Chapter Eleven
ORAZIO
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He stormed from the elevator, ready to kill someone.
Trevor, preferably, since he was the fucker she’d kept comparing him to. However, at the moment, anyone would do. With anger coursing through his body, Orazio was trying to put as much distance between himself and her as possible.
He couldn’t think when he was around her. He could barely fucking breathe. That woman was intoxicating, even when she was angry. He needed to clear his head, and he couldn’t do that while staring into her eyes and seeing them brim with tears, knowing he was the reason they were there.
However, his mind wouldn’t let him clear it of Monique Rose. It kept returning to her. Thoughts of his Rosa were holding his brain captive. His mind was replaying his confrontation with Rosa over and over again.
For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why the hell she felt like he’d ruined her life. It was Trevor who’d done that. Orazio was trying to put it back together for her. He was trying to make it better than how Trevor had left it.
Trevor planned to have her killed. Because of Orazio, she was alive. But did she appreciate that? Fuck no! All she could think about was the means he’d used to protect her, not the fact that he’d protected her.
There had been no, thank you . No, I understand that you did what you thought was best . None of that. Just, fuck you, I hope you die, and I want to go home . Instead of being grateful to him, her crazy ass had tried to kill him with his own pen.
He’d faced off with hardened criminals before. The worst of the worst. Yet, none had ever stared at him the way she’d stared at him at that moment. Her eyes had been wild. He’d seen despair and hatred toward him within the depths of her brown gaze.
And that hurt. That hurt him more than it should, more than he was willing to admit. Orazio didn’t do pain, but because of her, his chest ached. He didn’t do weak, but because of her, he felt weak as fuck.
As he walked, he stared down at his watch. It wasn’t even noon yet, and he already needed a drink. In the service hall, Orazio ran into his brother, Caspari Cattaneo. Damn it. Of all people, why did it have to be Cas?
Orazio had taken the elevator to this floor to get away from people. Yet, he’d run straight into the person who could irritate him more than his Rosa just had. This morning just wasn’t his morning. The first words out of Cas’s mouth further proved that.
“I was just coming to check on you. I heard you’ve acquired a rare jewel,” Cas joked, grinning from ear to ear. “Congratulations.”
Word traveled fast in this casino.
“Did you hear me, Raz? I said congratulations.”
“Fuck off.” Orazio stormed past Cas, heading to the back bar that was normally only open to special clients on special days.
Today, he would be the special client. He needed a drink. Or two. Fuck that. He needed a bottle.
“You should be in a good mood, Raz,” Cas called out, following him. “You finally have the woman you’ve been waiting for, the woman you’ve been stalking for months.”
Having her was one thing. Having her willingly was something entirely different. He thought he’d be happy either way. He was wrong.
“Stop walking so fast,” Cas said from behind him.
“Why are you on the service floor?” Raz asked.
“I’ve been down here for two hours, looking at security videos.”
Raz stopped. Over his shoulder, he asked, “Did something happen last night?”
Did something happen while I was with Rosa, having the best night of my life? Only to awaken to a nightmare.
“We had a few uninvited guests at the casino,” his brother replied. “Security took care of it.”
“Uninvited guests? Don’t tell me they were sent by the Silver Nugget Casino owners?”
“They were. Their boss is rebuilding his casino after all of that storm damage. They were in here taking photos of our casino. In the grand scheme of things, they and their boss are the least of our worries.”
True! With a nod, Raz continued on.
Cas continued following him. “Why are you the same grumpy bastard you always are? I thought one night with your new treasure would make you happy.”
“Mind your business, Cas.”
One night with her had made him happy. It was the morning hours that had him in a fucked-up mood.
“I guess she wasn’t worth the money, huh?” Cas asked.
Raz spun around to face his brother. “Stop.”
“What?” Cas asked, looking confused.
“Stop,” Raz forced through clenched teeth. “And go away before we have a problem.”
Warning given, Raz turned and continued down the hall.
Continuing to follow him, Cas shouted, “Wait! Are you and I seriously going to have a problem because of some bitc...”
Raz whirled around, eyes blazing, anger flaring. “If you finish that sentence, we will indeed have a fucking problem.”
Cas glared at him. “Because of some bitch !”
Raz slammed his fist into his brother’s face. Blood spurted from Cas’s nose.
“You son of a bitch!” Cas yelled, touching the hem of his shirt to his nose.
Raz grinned cruelly. “You’re the son of the same bitch.”
