34. Matteo
Matteo
I’m dead asleep on the couch, the only place I’ve been sleeping since the fight with Azra, on the verge of a coma from too much alcohol and drugs, when a freezing, violent blast of water nearly tears my shirt off my chest.
The torrent is too powerful to come from a cup or a bucket. It’s a skin-shredding blast that plasters me to the couch and scrubs my skin of every scent it’s ever captured.
I jolt upright with a strangled curse as another deluge knocks the air from my lungs. It’s so strong that it peels my shirt off my body this time.
When the water switches off, I blink through the droplets clinging to my lashes and finally make out the source. Giovanni stands at the entrance of the man cave, grasping a fire hydrant hose.
A fucking fire hydrant hose.
I can barely hear anything since my ears are waterlogged, but one voice stands out
“Told you he’d be alone. He didn’t even look at another woman all night, and he had the eye of every prime pick in the club.”
Nico’s confession is quickly chased by the fire hydrant turning back on. The torrent of water threatens to shred my skin from my bones and rattles through my core.
“What the—” I shield my face as the water punches into me like a thousand needles. “Stop! You should be happy I’m not sticking my dick in your staff, you fucking asshat.”
“True,” Nico shouts over the roar. “But keep going. He owes me a shit ton more staff than a new waitress. I lost ten bartenders last year alone because they thought they could ‘tame’ him.” He air-quotes his second-last word.
Giovanni grins like a psychopath as he tightens his grip on the hose. The pressure increases, and my body becomes one with the couch.
“Are you insane?” I yell, but the words drown in the torrent. “I’m your fucking brother. You’re not meant to waterboard me.”
I won’t lie. I stiffen imagining them punishing me a little longer. I’ve not been myself the past few days, so it’s nice to get back to a snippet of normalcy.
Finally, either the hydrant runs out of water or Giovanni grows a conscience. The blast of water stops infiltrating every hole I own, and the nozzle disperses its excess droplets on the floor.
While wringing out my soaking-wet clothes, I glare at my brothers, silently warning of the retaliation they’ll face for the provocation.
Nico is unfazed.
Actually, they all are.
They smile like smug pricks, mocking me as if my bite isn’t as stern as my bark.
I’ll show them.
Nico crosses his arms over his chest before he stills my immediate request for vengeance with a handful of stern words. “Serves you right for dumping her on the freeway halfway home. She quit this morning, stating she couldn’t work under these conditions. Whatever the fuck that means.”
It takes me a second—a long, waterlogged second—to understand what he’s talking about. My brain is so sludge I’m reasonably sure I am drowning on dry land.
He’s referencing the blonde I left the nightclub with last night, the woman I didn’t want to touch or even look at.
Her hair color alone pissed me off. It wasn’t the shade I wanted to imagine while getting my dick sucked. I grabbed her wrist solely because she was the closest woman in the vicinity. She moved wrong, talked wrong, and breathed wrong.
Before her hands could get close to my belt, I hated my own revenge plot so much that I couldn’t stomach pretending it was brilliant. Which meant I either told her to get out halfway to the compound… or ended her whining “I thought we were going to fuck” voice a much more violent way.
I rub my face, groaning. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”
“Barely,” Nico snaps. “Because although I’m not as psychotic as you, I don’t take the threat of being sued for sexual harassment lightly.” He drags a hand over his cropped beard. “Anyway, this isn’t about me and the mess you’re forcing me to clean up. Again. It’s about you.”
“What about me?”
Giovanni shuts off the hydrant, and the sudden silence is deafening. Water drips off me in sheets, pooling on the marble floor. I’m soaked through, freezing and furious, but also curious.
My family only conducts pop-up meetings in emergencies. The new rules Giovanni and Dante brought in won’t take kindly to me leaving a woman defenseless in the middle of nowhere, but punishment by a water hydrant seems a little overkill.
“The point,” Giovanni says, tossing the hose aside, “is that you’re an hour from losing her forever if you don’t do something.”
My stomach twists, but I refuse to follow the script. What one-man show does?
