Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
DARIA
S oft music trailed along the marble-clad walls of the hallway. It trickled underneath the door and crawled on the beige carpeted floor of our bedroom.
I dabbed at the final touches of my makeup and pretended everything was fine. The rage ebbing off my husband from all the way across the living room couldn’t touch me in here. But when I traced my lips in crimson, my hands trembled. So what? I had told him I was going out with Emily. Pushing it too far? Definitely. But he was becoming an addiction in my veins. There was an urgent need pulsing inside me for distance. I wanted to take a step back, ten preferably, and see him differently. He wouldn’t be that appealing with a void between us. Besides, there was a tiny part in me, maybe the Cosa Nostra part that the girls in our family had been born with, that made me wonder how far. How far could I push him before he melted like iron set on heat and molded himself into the perfect Cosa Nostra man? Unfaithful to the bone.
I was wrong about one thing. I had thought I was pure, and he was the darkness in our marriage. Turned out, the malicious side of Papà burned inside me too. I had an itch, and it was to see him fall. Sooner rather than later. It would save me from heartache. I was choosing myself before him. Because I could feel my heart trembling as he tugged with his sweet words and lustful eyes. But one thing was set in stone. I would never be Mamma. If I had to push him away to save myself, I would do it. I would die before I let a man degrade me like the gum beneath his shoes.
Minchia! My hand shook, and my eyeliner colored outside the line. It had been such a great idea to say yes to Emily’s invitation to go clubbing. Because I liked her. I think. Vaguely. It had more to do with the fact that I didn’t know anyone else here. She had been nice to me the last time I saw her. Although there was a coldness to her, one she would show when she thought I wasn’t looking. I bit my lip and took a step back. She reminded me of someone, but it slipped my mind who it was.
I had obviously lost my mind to go ahead with it and lost it even further to walk up to him and tell him my plans boldly when I shook inside like sand falling on a sifter.
I had thought he would be mad. But the fury that had climbed his body I had never seen before, and I was born among made men. My eyes slid closed as the image of his body shaking with fury floated in front of my eyes. I thought he would hit me. My feet had pulled back, and my eyes had shut in anticipation. But he had balled his fists and stormed away. Since he didn’t exactly say no, I just assumed it was a yes and went ahead and got dolled up because it was ages since I had done that, and God, did I love getting dressed up. Is it stupid? Is it na?ve? Like I said, the Cosa Nostra part itched to push back. Who was I kidding? This illusion was never going to last, anyway.
I whirled in front of the mirror. A black silk top and a leather miniskirt draped on me like a second skin. Topped off with knee-high boots, and I was good to go. It was a pity, though, that the ghost of his fury hung on me like bats to a damn tree. My instinct told me to stay. But it was the same one that pulled me closer to him. So I ignored it and walked on my tiptoes, hoping to hit the front door before he blocked me.
LORENZO
Nico glared at me like I had blown my own fucking head off. Well, it definitely felt like it. Rage fueled my movements as I paced the length of my living room. My hot Martello blood crawled up my body and rattled every cell within it. I would die trying to win my wife over, or I would kill again in her name. I preferred the latter.
“You can’t be serious?”
I was incapable of answering because animosity held every nerve in my body prisoner.
“Fuck! You are allowing it!” he muttered darkly, his wrath burning the skin on my face. I knew why Stefano was mad. He wanted to protect his fucking cognata . But Nico, he didn’t give a fuck about women. He just didn’t want her to be out without me.
“She going alone?”
I skidded to a stop. My gaze was on the floor because it didn’t help to see his fucking face. Besides, no one knew more than me how much worse this was than going alone. I forced words out through my blood-fueled throat. “With Emily.”
“Fuck’s sake, Enzo, you’re messed up. You’re allowing your ex to go out with your wife?”
A gasp fell on the room right after his words. My eyes shot past Nico to spot my wife standing behind him. Fuck! A rush of hot awareness hit me right before our eyes met. Rage, pure and unbidden, sparked off her frozen stance and hit me like an ice-cold fist in my chest. It was like she had forgotten to move, and I had forgotten to breathe. One heartbeat and two. I could have shot Nico for his foolish timing and put a knife through my fucking past in the meantime.
I knew it a second before she did. She was going to run. My foot hit the ground the second she flipped around to move. She was fast even in those fuck me boots she was wearing, but I caught her right beside the front door and slammed her between the wall and me.
Our breaths were heavy, mixed in a hot mess as she struggled to get out of my arms.
“Let go of me, you brute.”
