Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
LORENZO
U nease crawled through my skin like frost on an icy lake. I watched my wife, all curled up and tight like a kitten, in my bed. She’d fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion right away.
A soft sob left her breath, and it vibrated through my veins. My fists clenched as tightly as the pressure around my chest. Oxygen snuck out of the room, and heat protruded from my throat. I couldn’t breathe in here. Guilt wasn’t knocking on the door. It was standing right in front of me, had my hands shackled, and a gun to my face.
The next sob that left her had me jump out of the chair I was sitting on like it was a fucking burning hot red plate.
The third soft sob hit me hard on my back as I strode out of the room and stumbled into my office.
Before I knew it, I was pacing the floor with a long distance call pasted to my ears.
“Martello,” Di Matteo’s growl came over the line. His tone, as always, told me he was mad at me. I supposed it had something to do with the fact that I’d stolen his sister from him.
“Need some answers.”
A hitch and an immediate, “Is Daria—”
“She’s fine or will be soon—”
“What the fuck!”
Jesus! His thunder was going to puncture my ear. I held the phone away from me before bringing it back to his, “What the hell happened, Martello?”
I hadn’t planned on telling him anything. But the image of my wife, on her knees, bawling her eyes out, was lasered onto the back of my eyeballs. So I told him of actions and reactions I didn’t fully comprehend, but somehow he did because there wasn’t a single surprised gasp that snagged through the international line. All he did was sigh, like he’d known this would happen, like it all made sense to him. I didn’t care to remain in the dark. Especially when it came to my wife. Frustration trudged up my spine.
“You planning to tell me what this is all about?”
Another annoying huff. “I’d hoped she would tell you herself—”
“She didn’t. If you want me to help your sister, get to the fucking point.”
Heavy silence followed before Di Matteo's venom leaked through the phone.
“Carlo fucked up all my sisters.”
Apprehension hit me like a cold bucket of ice water. It didn’t slip my mind that he didn’t call him Papà.
“Not a worthy Papà?”
Di Matteo's harsh laugh bounced off the phone and echoed lightly in the room.
“Not in my eyes. I don’t know if he was ever faithful to Mamma, but as long as I can remember, he wasn’t. Unfortunately, that’s what my sisters have grown up with. Nothing unusual. That’s the Cosa Nostra as we know it. Except in the last few years, he took it further. It was like a sickness had overtaken him, and he just couldn’t fucking stop. He stuck his dick into any whore he could get his hands on. Any maid. Any girl who stepped into our house.”
“My old man wasn’t any different—”
“Did he fuck his women in front of his wife?” Di Matteo’s harsh voice cut me off. “You don’t have sisters, so don’t tell me what it’s like. What it does to your sister when she walks into the kitchen to find him humping the new maid.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah, he wasn’t around to protect her, either. That’s what Daria found. He fucked all women who entered our house. The bastard kept his girls and wife at home while he just…” His voice cracked like glass on a cold winter night. “This is my biggest regret, and I’ll carry it with me to my grave. Mamma just would not leave him. But I didn’t try enough to get my sisters out. He wouldn’t let me, but I should have tried more. I didn’t.”
The sound of harsh disappointment ticked in the silence of the room before my whiskey decanter shattered against the wall and fell to the floor. I didn’t even know that I had done that, yet warm whiskey trickled on the floor, and cut glass glittered like jewels under the sunlight streaming through my windows. A deep desire to scrape up the broken glass and jut it into something, someone, preferably fucking Carlo’s dead body, burned in my veins.
“Should have fucking told me.” My voice scraped like sandpaper. Guilt scratched at me at how I had treated her.
He misunderstood me, of course.
“Don’t take it out on her. I’ll come and pick—”
“Back the fuck off! She’s mine. She stays with me. I’ll protect her because clearly you couldn’t, but you should have fucking told me,” I snapped.
Three heartbeats of a heavy silence. “You’re right. I didn’t, and I should have.” Di Matteo’s defeated voice filled the room like greasy oil slipping underneath the door, but it did nothing to me.
It wasn’t my game to kick a defeated man. But the chill riding my spine, the frustration fueling me like gasoline in my stomach, had to be thrown at something, and, well, he was the only target I had. But just because I didn’t trust myself to not cross the line and light that damn fire and start a fucking war over something he obviously had no control over, I smashed the phone against the wall and watched it mix with whiskey and glass.
There was a constriction on my rib cage. A darkness to my gaze. My pulse throbbed all over, and my organs fought to restart.
The fight first, think later, Martello attitude wouldn’t do shit now. I needed to reverse. Change every damn thing I knew. The shit on the floor needed cleaning up. But first, I had to fire a maid I had only hired a few hours ago. Because there was no fucking way I was having my wife wake up to see her again. After that, I was going to fill my lungs with nicotine so I could calm the fuck down before she woke up because the way I was feeling, I was ready to burn down the whole damn world, and that included myself, because fuck if I wasn’t made of the same material of all the jackasses who fucked around with perfect wives sitting at home asking perhaps for just one thing. For the faithfulness of their spouse.
I thumped a lump sum in the maid’s hand and kicked her out in a matter of minutes. When I came back to my office, my phone was vibrating and sliding around in whiskey and glass. What a mess. Literally and figuratively. I dipped and read Di Matteo’s messages coming in.
Give her time.
She just needs time to trust you.
Sometimes she has nightmares.
She misses him.
Jesus. He pissed me off. His fucking messages filled me with blind rage. I’d planned to sit in our room till she woke up. Now I wasn’t in a state to do that, because venom like I’d never known before was slithering inside my body, looking for a fucking spark to light the world up.
