Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
DARIA
“ S he never comes here anymore.”
Mamma’s sorrow touched my heart. “She must be busy, Mamma.” I consoled her reluctantly, even though my heart wasn’t in it.
“For two months? What’s she doing when her man isn’t home? I see him more than her.”
I sighed. Orietta had always been the peculiar one, but Papà’s death brought with it a difference in my sister that I had not seen coming. It was like she had shrugged off the facade she had kept on her for all these years and moved on. More than that, though, I worried my brute of a husband rejecting her had pushed her further away, even though the thought of his hands on her brought an odd kind of bile to my stomach. But irrational logic took over. It should have been her in this apartment, on this bed, burning under his magnetic eyes.
The question that had been on my mind crawled up my throat. “Is she happy?”
“ Beddra Matri! How will I know? If she isn’t, she won’t tell us either. I’ve gone so many times, and she won’t welcome me in. Keeps me at the door and doesn’t invite me in. Her own Mamma. Sometimes I think it’s a good thing your Papà isn’t here anymore.”
Is it? I still missed him. The way he called me Ria. His loud, robust laugh. But I still hated him, too. The memories he had left behind followed me around even in the depths of my dreams. All dirty and dark and tainted in every possible way.
“Maybe Ale can…”
“Your brother has enough things on his mind. Besides, I suspect he knows more than me. Probably why he tells me to drop it.”
I sat on the bed, cross-legged, and plucked random loose threads out of the sheets.
“Maybe it’s my fault,” I muttered.
“ Cu fu? What’s got into you?”
I was making a mess out of it. Sicilian women spend ages embroidering these sheets. I found another loose thread and yanked hard. It made me feel better as I took a deep breath and spelled out my worst fear. “If Lorenzo had married her instead of me—”
“ Schifiu ! Don’t talk nonsense. This has nothing to do with you.”
“But….” My gaze drifted up. The object of all my thoughts was framing the doorway with a dark look burning in his eyes and dark clothes draped on his body. A shift in the air spoke of a slow rage building up. I don’t know what had pissed him off, but when he strode towards me, I knew I had to end the call. Immediately.
“I’ve got to go, Mamma.” I rushed. “There’s someone at the door.”
“Don’t you have a doorman for—” hung awkwardly in the room as I hung up on her and tossed the phone.
He snatched it and shoved it into my hand. “Call your sister.”
I couldn’t follow.
“If you don’t, I will,” he growled as I clutched the phone to my chest.
“Orietta?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Ask her what really happened.”
Unease coated my skin. Dread, heavy and thick, seeped into my chest. “Why don’t you tell me first?”
“I will, but…” he jerked towards the phone, “ask her first.”
A few minutes ago, I’d been happy, I had thought. Now, fear was all that pulled at my heartstrings as my finger pressed on Orietta’s name.
“Set it on speaker.”
One ringtone and another echoed in the room.
“If it isn’t the princess of the family.” Orietta’s snarky tone crawled into our bedroom.
It was like she stood there in the bedroom between him and me.
“Etta—”
“I wish I could say I miss your silly names. Guess what? I don’t.”
I inhaled sharply. She had been distant, sometimes direct to a fault, with no filter. But being downright mean? Was she ever that?
“Did Mamma ask you to call? To find out how the peasant in the family is doing?”
I frowned. Since when were we poor? Since when was she poor?
“What are you talking about?”
She laughed, a gruff unamused laugh. “Oh, you don’t know? I guess I didn’t make the international news. Your fucking brother cut me off.”
“What?” I glared at Lorenzo. Did he have something to do with it? His eyes thinned. “Why would Ale do that?”
“Why would Ale do that?” she mimicked me in a high-pitched tone. Lorenzo growled in front of me. A pause on the other end. “Am I on speaker?”
I squirmed. “Yes.”
“Tell her why he cut you off,” Lorenzo snapped.
“I don’t know…” her snarky voice had gone soft.
“If you don’t tell your sister, I will, and I thought you’d want to plead your case first.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “I don’t see what the problem is, anyway. So what? I was already fucking Luigi. You found out. Can’t blame me if you wanted a virgin.”
“That’s not all, is it?”
“That’s all I know.”
“Yeah?” Lorenzo pinned me with his eyes. “She offered you to me. She said you’d be a better wife.”
My lips wobbled. Is that why he married me? Because I was a virgin and supposed to be a better wife?
Orietta’s answer buzzed in my ears. Something about how she should have married him anyway, so that she wouldn’t be stuck on a Soldati’s earnings.
But I couldn’t have cared less about her answer. I wished I could have said I didn’t expect this from her. But it would only make me as na?ve as she’d once accused me of being. Because somehow I had known she never liked me. Still, I asked the question, burning like acid in my throat. “Why?”
“Why? Why? You’re always the fucking princess of the family. You and Lia. You were Papà’s favorite.” I gasped at the venom in her tone. “He never even looked at me properly, but if you wanted something, you got it instantly. Then he fucked up and died, and Vitale is the fucking same. I wanted you to suffer. I wanted you to fall off the pink cloud you were living in.”
“He never gave me anything I wanted, Etta. If he had, he wouldn’t have…he wouldn’t have…” I couldn’t finish. She hated me. She really hated me. No one was Papà’s favorite. Papà loved no one but himself. Couldn’t she have seen that?
There was a wetness sliding on my cheeks, yet all I felt was a hollowness in my rib cage.
“You were his fucking princess,” she screamed down the phone.
“Guess what,” Lorenzo’s dark tone filled the room. “She’s still the fucking princess.”
A sob left my body. How could my own sister be filled with so much wrath towards me? For what? I hadn’t done her any harm. At least not knowingly. Yet again, Papà hurt me long after he was gone.
“Don’t go there,” he muttered. His vision swam before my tear-filled eyes. He must have hung up because the phone wasn’t in his hand.
“Why did you make me do that?” I accused him.
He ran his hand through his hair in agitation. “I don’t want anyone treating you badly, and that includes you. Why are you blaming yourself for her unhappiness? She did that all by herself. I wanted you to know.”
“Does Mamma know?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know, but your brother found out.”
He sank next to me on the bed and pulled me roughly into his arms. “You need to stop blaming yourself for other people’s faults, and that includes your papà’s.”
“Papà was a cheat,” I snapped, pulling myself away from him.
His lips thinned. “I know, Principessa . So was mine. Except he didn’t bring his women home like yours.”
“Didn’t your mamma—”
“I don’t want to talk about her.” His tone was too dark and too final to continue down that path.
His phone beeped, and regret framed his face as he picked it up. “ Sì? ” He pulled me into his arms, and this time, I remained there. My thumping heart calmed down, listening half-heartedly to the conversation. A rough Italian voice filtered through the phone. “I need you here, Lorenzo.”
“I can’t come today.”
I didn’t catch the response to that except my husband’s words. “No. My wife needs me. Nico will come in my place.”
Something unfamiliar pulled at my heartstrings. It was warm, and it flowed as thick as honey through all my veins.
“I hate him,” I muttered darkly, a few heartbeats after he clicked his phone shut.
“It’s okay to hate and love a person at the same time. You will have good memories with him, too.”
“I hate her.”
Silence is all that I heard.
A flicker of doubt ignited inside my hollow chest. “Is that why you didn’t marry her? Because she wasn’t a virgin?”
His harsh voice fell on the glass and echoed all over the room. "Makes you wonder why I married you then, because a vision is etched to my brain that you weren’t one either.”
I wanted to ask him, so why did you? But I didn’t. It was better to hold on to hope than ask and be disappointed.