With a roar, Cas rushed him. Raz didn’t try to stop him. His brother rammed his shoulder into Raz’s stomach, knocking the air from him. Cas’s arms went around Raz’s waist. Though Raz knew what was coming next, he didn’t fight back. Cas lifted him and slammed him to the ground, falling with him.
Raz stared up at his brother, who was now straddling him with his fist raised. Cas brought his fist down swiftly. Raz didn’t flinch or close his eyes. He waited for the blow, welcoming the pain that would follow it.
Maybe it would knock some sense into him and help him see where the fuck he’d gone wrong with Monique. Unfortunately, even this wasn’t working out for him. Cas’s fist stopped inches from his nose.
“You’re not going to block it?” Cas asked, blood from his nose dripping onto Raz’s shirt.
Raz remained silent. Cas cocked his head to the side.
“Fight back,” his brother yelled.
Raz didn’t.
“Or don’t.” Cas shrugged, then cocked back and slammed his fist into Raz’s nose.
Pain sliced through Raz’s face, and he tasted blood.
“Fuck!” Orazio muttered under his breath, hand going to his nose.
He pulled his hand back to stare at it. No blood.
“I didn’t hit you as hard as I could or as hard as you hit me,” Cas admitted, rising to his feet. “What’s the point since it seems like you want your ass kicked?”
Yes. He did. He wanted to feel pain because he’d made her feel pain. This was what he deserved. His penance.
“Get up,” Cas urged.
Raz wasn’t ready to get up. He just wanted to lie there. To think. Alone.
“Go away, Cas.”
His brother folded his arms over his chest. “This woman really has you losing your shit.”
Losing his shit? He’d already lost his shit. He was trying to figure out how to get his shit back.
“I’ve never seen you like this, brother,” Cas observed.
Raz had never felt like this, whatever this was. He looked to Cas. The worried look in his brother’s eyes helped him snap out of whatever destructive haze he was in. Raz pushed himself to his feet and straightened his clothes on his frame. He touched his fingers to his nose again to ensure it wasn’t bleeding.
It wasn’t. But it hurt like hell, and he was pretty sure he’d end up with a dark circle around his eye because of it. If he did, maybe Monique would feel sorry for him. Maybe if he was hurt, she’d want to stay and take care of him.
“Shit!” Raz yelled, fist connecting with the wall. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”
The thoughts in his head couldn’t be his own. He didn’t think shit like that. He wasn’t that type of man. He wasn’t like... Trevor . No. He wasn’t acting like Trevor.
He was behaving the way his father had, right before Raz’s mother left him. That truth helped him clear his head a little. He refused to be anything like his dad. No woman would ever rule him to the point that he almost ruined himself. Raz looked to his brother.
“Have a drink with me,” Raz ordered.
“What the fuck is this?” Cas asked, confused. “This is some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shit, Raz. You just punched me. Now, you want to drink with me.”
“You act like we haven’t fought in the past.”
“Not over some bit...”
“Cas! I won’t warn you again.”
“See.” Cas pointed at him. “That’s what I’m talking about. When have you ever defended a woman like this?”
“This woman is different.” Special. Mine.
“Different?” Cas laughed. “We don’t have time for different.”
“I’m making time,” Raz replied.
“Raz, this woman was supposed to be an expensive fuck. A stress reliever. But your ass is here acting like you’ve fallen in love with her or some shit.”
Love? Raz ran his hand through his hair again.
“Fuck no!” Cas yelled, eyes widening in shock. “Brother, don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love with this bitc... woman, after one fuck!”
“I’m not in love,” Raz defended himself. “I’m just a bit... obsessed at the moment.”
“According to Bryce, that’s how love starts.”
“Bryce? When did you talk to Bryce?”
“Our cousin is at the same bar you’re headed to. Like you, he’s having woman troubles. You two should sit down and drink while writing in your fucking diaries together, lame asses.”
“Shut the fuck up, Cas.”
Raz turned and resumed heading to the bar. He still needed that drink. And now he had a drinking buddy. Misery loved company . Cas couldn’t understand Raz’s frustration. Maybe his cousin, Bryceson Cattaneo, could.
“I’m coming with you,” Cas insisted. “I may have to babysit you two teenage girls.”
“Do you ever shut up?” Raz snarled.
“I don’t.”
At least he was honest. When they shoved the double doors to the bar open, they found Bryce with a bottle to his lips. He looked up when he heard them.
