom I got a glimpse of not long ago.
Setting my sights on that—on the possibility of a way out—I lift my chin.
“My future starts in Italy.” I swallow my new reality down and make peace with it. “Take me to the airport.”
Staring at the flicker of the lamp I clicked on when the sun set, I remember the guttural cry that erupted from him just after I slapped the car door closed at the airport.
I denied him the last word when I leapt from the car after he turned to me.
Maybe to tell me he’d changed his mind, maybe to offer some more useless words, but it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was the beacon of hope I’d already started to follow and the possible path now ingrained in my mind.
Of another way to live. A different life—of true freedom.
But it was the roar that escaped that car door that crippled me from walking away from him unscathed. The anger and hurt attached to it that latched onto me. The sound of his pain, of our break, that had me crying the entire way to Italy.
Voices interrupt my memory as I realize that Tyler’s speaking …
and someone is replying just outside our tent.
Hearing the hushed exchange, I pop my head out, only to have my breath stolen.
Opposite Tyler, a little below average height, stands an impressively built, dark-headed man.
As they converse, I notice their inked forearms match.
Their exchange comes to an immediate halt as I emerge, and both men turn to peer at me.
In the next second, I’m struck by just how stunning the stranger is as I get my first good look at him.
As I study him, I run through my memory bank of the Ravens I know of.
Coming up blank, I take in the face of the stranger who is now openly peering back at me, seeming just as intrigued by me.
A Raven wearing a smile so mischievous and …
seductive that I have no choice but to return it.
“Ah, bella,” beautiful, “we finally meet.”
“And you are?”