Chapter 16 – Siena
SIENA
L unch with Maria plays over in my head like a film I want to watch on repeat.
The way she reached across the table and squeezed my hand, the way her laugh filled the kitchen when she told a story about Giovanni as a boy, warm, unguarded, so unlike the tight, measured world I’d first met him in.
I left her house feeling light, like I’d been given a key to something I’d been afraid to want.
For the first time in a long time, family didn’t feel like a hollow word.
So when my thumb hovers over Giovanni’s name on my phone, there isn’t the usual hesitation.
I want to tell him how real it all felt, to hear the laugh that always seems to fall out of him when he’s trying not to be sentimental.
But his phone goes straight to voicemail, and the texts I sent sit in that limbo of “delivered” without reply.
A small worry coils in my chest. Maybe he’s busy, I tell myself. Maybe he’s still working.
The worry turns to something else, something sharper, after a few more minutes. I need to see him. I need the ordinary comfort of his presence to quiet the little, insistent voice at the back of my head that wouldn’t let me be.
The casino doors swallow me with a rush of sound and light and the warm thump of music. I falter for a second, entirely out of place in my day dress among sequins and suits. Anthony finds me before I can steady myself. He’s leaning against the wall with that crooked grin like he’s playing at charm.
“Can I help you?” he asks, but there’s heat in his gaze that makes me want to look away. I haven’t seen him since the night he walked in on me naked with just Giovanni’s shirt held against me. My cheeks flame with a memory I’d rather forget.
“Can you please point me in the direction of Giovanni?” I force my voice to sound casual.
The grin falters. He pulls out his phone, thumbs something, glances up with a look that’s half amusement, half apology. “He’s in the private rooms. Hold there, I’ll get him.”
When Giovanni appears, the world narrows. His mouth is a thin line, his eyes darker than they are in the daylight. He studies me sharp and measuring, the same way he studies a problem. I expect relief, but instead there’s something like apprehension in him.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Looking for you.” My answer is simple and true.
He takes my hand and steers me down a corridor to a room that shuts out the casino’s clatter with a thick door, dim light, and leather chairs. It’s private in the way his life is private. It’s designed to keep things in and keep people out. When the door clicks shut, his posture snaps tense.
“You should have stayed home,” he says, voice raw. “I told you I’d be back.”
“So what?” The words come out sharper than I mean. “So this is what it’s like, Giovanni? You open your door to me, then slam me out of the rooms behind it. You become the man you promised you weren’t. Everything is on your terms. I’m your girl until your life gets ugly.”
He scrubs a hand over his face like he’s trying to push something down. For a long beat he doesn’t answer, and the silence between us bristles. Then he’s on me, surprisingly gentle, fingers threading through my hair, holding my face so I have to look at him.
“Fuck, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he says, the apology raw. “I want you here. I want you everywhere I am. I was just talking with my father and he pushes me to the breaking point time and time again.”
“Then talk to me,” I demand, crossing my arms and meeting his gaze. “What happened with him? What are you hiding?”
It hangs in the air like a dare. I need to know. I need him to be honest before I move my life into his world. I need to know he means what he said about building this with me, truth and all.
He lets out a long breath and takes my hand again, his fingers hot around mine. “You never met him, but Michael worked for me. He did a lot. He watched the floor, collected debts, the usual. I found out he stole from me. I had to handle it.”
The words land with a physical thud. “You killed him?” The question leaves me before I can stop it.
He doesn’t flinch. He swallows, and there’s a fragile, terrible calm in his answer. “Remember the blood on my shirt?” His voice is low. “I handled it.”
The world tilts. For a second, I see nothing but the bloody smear, and my stomach drops.
“Fuck, Giovanni,” I whisper, stepping back, the room swimming.
Images I never wanted to see thread through my mind.
The counting rooms, the cash, the cold faces of people who take and never get taken.
The neat domestic life I’m moving toward fractures into a hundred dangerous pieces.
“You want into my world?” he says, the question more a statement, painful and blunt.
“This is what it is. Dark. Dangerous. Dirty.” His hands close on my shoulders, urgent.
“But if you want to be kept out of it, like my mom is, then we will keep you out. I never should have said I’d let you in like this.
I love you too much to drag you into that danger. ”
Everything inside me trembles. Part of me recoils, horrified by the violence, by the absolute finality of what he’s admitted.
Part of me understands, on that jagged, trained-by-life level he seems to operate from, why he did it.
And worst of all, part of me remembers how safe his arms feel when he holds me, how he promised protection, how his family welcomed me with open, warm hands.
“Is that what you needed me to hear to prove you’re serious?” I ask, voice cracked. “That you can kill so nothing touches me?”
“No,” he says immediately, raw and desperate. “Not like that. I needed you to know the truth. But I will protect you, in the worst ways, if I have to. But I don’t want you living with the blood in your hands. If you want to be with me, I’m asking you to choose me with eyes open.”
I stare at him, searching for the man who brought me lasagna and lilies, who blushed in his mother’s kitchen, who laughed in the dark theater with me. I find those things behind his grief and his violence, tangled and real and impossible.
“You told me we would build this first,” I whisper. “You promised me trust.”
“I did,” he answers. He reaches for me, pleading, as though my coming toward him will patch the thing that just cracked. “I love you, Siena. I want to keep you safe and part of that is not knowing everything. I don’t want you to believe I’m something dark.”
I close my eyes and the image of last night with his kisses, his hands, the warmth, collides with the new picture of him in a room where a man is gone because of his order. I feel the foundation shift beneath my feet.
“If I move in,” I say slowly, testing the words on my tongue, “I have to know there will be no secrets I find later. I have to know you’ll tell me everything that matters, no matter how ugly.
If it involves me or threatens me, I need to know.
And if you’re in a dark place, you tell me and we talk about it.
No matter what it is. No matter how dangerous it is. ”
He nods like he’s been waiting for that question, like he had rehearsed the answer a hundred ways before. “You have my word. No secrets about what matters. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. I swear it.”
I want to believe him so badly my throat hurts. I want the warmth of his family, the hush of late-night pizza, the lazy mornings in sweats. I want to trust that the man who killed a man will choose me with honesty.
“Then prove it,” I say, voice small but steady. “Prove it every day.”
He closes the distance and kisses me slowly like a vow. I fold into him because part of me is tired of being fierce, and because the other part still, stubbornly, thinks we can build something that holds.
When we finally step out of that private room, the casino’s noise rushes to meet us.
Carlo is standing on the opposite side of the room with his arms crossed, staring at us.
I feel the weight of what I now know settled heavily in my chest, like another thing I carry for both of us.
We walk back into the light together, hand in hand, but the world behind my eyes has changed.
It’s brighter in some ways, darker in others, and the question of whether love is enough has never felt more like the only one that matters.