“Cousins! Let me tell you something,” Bryce slurred. “Women are the fucking devil. Beautiful devils sent here to destroy us.”
Finally, there was someone who felt his pain. Bryce was already tipsy. How long had he been drinking? Cas snatched the bottle of whiskey from their cousin. Bryce reached for it, slurring something unintelligible. Shaking his head, Orazio sat down on the stool next to his cousin as Cas put a glass in front of Bryce and half-filled it with whiskey.
“That isn’t enough,” Bryce protested.
“Don’t drink yet,” Cas ordered when Bryce reached for the beverage.
Bryce glared at Cas. “If you knew what was going on in my life, you’d give me that entire bottle.”
Still holding the bottle, Cas walked around to the other side of the bar, grabbed another glass, then half-filled it and placed it in front of Raz.
Playing bartender, Cas told them, “I don’t have time to deal with both of you separately, so we’ll do this together. You can only take a sip after you tell me one thing that’s bothering you and after I give you my advice. Got it?”
Raz chuckled. “What kind of advice can you give us?”
“Us?” Bryce asked, facing Orazio. “Are you having woman troubles too, Raz?”
Was he having woman troubles? Not really. He was having trouble. And a woman was involved. She was at the center of his troubles, but she... Shit . Yeah, he was having woman troubles.
“He’s ashamed to admit it,” Cas said before Raz could admit it. “But, yeah, his head is gone over a woman, too. I hope this shit isn’t contagious.”
Bryce slapped Orazio on the back. “Join the club, cousin. And don’t be ashamed. Even the best of us go through this.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything I do,” Raz said. “And I’m not really having trouble. I’m... facing an obstacle.”
Yeah. That was a good way to put it.
“Is that obstacle a woman?” Bryce asked.
Yes . “No,” Orazio answered. Maybe he was a tad bit ashamed.
“Bullshit,” Cas yelled. “It’s just the three of us here. You can be honest.”
He wasn’t ready to be honest. Not with them. Not even with himself. Raz reached for his glass.
Cas pulled it away from him. “You can’t drink until you answer the question truthfully.”
“I’m not lying. Not really. My Rosa isn’t the obstacle. I...”
“Your Rosa?” Cas asked before bursting out laughing.
His brother was really starting to get on his nerves.
“Man, you really are in love, aren’t you?” Cas asked.
Bryce nodded. “That sounds like love.”
“It’s not love,” Orazio yelled. “Love isn’t real. At least, not for men like us.”
His words made everyone go silent. For a while, none of them said anything. Bryce was the one to break the silence.
“My mom hates my dad. My dad loves his mistress,” Bryce said. “My grandmother hated my grandfather until the day he died. My grandfather loved his mistress until the day he died. But neither my grandfather nor my father was loved. They were respected, feared, and admired but never loved by the person they loved. So, it’s not like the men in our family can’t love. We can. We love hard,” Bryce slurred. “We love passionately.” Bryce stared down into his drink. “We just can’t find anyone to love us back.”
The truth of Bryceson’s words hit Orazio like a ton of bricks. Before he could fully process those words, Bryce continued talking.
“And that’s just my grandfather on my mom’s side,” Bryce said. “On my dad’s side, the Cattaneo side, there’s even more fucked-upness going on.”
Cas nodded. “We are a fucked up family, aren’t we?”
“Take you guys’ dad, for instance,” Bryce continued.
Shit . Raz didn’t want to talk about his dad. He didn’t even want to think about the man. But he didn’t stop Bryceson from saying what he had to say.
“Your dad loved his wife. That’s a good thing, right? Wrong! The problem was, she didn’t love him back. She never would’ve married him if he hadn’t blackmailed her into doing so.”
Orazio sighed. He tended to ignore the part where his father blackmailed his mother into the relationship. Instead, he always chose to dwell on the fact that his mother had never been much of a wife to his father or a mother to Raz and his brothers.
Yet, she’d moved on from them and started a new family that was thriving, a family she actually smiled at. It wasn’t that she was incapable of love. It was them, the Cattaneos. They were the ones who were unlovable.
So much so that his father had to blackmail his mother to get her attention. That was a truth Orazio learned later in life after his hatred toward his mother had already festered. It was hard to see someone in a new light after you’d gone years only seeing what you thought was darkness in them.
Even now, he ignored his father’s wrongs and focused solely on his mother’s. Maybe it was because he understood her disdain for his father but not her hatred for him and his brothers. They hadn’t done anything wrong.