Giovanni hits me with a look I can’t ignore, and it steamrolls the truth into me.
I don’t want this to be a solo act anymore, and the woman I want to turn this into a duo with is marrying someone else today.
Too snowed under to make sense of my confusion alone, I mutter, “What’s the use? She doesn’t want me. She’s not mine.”
Those last three words hurt. They fucking kill. Saying Azra isn’t mine is the equivalent of ripping out my own ribs.
Elio winces when Nico says, “That might be my fault.”
He hesitates, which is rare enough to make me look up. Guilt hardens his features, and something akin to fear clouds his eyes.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“It wasn’t just him.” Elio steps forward, standing shoulder to shoulder with the man he’s refusing to send to hell alone. He isn’t as tall as his brothers, and nowhere near as vicious, but he can hold his own, so his petrified expression is new.
My blood runs cold. “Tell me.”
“She overheard us talking about you,” Elio admits.
As I stand to my feet, I clench my hands into fists. “What did she hear?”
Nico rubs the back of his neck, forcing my eyes back to him. “We were discussing how it seemed like you were preparing to send her back to Antonio sooner rather than later.”
A growl rips out of me involuntarily, and Giovanni and Dante move just as fast. They place themselves between Nico, Elio, and me, aware that we usually solve matters like this with our fists.
Elio leaps into a piss-poor defense. “The self-defense gym is across the road from where Antonio gets his girly drink every day. What were we meant to expect?”
“That I was teaching her how to hold me back if I couldn’t take no for an answer,” I snap out, my words shouted.
The room stills. The only person who moves is Dante. He angles his head and scrunches his brow.
“You taught her self-defense… to hold you back.”
There’s no use acting coy now. I’ve shown my hand, so I lift my chin. “Yeah.”
I have no clue what the fuck he sees on my face, but it’ll take more than a handful of blinks to see clearly again when he slams his fist into my gut, folding me in two. Then, smirking, he exits the man cave like I’m not in the fight of my life.
“What the fu—”
“He told you he’d step back and watch you fall without a bit of advice on how to get back up undusted if you didn’t shut the fuck up about him being in love with Lucia,” Giovanni says. “He’s a man of his word.”
I cough, my balls gargling in my throat. “He thinks I’m in love? I’m not in love. I’m… I…”
I’ve got nothing.
Is that why I’m going insane, and why I can’t look at another woman? Is that why everything hurts? Am I in love with Azra?
My chest tightens as rage flares. I’m not angry at her for knocking me on my ass with only a sideways glance. I’m pissed that Nico and Elio might have stolen any chance I had of making her mine.
Giovanni throws his hand in my face, stalling my charge for the second time this morning. “You can beat the shit out of them later. You don’t have time to fuck around. If you love her, you need to act now.”
“Especially with how fast Antonio’s first marriage ended,” Elio mutters, jaw tight.
We all stare at him, confused as fuck.
“Antonio has been married before?”
Elio blinks before shifting his eyes to me, his interrogator. “You didn’t know? Today’s event isn’t the first wedding Vivienne has organized for Antonio.”
“Vivienne?” I echo, shrugging.
“The wedding planner,” Giovanni supplies, his mind ticking over so fast I hear each cog turning. “I don’t know of a single Cosa Nostra wedding she hasn’t planned in the last seven years.”
Elio nods, agreeing with him. “Vivy planned his first marriage four years ago.”
“Vivy?” Nico asks, brow arched.
Ignoring his drilling gaze, Elio opens a folder from his briefcase and pulls out a photograph.
It’s a staged wedding portrait of a smiling blonde woman and Antonio.
She is happy and radiant, nothing compared to the blonde in the next photo.
In this photo, she’s wearing a white nightgown.
The nightgown is scuffed, dirty, and torn, and tears streak her face. She looks wholly broken.
“That’s the night his wife committed suicide,” Elio says quietly. “One week after they wed.”
“A week?” I whisper, horrified.
Elio nods, and that’s all it takes for me to bolt.
I don’t think, breathe, or look back.
Azra is marrying a monster, and I’m done pretending I am fine with that.