Chapter 13 #2
What they’d shared through the night had been an illusion. It didn’t matter how tenderly he’d made love to her, Tommaso was still a monster and dreams always turned to dust. Especially dreams that should never have been allowed to breathe.
Sliding out of bed, she padded silently to the bathroom and locked the door for the first time since she’d lived under Tommaso’s roof. It would also be the last time.
With forced determination steeling her spine, Gabriella showered and brushed her teeth. When she opened the door, he was still sleeping. Crossing to the dressing room, she dressed quickly. If she was going to do this, she needed to do it now, before her resolve faltered.
When she slipped back into the bedroom, he was stretched out on his back with his arms hooked behind his head.
A sleepy smile on his lips, he raised an eyebrow.
“I heard you in the dressing room and thought you were putting something sexy on for me. Unless, my heart, you think jeans and an oversized sweater are sexy?”
Gabriella’s heart clenched tightly at the endearment. So did everything else inside her.
He continued to appraise her, his smile slowly melting away. “Is something wrong?”
Shaking her head, she fought to get air into her lungs. “It’s not something, it’s everything.”
Concern now writ on his face, he pulled the duvet off himself, swung his legs around, and, his feet planted on the floor, stretched an arm out to her. “Come here.”
Hugging her arms tightly around herself, she shook her head with more force.
Fully naked, her bronzed giant of a man got to his feet, as beautifully masculine as it was possible to be.
Gabriella closed her eyes for strength and lifted her chin before locking her stare onto his and reminding herself of exactly the monster he was. “I’m leaving you.”
It was such a rare occasion for Tommaso to be lost for words that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d stared at someone in silent disbelief at something they’d said.
In the silence that followed Gabriella’s three nonsensical words, he looked more closely at her.
All the colour their passion had brought to her face through the night had drained away.
Eyes that had shone with desire and emotion were as dim as the most overcast day.
He could feel his own colour drain away. “Is this some kind of joke? Because it isn’t a funny one.”
“Not a joke,” she said with quiet steadiness. “I’m leaving you.”
He clasped the back of his head, remembering how only hours ago Gabriella had done the same to pull him down for a kiss. “Have you taken something you shouldn’t?”
“Only a dose of reality.”
The bitter bite in her tone was as disorienting as her words. Tommaso had woken as fuzzy and contented as a satiated cat. He’d listened to Gabriella’s movements in the dressing room with a heart that had never felt so full and with the sense that his world had righted itself. “What does that mean?”
“That I can’t stay.”
A grim laugh broke free. “You know you can’t leave.”
Features tightening, her neck strained as she looked him dead in the eye. “The only way to stop me leaving is to kill me.”
“What the fuck?” His feet were moving toward her before his brain had fully comprehended her coldly delivered words. Grasping her shoulders, he peered right into her face. “Why would you say something like that, Gabba?”
She didn’t flinch from his hold or avert her cold stare. “It’s the only reason I’m here. My life for my life.”
He tightened his grip and brought his face even closer to hers.
“You’re here because we love each other.
We’ve been in love with each other for years.
” Tommaso knew it with bone-deep certainty.
Even when he’d hated the air she’d breathed, he’d been incapable of contemplating a life without Gabriella in it.
He loved her.
A dart of animation sprang into her eyes. A long beat later, she shook her head vehemently. “That’s not true.”
“Like hell it isn’t – last night didn’t happen in a vacuum.” He pressed his forehead to hers, willing her mind to open and let him back in. “You can’t tell me what we shared wasn’t love.” Their feelings had been there in every kiss and touch.
Her face suddenly twisting in misery, she reared her head and wriggled her shoulders against his hold. “Love isn’t built on the barrel of a gun or from threats. I could never love you.”
“Because I’m my father’s son?” he managed to challenge through a throat that felt as if something were clawing it.
“Because you’re you.” Where her strength came from, he would never know, but suddenly she wrenched herself from his hold and staggered back.
Holding her palm out in a clear warning for him to keep his distance, she tremulously said, “When I agreed to this marriage, it was to save my own skin, but now I see that death would be preferable.”
“Don’t say that,” he whispered tightly. “Never say that.” Nausea a bubbling cauldron in his guts, he snatched his robe from the floor and punched his arms into it, trying to think coherently through the hot mist of blood pounding in his head.
All those weeks ago, he’d sat in Gabriella’s apartment with a gun in his hand and a cobra unfurled in his chest. He could feel it there again now, priming itself to strike all over again. But not at Gabriella. The cobra’s venom was aimed at Tommaso’s heart.
Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Last night was just a ghost of what could have been if I wasn’t Gabriella Romano and you wasn’t Tommaso Esposito, can’t you see that?
If we didn’t have that horrendous history with our fathers and if you were a stranger to me, then I could believe in the magic of what we shared… ”
“So you did feel it too,” he cut in, a glimmer of hope flaring even as the cobra’s teeth positioned around the vital organ that beat only for her.
“Yes!” she cried. “But that only makes it worse. Last night was a betrayal of my parents and a betrayal of everything I hold dear. Even if I didn’t have the guilt of my parents, I could never love you.
