Chapter 14 #2
His throat tightened all over again. “Those clothes belong to you, Chicca.”
“My name is Francesca, and I’d rather wear rags than anything you’ve paid for. Return them to the store, give them to your next lover, give them to charity, put them in a bonfire, do whatever the hell you want with them. I don’t want them.”
Then, as if accentuating her point, she sat on her bed, pulled the book she’d had when he’d kidnapped her out of her large handbag, and began to read.
“It’s time to go.”
Francesca got up from her seat at the living room’s dining table and put her book in her bag.
Strangely, the words she’d struggled to read when she’d read it that first night had been nice and clear to her eyes that morning, and she’d been able to immerse herself in it fully.
She’d finished the epilogue only minutes ago, which felt very fitting for the circumstances.
Filled with calmness she didn’t even have to work at, she joined Gino in the elevator. She would have tuned him out as she’d done when reading, but when the door closed, he handed her phone to her with a quiet, “For you.”
She slipped it into her bag without a word or a glance at him.
“I’ve messaged my number to it. Save it. If you ever need money, call me.”
“Gino?”
“Yes, Chi…Francesca?”
She finally met his stare in the mirrored door they stood in front of. “Go fuck yourself.”
Francesca sat in the back of the same monstrous car she’d been abducted in, sandwiched between two of Gino’s men.
He was sitting up front, the dividing screen lowered so the four men could converse.
She ignored their conversation. She had no wish to annoy or make her final mark.
All she wanted was to go home. She was even looking forward to seeing Artu.
They stopped an hour into the journey, at a restaurant in a small town she’d never heard of.
If any of the other diners were aware that the back table crammed with twenty men and two women was acting as the hub of a deal built on kidnap and blackmail, Francesca imagined they thought it best to pretend it wasn’t happening.
She was the only member of the party not armed.
Even Siena had a gun visible through her chic clothing.
Maybe it was her naivety, but she felt no fear, not even from the guns discreetly pressed into her sides by two of Gino’s men. Discreetly, but visible to her cousins.
She’d thought the contracts had already been signed, but it was an assumption she’d got wrong.
One by one, her Esposito cousins signed the documents, and then Gino signed too.
Once the signed contracts had been gathered by both side’s minions, looks were exchanged and phones were tapped at.
Sharp nods were shared, and then before she knew it, the guns pressed against her skin vanished, and everyone was throwing money onto the table and rising from their chairs.
Gino stretched his arm across the table to Mattia.
Unsmiling, her cousin shook his enemy’s hand, and then Tommaso followed suit, as did Siena.
It was done.
Now penned in by her cousins, Francesca was led out of the restaurant. The car park was full, not just with cars but with men deployed by both sides to keep watch in case things took a wrong turn.
Led to a car as monstrous as the one she’d arrived in, a back door was opened. One of the identikit bruisers keeping watch swept an arm inviting her into it.
Only as she was about to bow her head to get in did she give in to the urge that had been steadily growing inside her, and turn her head.
Gino was on the other side of the car park. For the first time since they’d left his elevator, their eyes met.
There was a painful sensation in her chest, almost as if her heart was spasming.
His powerful shoulders rose.
Her spasming heart clenched.
He turned his face away, climbed into the back of a car, and vanished from her sight.
The debrief went on for what felt like forever.
Francesca’s parents were allowed to embrace her tightly to welcome her home, and then it was down to business.
Although she was spoken to with kid gloves, her cousins wanted to know everything that had gone on over the last week and pick out any information she might have gleaned in her time with their new business partner and sworn enemy.
She didn’t know why, but through it all, Francesca kept close to Artu. Possibly because he was the only member of her family she didn’t know for a fact had been conspiring behind her back to marry her off.
All the others had, she thought numbly as she met the eyes of her parents, her cousins and her aunt Valeria. All of them. Even beautiful Siena, who would herself be stuck in a marriage arranged by her now-dead father if the groom hadn’t got cold feet and jilted her at the altar.
“You slept in his bedroom?” Mattia clarified, gingerly moving back, again, to the sleeping arrangements. She knew why.