A sharp-edged kick landed on my inner thigh. Fuck! I smothered her with my body and gripped her chin in one hand. “It was over long before I met you, Principessa .” She clawed at my face with her fucking long nails. I grabbed her arms and pinned them on top of her head. “She’s a fucking ex. I am not fucking her now,” I growled as frustration rolled off my words. “I told you I’m not cheating. Believe me, for fuck’s sake.”
“Enzo!”
Nico’s voice slicing through the air stilled me. Fuck. I was shaking her like a rag doll. I stopped instantly. I took a shaky breath as her chest pumped harshly in and out. Guilt thawed behind my rib cage. “ Mi dispiace, Principessa. ”
“Yeah? Show me,” she spat out.
“What?” I knew what was coming because I was the one who had started it.
Her eyes glittered. “Show me you are sorry.”
My lips thinned. I already knew I wasn’t going to like it. “How?”
She shoved me back with her palms on my chest. I edged back, my palms held up on either side of me. “Let me go and party. After all, if you aren’t fucking her now, you have nothing to worry about. Right?”
I swallowed tightly. There were so many things to worry about when it came to her. Emily was one-tenth of it. But she took my silence as approval.
“ Perfetto . Don’t wait up for me.” She pushed off the wall and sauntered past me in her fucking tight mini-skirt, but I whipped her around to my chest.
I shouldn’t have let her go. But it was suicidal to hold her against her will. “If you get into trouble, you call me, capisti ?”
She patted my chest. “Don’t worry, big boy, I can look after myself.”
She pushed past me and out the door.
“Fuck!” I slammed my fist on it. My fucking front door was edged with my fist now, but it didn’t touch me. She wanted fucking freedom. Insanity was the only way. I would let her fly. I just hoped to God she would come back to her nest.
DARIA
Defiance had made me push past him and out the door. That and vexation. They had taken me for a ride. Emily the least of all because I didn’t actually care for her. But Stefano had known, and now his reaction made sense. It wasn’t that he had fucked her, it was because his brother, my husband, had. And my fucking husband had taken me for a ride. He could have told me. At any one time, he could have told me. If it was just an ex, he could have opened his damn mouth, and instead of sucking me dry, he could have told me. But he didn’t, and that told me so much more.
New York traffic flitted past as Orso drove, talking softly into his mouthpiece. I would have bet my damn ass it was my husband.
I leaned forward and asked in Sicilian, “Is that my husband?”
His shoulders stiffened, and I had my answer. Of course it was.
“ Gli faccio un culo così. ”
I slipped back into my seat, a quiet pleasure running up my body that I had told my husband to go screw himself. I wasn’t going to hide in a dark room like Mamma. I was going out clubbing. Because he didn’t have the power. He couldn’t hurt me.
My judgment was all wrong. I trusted rarely. But it itched my skin like a nasty rash that I hadn’t seen Emily for who she was. The woman he had fucked. She wasn’t a friend. More of an acquaintance. Still, the fact that I had actually had lunch and gone shopping with the woman he had fucked threw me off. The thought of meeting up with her disgusted me. He hadn’t allowed Aldo a second to live when he found out. In my mind, this was no different, but I was supposed to move on.
Irritation spiked. I wanted a world between myself and everyone. Away from him, his fuck buddy. Away from his men. My Mamma always told me my impulsive decisions would get me into trouble one day. I realized it was time to find out.
The car slowed down, and the pounding of music thundered in my ears. I pushed the door open and stumbled out to the loud curse of Orso. The door almost hit a passerby. Loud cursing followed me. I didn’t know whose. Orso? The guy who I had hit with the door? I didn’t hang around to find out and dashed to the pulsing building with the neon light-clad walls. I was anonymous here. No one’s wife, no one’s daughter. I whizzed past the bodyguards in the front. The charm of a woman’s body that I used for the second time in my life. Dark music and heat pulled me in when the door swung open. I didn’t even get a second to catch my bearings before the crowd carried me through. Suffocation constricted the walls of my lungs. Unease riled below the sweat on my spine. I fought the bile in my stomach. Memories of another time in another bar hit me like a fist to my belly. I found a gap in the mass, groped my way to the toilets, and emptied my stomach of the bile.
I tottered out and splashed ice-cold water on my burning face. My eyes caught on the hot piece of ass staring back at me in the mirror. Well, I would not allow it to go in vain. I didn’t care about him. I was going to party my ass off. I was going to show him he didn’t have my heart. He had my body, and if he looked at me with those burning eyes of his, he would probably have it again. But not my damn heart. That was all mine, locked and sealed in a box.
So I went out and headed to the bar. Emily and Orso were nowhere to be found. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my brute of a husband had his entire team looking for me, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I ordered a vodka straight up. Even though I had never had it before, it sounded like a badass drink the new me would have. Except it took me a few sips and a groping hand of a stranger to realize I didn’t care for the new me that much.