Chapter Thirty One
Victoria
The fire is snapping.
That is what I focus on.
The small, sharp cracks from the hearth. The shifting wood. The occasional flare of orange against the dark grate.
It gives me somewhere to put my eyes that is not the door… and who’s waiting on the other side.
My hands are resting in my lap, fingers curled so tightly into the blanket that the knuckles ache.
Dr. Santoro left me here with instructions I only half heard. Rest. Fluids. No more stress tonight, which is laughable enough that I almost laughed in his face.
He gave me a glass of water, asked if I wanted something light to eat, told me I was safe, and then looked at me with the particular gentleness of a man who knows something irreversible has already happened, and that I'm going to have to find a way to live with the trauma of it.
I am safe.
I am sitting on a couch in Mario Conti’s house with a blanket over my legs, a fire in front of me, and armed people somewhere beyond the walls.
Safe is apparently a complicated word.
I hear the door open behind me.
I know it is Mario before he says anything.
His presence fills the room the way it always does, except now I feel it differently. Before, it made my pulse trip because I wanted him so much I could hardly breathe. Now, it scrapes against every raw place in me.
I keep looking at the fire.
His voice comes from behind me.
“Victoria.”
My throat tightens.
Just my name. That is all.
He is not angry, or demanding, or questioning me.
Somehow, that makes it worse.
I turn my head enough to see him.
He is standing just inside the room, the door closed behind him, one hand still near the handle. His jacket is gone. His shirtsleeves are rolled to his forearms. His tie is missing, collar open, hair slightly disordered in a way I have never seen on him outside a bedroom.
His face is calm.
But I recognize it as that controlled calm that means everything underneath it is potentially lethal.
I swallow. “What did the doctor tell you?”
“He told me you are unharmed.”
“Anything else?” I can't make my voice rise higher than a whisper.
His eyes move over me, taking in my face, my hands clutching the blanket, briefly my stomach, though it’s hidden.
My breath backs up into my lungs.
In the SUV, I had said jumbles of words, but nothing coherent. He wouldn’t know. Would he?
Then his eyes meet mine again.
“He told me to talk to you.”
A laugh almost comes out of me.
I look back at the fire. “That’s annoyingly ethical of him.”
“Yes.”
I hear him move farther into the room with easy steps. He comes around the couch and lowers himself into the chair angled near me, not too close, not too far.
The space between us feels deliberate.
I hate that I am grateful for it.
I hate that I want him to cross it and hold me.
For a few seconds, neither of us speaks.
The fire snaps again.
My body jerks.
Mario’s jaw tightens, but his voice remains even.
“Do you want something besides water? Maybe tea?”
“No.”
“Food?”
“No.”
“You need to eat.”
“I know.”
“Have you eaten today?”
I close my eyes.
There is that same practical care. Impossible to separate from the man who had people following me without my knowledge, and also saved my life because of it.
“No,” I say. I couldn’t eat a bite before my meeting; it was making me so sick.
“Victoria.”
“Do not start with me about food right now. Please.”
I am met with silence.
I open my eyes and look at him.
He is watching me with a focus so complete it would have made me defensive on any other day.
Today, I am too tired.
Too scared.
Too ashamed.
“I know I need to eat,” I say. “I know I need to drink water. I know I need to rest. I know all of the things I am supposed to be doing. I am a very educated person, currently on a roll with terrible decision-making.”
His mouth tightens faintly. “Yes.”
I stare at him. “Was that necessary?”
“No.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“Marginally.”
For some reason, that almost breaks me.
A shaky laugh leaves me, and I look away before he can see the insanity behind it.
Too late. He sees everything.
“Who was she?” he asks quietly.
“Her name was Cindy Sullivan,” I answer, just as quietly, while staring into the fire. “She’s a journalist.”
I pull the blanket closer around myself.
“Or I thought she was anyway. I contacted her through her official email, and she looked like the photo. I don’t know. Maybe it was her. Maybe the photo was fake. Maybe I’m just stupid.”
“You are not stupid.”
My laugh is thin and self-deprecating. “I'm certainly not as smart as I thought I was.”
“You were frightened.”
“That is not a legitimate defense.”
“It is an explanation.”
“No, it isn’t.” My voice cracks, and I hate it. “It explains why I panicked. It does not explain why I went alone to meet a stranger in a park. It does not explain why I thought that was better than just talking to you.”