So I crunched the glass and strode to my chair. On a normal day, the stains it was going to leave would have annoyed me enough to get a cleaning crew in from the lobby. But I just couldn’t get myself to care. Instead, I sat in my chair and clogged my lungs with enough nicotine for a week. Each puff I sent out to the room was supposed to calm me down. All it did was create dark clouds in my office and make my furniture reek of addiction and the air hang tight with tension.
That boy between her legs in that cheap hotel.
I didn’t want you to own me, ran in a loop over and over again like an old LP dying on me.
Is that what you think? That all men cheat?
Her answer when she’d looked me in the eye with deep-set conviction. “All made men do.”
“Did you fuck her?”
When she’d asked that in the plane, I’d thought it was because she was young and na?ve and didn’t know the world of the made men. Now I knew she knew every sordid detail of our world.
“Let’s see how long it takes for you to fuck the next one then.”
Fuck! No wonder she’d been triggered by the damn maid in the kitchen. A trigger that bridged an old memory.
The chair I sat on sliced me with guilt that spread all through me. This is what I had planned to do. Find a Sicilian doll to play house while I fucked around at will.
Her eerie scream still echoed in the walls of my ribcage. The image of her wailing, with her eyes squeezed shut, etched itself into my brain cells like a fucking laser beam.
For a millisecond, the idea filtered into my mind that she was too much to handle. I should have given her back like a fucking machine with a malfunction. Di Matteo would have taken her back, and I wouldn’t have toothpaste lining my sink, clothes piled on the floor, and especially, especially, no stricken looks of despair. I could have gone back to fucking black-haired stewardesses, and I wouldn’t have to account for anyone, least of all a brown-haired, blue-eyed, plum-lipped siren, just waiting for me to step out of line. Because that was what she’d do. She’d watch my every step, go through every phone call, sniff all my shirts till she found evidence, and honestly, was I even going to be faithful to her?
The Cosa Nostra etched infidelity far deeper than our own mottos. This was what we did. What we had always done from generations past.
The only faithful man that I knew of was Capizzi, but I considered him pussy whipped just because he chose to go to his wife every fucking night. Would Di Matteo stay faithful? I imagined if he went through what he did, he might just not marry at all. But he had to. As the Don. So was he going to be faithful?
Why did she fucking expect me to be? Except she didn’t. And that pissed me off above all else. The thought had never even crossed my mind to be anything but unfaithful, and I didn’t even know if I could be anything but that. Did I have the will to? Or would it crawl in like the need to smoke when agitation arose? Did she know me better than I did?
It irked me beyond what I cared to admit that she was waiting for it rather than believing in me, in us, in our marriage.
But then again, her stricken look smacked me in my face, and I wanted so badly to prove her wrong. To prove to her day by day that I was worth the fuck. That we were worth it.
“Hi.”
I shifted my gaze to the door. The room had gotten dark without warning, and a soft, hesitant voice called out from the doorway of the dimly lit hallway.
My chest filled with relief as she stepped hesitantly into my office.
She wrung her hands before her and filled the room with her broken words.
“I’m sorry.”
Fuck! It hurt me more that she’d apologize for something she had no control over. Because of the actions of a jackass.
She took three steps into the room, and I found myself in front of her. My hands hitched her up on me like before, and I carried her over the mess littering the floor back to my chair.
I told myself it was because I didn’t want her to hurt her dainty feet on the glass. But it was only partly the reason. I kind of liked how she crawled up me, like a koala bear.
I rocked back on the chair with her straddling me, and the intimacy of the position glazed over me like the finest whiskey that had touched my tongue. She was still in her shorts and t-shirt and clearly had no idea how tempting she looked as she sat on me, my dick almost in her pussy, with her hair in tangles, and her face makeup free. I rolled my head to block the nasty thoughts riling me. I wanted to grab her and wipe that sad tilt off her lips with my own. Stuff my dick inside her and make her ride me and hear her moan. There was some sanity somewhere in my depths because the memories of today and her red, tear-stained eyes held back the monster in me. By an inch and with a thin, threaded line.
She rested her head on my chest like I was her fucking comfort to her daddy issues. I was not even sure why that idea warmed me up like fucking mercury.
My hand found its way to her hair and trailed it softly. A sigh left my lips as the soft tendrils wrapped around my thick fingers, the texture of silk catching on my calloused skin.
“I’ve fired the maid,” I said gruffly.
She stiffened in my arms while the awkwardness of forgotten memories crept into the room.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered so softly that I almost missed it.
Wish I had because it pissed me off. She was a fucking princess. She had no business apologizing.
“Fucking stop apologizing.”
My tone was harsher than I intended to. But really, I couldn’t be all things to her. I was no gentleman, and kindness was a far-fetched trait for me. I was trying for the faithful part, and that was all that she would get from me.
“We’ll have to hire someone else since apparently you can’t cook.”
Jesus! That came out all accusing. Probably because I was pissed off. This wasn’t what I had wanted. I wanted a quiet doll with home-cooked meals. She was a messed up firecracker who apparently didn’t know how to boil a damn egg. I was beginning to wonder why I was not returning her to her brother.
“Can you hire a man?”
I gritted my teeth. Should have returned her. “Not going to happen.”
“I don’t want a woman.” Her words rumbled on my chest, and suddenly, I remembered what it had felt like to have her against my naked chest.
I cocked her chin up to look at me. “Then we’re going to have a problem, Principessa . We need to eat. Why don’t you know how to cook, anyway? Didn’t your mamma teach you?”
She jerked her head to look away. “Didn’t want to learn.”
There was an entire story behind that line and the hunched shoulders. One I wanted to know, but not today. She’d gone through enough already.
So I let her be and wrapped her in my arms, and we sat like that till the sun rose far east.