You’re a monster, Masino. You try to rewrite history to pretend you saved my life, but you took it, not for my sake but as punishment and a power trip for your warped ego.
Last night wasn’t the start of some beautiful future – there is no future.
Not for us. I will never look at you and not see a monster, and I cannot build a life with a monster. I won’t.”
Tommaso gazed into the beautiful face firing pain and loathing at him, and felt the graze of the cobra’s teeth on his heart. “I’m not letting you go, Gabriella. I can’t. We made a deal.”
“A deal made with a gun aimed at my head.” Suddenly, she was breaching the distance between them, the bravado and defiance from those early days lighting her face as she drew close to him.
“As I said, the only way to stop me leaving is to kill me, so go ahead and do it.” Eyes glistening, lips trembling, she clasped his wrists and tugged his hands to her throat.
“You don’t even need your gun. You can squeeze the life out of me right now. I’m not strong enough to fight you.”
Her pulses beat with rapid strength beneath the warm, delicate skin his fingers rested on. The cauldron of nausea in his guts threatened to spill over. “I let you go, and what happens? You think my family will let you walk away after what you’ve done?”
She didn’t blink. “I’ll take my chances.”
“The only protection you have is the protection our marriage gives you. You walk away from it, you’re walking away from that protection.”
“Better to die a free woman than live as a prisoner and a slave.” Her shining eyes held his in challenge. “I’m taking my freedom. Do your worst.”
Stepping away from him, she turned and, without looking back, walked out of the bedroom.
The cobra clamped down hard and unleashed its venom.
Gabriella barely noticed her Vespa was still parked in its usual place. She’d hardly taken in a thing on the long walk from Tommaso’s villa to her apartment.
“Gabriella!”
She turned her head to find Ciro jogging across the courtyard to her. Bitterness at his betrayal punched hard.
“What do you want?” she asked coldly when he reached her.
He looked taken aback. “Just wanted to say hello. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Hostility laced her voice. “How much did he pay you to sell me out?”
“What?”
“You sold me out, Ciro. You knew there was a man in my apartment and you let me believe it was safe to go in there.”
“But it was Tommaso,” he said, as if that fact absolved him. “He told me it was a surprise.”
Gabriella looked hard at him. Took in the youthfulness of a face not yet mature enough to even contemplate shaving. She tried to imagine him defying Tommaso Esposito and came up blank. The adolescents of her world all hero-worshipped him. Those who didn’t were too smart to say it.
She’d been around Ciro’s age when her crush on Tommaso had really taken root, and just like that, her anger abated. Ciro was little more than a child, just as she’d been.
Taking a deep breath, she forced something she hoped looked like a smile on her face. “It was certainly that.”
The relief on his face made her heart ache.
About to apologise and follow it with a gentle lecture about not letting a woman enter her apartment when an uninvited man was in there, no matter who that man was, he knocked her off guard by saying, “Mum says you married him.”
Everything inside her compressed into a tight ball.
Slowly, she raised her left hand. The slender gold band on her finger gleamed under the sunlight. Gabriella’s mother had worn her father’s ring until her death. Gabriella had made sure she was buried still wearing it.
When she’d been Ciro’s age, Gabriella had dreamed of wearing Tommaso’s ring; dreamed she would wear it until her own death.
It shouldn’t feel like she was pulling her heart out of her body to tug it off her finger, and she swallowed before attempting another smile. “Catch.”
“What?”
She lobbed the ring at Ciro.
He caught it and snapped his fingers around it.
She attempted one last smile. “You should get good money for that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Always.”
Suddenly terrified she was going to cry, she hurried away, climbing the stairs to her floor and crossing the external walkway until she reached Ciro’s apartment. His mother opened it with a beaming smile.
After they’d exchanged a tight embrace and kisses, Gabriella said, “Do you still have my spare key?”
Monica’s face clouded with anxiety. “Yes, but you should know, men have been in your apartment. I tried to call you.”
“I lost my phone,” she lied, although she supposed it wasn’t a proper lie. She had no idea what Tommaso had done with it, so technically it was lost to her.
Everything was lost to her.
Shaking off the icy shiver that snaked her spine, she added, “And don’t worry about those men – Tommaso sent them.”
If Ciro knew she’d married him, that meant his mother definitely did, a thought confirmed when the older woman said, “I heard you married him.”
You’re my whole damn life, Gabriella…
Gabriella closed her eyes on the memory.
“I did, but it was a mistake. I’m moving back home now.
” She wouldn’t run. That was something she’d made up her mind about on her long walk.
If Siena or Mattia or Valeria decided to kill her, then they would kill her.
She could run to Antarctica, and still they would find her.
Her false passport, assuming it was still in her mattress, was worthless now that Tommaso’s men had found it.
Because of course they’d found it. They’d have found everything. Been through everything.
Better to die here, in the place she’d been raised and loved, than die in an alien land surrounded by strangers.
Monica’s eyes were troubled. “You’ve left him?”
“Monica… If you hear anything that worries you coming from my apartment, don’t check on me, okay?”
“Oh, Gabba, what have you done?”
Strangely, her smile at this took no effort to form. “I’ve followed my conscience.”