Sure, they resembled their dad. And sure, they’d grown up to be more like him than her. But she was to blame for the latter. Their father had raised them. She hadn’t. How the hell had she expected them to turn out?
“It’s not the women who are the problem,” Bryce slurred. “It’s us fucking Cattaneos. What the fuck is wrong with us?”
Something in Raz shifted. Reality finally set in. A disturbing reality that forced him to see he wasn’t much different from his dad at all. He could see why Monique compared him to her scum of an ex.
Trevor was fucked up. And so was he. They were two different types of fucked up. But fucked up was fucked up, no matter how you looked at it. However, he wasn’t the only one who was fucked up. Monique was fucked up too.
Even if he hadn’t seen her in his club that first night, even if he hadn’t paid Trevor to divorce her, he and she still would’ve ended up in a situation similar to the one they were in now. Last night, he hadn’t gone to her.
She’d come to him. He hadn’t seduced her. Technically, she’d seduced him. And instead of just using him for sex as one would in a typical one-night stand, she’d made him feel things. She’d let her guard down around him.
She’d been vulnerable in front of him, triggering a protective instinct in him that had been reserved for family only. If she hadn’t wanted to be a part of his family, she shouldn’t have made him feel that way.
The smiles she’d given him, the gentle caresses and shy glances, that wasn’t some shit you did with a stranger. You did that with someone you felt a connection with. Or, at least, that was what he’d thought those types of things were reserved for.
But Monique had done that with him , meaning she didn’t see him as just some one-night stand. He was more than that in her eyes. But, this morning, she’d awakened and pretty much said thanks for the dick and breakfast, see ya.
She’d planned to waltz out of his life, leaving him with all these fucking feelings. Hell no. It didn’t work like that. Yeah, he needed to be responsible for his actions and the fucked up shit he’d done, but so did she.
She’d toyed with his emotions, used him as a cheap thrill, a rebound fuck. And he couldn’t let that slide. Orazio reached for his drink again. Cas pulled it away.
“I already admitted to having woman troubles,” Raz said, needing a drink badly. “I also admit that, like all the other Cattaneo men, I’m the reason for my troubles.” Part of the reason.
With a nod, Cas pushed his drink over to him. Orazio downed his drink, then tapped the bar counter, wanting more.
Cas refilled his glass. “The first step is admitting you’re the problem,” his brother told him. “The second step is figuring out how to stop being the problem. How can you stop being the problem?”
Raz sipped from his drink as he pondered his brother’s question.
“I know a way you can stop being the problem,” Cas told him.
“How?”
“Leave her alone. Problem solved. Let her go home. Don’t bother her again. Cease all contact with her. That would end her problems. Right?”
“Wrong?” Raz whispered.
“How is that wrong?” Cas asked.
“Because that would only cause more problems.”
“For who?”
For me. Leaving her alone, not being able to see her smile, hear her voice, or feel her touch, that would cause problems for Raz.
Bryce placed his hand on Raz’s shoulder. “Cousin, have you fallen in love with the wrong woman?”
Raz swallowed. Before he could answer, Cas’s phone rang. Saved by the bell. Cas answered the call. His gaze jerked to Raz. Shit . What was wrong now? Had someone in their family been hurt? Had one of their businesses been raided again? Was their dad stalking their mother and her family again?
Cas burst out laughing before saying, “I’ll take care of it.” His brother ended the call and shoved the phone into his back pocket.
“What’s wrong?” Raz asked.
“Security got a call from one of the window washers. The guy reported that someone was sticking papers to the window from inside one of the family suites that read, Help Me, I’ve Been Kidnapped By The Owner. Call The Police. ”
Cas burst out laughing. Orazio gritted his teeth. He should’ve known she wouldn’t sit in the room and think about her actions and how they hurt him. Instead, she was trying to find ways to leave him.
“I’ll be back,” Raz said, standing up.
“Wait!” Bryce stopped him. “You kidnapped your woman?”
Raz braced himself for the lecture his cousin was about to give him.
“Shit. Why didn’t I think of that?” Bryce said.
Cas began trying to convince Bryce that kidnapping the woman you loved was wrong. According to Cas, you should only kidnap women who loved you back. Orazio grabbed his drink and downed the rest of it. Yeah, the men in their family were definitely fucked up.
Maybe they were cursed to fall in love with women who would drive them crazy. He lowered his empty glass to the counter, then froze. Oh, shit! Did he just admit to himself that he loved his Rosa? Fuck!