And there it is. No going back now.
His eyes do not leave my face.
I feel sick again.
“Talking to me about what?” he says, so patiently I want to scream.
I press my hand against the blanket, over my thigh, forcing it to stay there instead of moving to my stomach.
But his gaze drops anyway.
He saw it in the car.
He knows enough to know there is something. And he's not an idiot. He knows what.
But he isn't saying anything or demanding answers. He’s being reasonable, which makes it harder.
“Victoria,” he says. “Just say it.”
My eyes sting.
“I found articles,” I say.
When I don't continue, he prompts me. “Articles about what?”
“About you. About…” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Your wife.”
“Anna.”
His eyes close briefly, and when they open again, the calm is still there, but grief is occupying the space as well.
It looks fresh and very, very real.
My throat burns.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“For what?”
“For reading them. For thinking that maybe…” I can’t say it. “For not talking to you about it. For all of it.”
He leans forward, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped loosely between them.
“For thinking what, Victoria?”
I look at him.
I cannot say it. Not to his face.
Not after he and his people saved me from… whatever that was.
Not after the way he held me in the car, like I was something precious he had nearly lost.
Not while carrying his baby.
His gaze does not soften.
I have to. I owe him that much.
Don’t be such a coward, Murray.
“I found an article that implied that…” I take in a sharp breath. “That your wife might have died under mysterious circumstances.”
“That I might have killed her,” he says plainly.
I wince. Hard. It’s painful and almost grotesque.
I press my lips together and wait for him to stand. To curse. To look at me as if I have become something beneath contempt.
He does none of those things. He sits back slowly.
I wipe at my cheek before the tear can fall all the way.
“I didn’t believe it,” I say, and then the words start pouring out of me in a rush, like a flood.
“I swear to God, I didn’t. It was just the language in the article.
Or rather, what it wasn’t saying. Well, it was in Italian.
I had to translate it, but still. It was the way everything was private and sealed and carefully worded.
And I know that can mean anything. I know wealthy families can keep things private without it being sinister.
I know that. I completely dismissed it.”
“Obviously not,” he says, and the calmness in his voice might just kill me.
“I did. I shut my laptop, I put it away, and I went to bed,” I insist. Just get it all out right now.
Can't possibly get any worse than this, can it?
“The next day, it was Sunday. I opened my computer to just get a little work done for the coming week. And there was that article still sitting there.”
I drop back against the couch in defeat. It all seems so stupid now—how I could even think something like that.
“I started looking for more,” I say, ashamed. “I looked deeper, and I found more.”
His eyes change then, for the first time. They sharpen in interest. “Oh? What did you find?”
“Just some more articles. Mostly in Italian. The same careful wording and the same implication. No one said anything outright, obviously, because I have to assume that libel exists in Italy, too. But it was there. Repeated enough that I couldn’t make myself stop seeing it.”
“Speculation repeated is still speculation.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” he asks, and there is the first edge of anger in him. “Because you went alone to meet a stranger based on articles you admit were speculation.”
“I know what I did.”
“No,” he says. “I am beginning to think you did not.”
The words cut, and I deserve them.
But he deserves the rest of it.
“There was some local article,” I say. “From when you first came here. It wasn’t just old Italian gossip this time. There was a profile about you and the Hawthorne acquisition.”
His brow draws slightly. “What profile?”
“The one by Cindy Sullivan.”
Every visible part of him stills. It’s terrifying.
“The woman you supposedly met in the park,” he says.
My stomach drops.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s why I wanted to meet with her. She wrote a biography. Or a profile. Whatever you want to call it. About you, when you first acquired Hawthorne.”
“No.”
That answer deflates me.
“Wha—” I furrow my brows. “What do you mean ‘no’? Her name was on the byline, and I looked her up, found her LinkedIn—”
“No,” he says again. “There is no profile written by Cindy Sullivan.”
“Yes, there is,” I insist. “I read it, Mario.”
“I do not know which article you think you read, but no woman named Cindy Sullivan wrote a profile about me.”
“She did.”
“Victoria.” His voice lowers. “Listen to me carefully. My people keep track of every word written about me, my sons, my brothers, the family, and our businesses. Every legitimate article. Every gossip item. Every blog post with six readers and no grasp of punctuation. Anything that attaches the Conti name to print is logged.”
My fingers go cold.