“Yes. On a single bed he’d had put in for me. He didn’t trust me not to try to escape, so kept me with him at all times.”
“At all times?”
“I was allowed to use the bathroom alone. All sharp objects and anything I could use as a weapon had been removed from it.” She should have slept in there, she thought. The bath was big enough for her to snuggle down in.
“And you slept in that single bed?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
Fed up of all the pussy-footing around, wanting nothing more than for her family to just leave her alone, Francesca folded her arms over her chest. “If you’re trying to bring yourself to ask if he raped me, then the answer is no.
He didn’t. I slept in that bed alone.” It was Gino’s bed she’d shared.
Her cousins exchanged significant glances, and she felt a stab of anger that those glances were less about her physical and emotional welfare than what they perceived her lack of being sexually assaulted to mean for them.
“However, just because he didn’t rape me doesn’t mean you can marry me off to that Elio Ranieri.” She had the brief satisfaction of watching her all-powerful cousins stiffen. “I know you all know my kidnapper told me, and I...”
Mattia raised his hand to silence her. “This is something for us to discuss with you another day. You’ve been through a traumatic ordeal, and now you need to rest and recover.”
“I won’t marry him,” she stated.
Siena leaned over the table and covered her hand. “No one will make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Good. Because I would sooner kill myself than marry someone against my wishes.”
Her over-dramatic but flatly delivered declaration resulted in more significant glances being exchanged.
Good. She might not have the energy to fight her corner at that moment in time, but she wanted them to know – all of them – that she wasn’t going to be the pushover they all expected her to be.
The pushover she’d spent her whole life being.
Withdrawing her hand from her cousin’s, Francesca got to her feet. “I thank you all for everything you’ve done in obtaining my release, but if you will excuse me, I want to go to bed.”
No one tried to stop her. They could see the exhaustion on her face as well as she could every time she caught a glimpse of her face on a reflective surface.
At the door, she paused and looked at Mattia. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“What plans do you have for him?”
There was no need to explain who she was talking about.
He held her stare, weighing up what he could share with her. Only a week ago, Francesca had been the naivest member of their family, the cousin who lived in dream clouds longing for a future that was her own for the making, but doing nothing to make it happen other than ask.
For all that she’d always believed she’d fought for every scrap of freedom, she’d never once forced an issue, simply relied on the hope her constant requests would wear her parents down.
Look where that had got her. Twenty-two years old and with only two weeks of employment history.
It was possible Mattia caught something in her stare he’d never seen in her before, because his tone changed, going from the voice of someone talking to a small, fragile child to the voice of someone conversing with an adult.
“We need to bide our time, but the day will come soon when we exact our vengeance for what that man did to you.”
She refused to show a hint of emotion. With a sharp nod of her head, she left the room.
It was three in the morning. Gino’s celebration party was winding down. It had been an impromptu party, a sheer fuck it moment.
His apartment was trashed. It was a small price to pay for the gamble of his life paying off so handsomely. Now all he had to decide was which of the beauties sprawled over his apartment he would take to his bedroom and use to screw away the last remnants of Francesca from his memories.
Francesca’s bedside clock read 03.31. She was back in the bedroom she’d spent her whole life in, but still no closer to sleep.
She closed her eyes and tried to close her mind. The voices in it were growing louder. A cacophony of noise coming close to deafening her.
Screams. That’s what the voices were.
Her screams. Trapped in her head.
Who was he with? Here, in this moment, who was sharing his bed with him?
She squeezed her eyes tighter, fighting with everything she had to close off the screams and turn off her thoughts.
Was it that blonde woman? Or one of the women who’d given him their numbers? Or any of the others who’d flocked around him like bees to honey?
The screams were piercing her brain, pressing on it, begging for release, and in a swell of pain that wrenched through her heart and her guts, it ripped out of her. With a deep wail that came right from her soul, Francesca curled into a ball, buried her face in her pillow and set the screams free.
Crying harder than she’d known was possible, she sobbed until her chest was bruised from her gasps for breath and her pillow was soaked with her tears. And still they didn’t stop.
That early morning, while the rest of the world slept, it felt like the tears would never stop.