Chapter 15
GIANNA
The phone call with my sister was supposed to be a joyous thing, but it put me in a very foul mood—much worse than anything I’ve felt since everything went wrong, and I ended up Matteo’s prisoner. His plaything. His property.
Why does thinking that fill my belly with butterflies and my pussy remember the feel of his cock? Instead of making me hate him like I should?
What is wrong with me?
“Come on, let’s go make some lunch,” Maria said to me as I handed her back the phone silently.
The look she was giving me said a lot of things.
That she felt sorry for me, is angry that I’m sad, and a little maybe that she’s too old to deal with all that plus the heaps of clothes that she did manage to put in some sort of order while I was speaking to Chiara, doing a much better job than I had.
“I don’t know if I can leave this room,” I told her, very quietly.
What kind of idiot argues when they’re about to be released from their prison for just a little bit?
“You can leave this room,” she told me sternly, but I don’t think the sternness was meant for me.
At least she hasn’t been showing me any more of it since we reached the large kitchen on the ground floor of the house.
She took me down a back staircase, the one meant only for servants, I’m sure.
But I didn’t mind. At least we didn’t run into any of the men I could hear talking elsewhere in the house.
She served me a wonderful tuna melt tramezzini, better than anything I’ve ever eaten. The crustless bread just melts in my mouth and the spread has so much taste I can’t even figure out all the spices she used to make it. I’m on my third slice and I might not stop yet.
She’s sitting across from me at the long wooden kitchen table, chopping up onions, garlic, and tomatoes, glancing at me every so often.
I keep my eyes focused on the view of the ocean in the distance.
I can just about make out the people on the distant beach—they’re black dots, no bigger than ants, but what I wouldn’t give to be one of them right now.
Free. Running around on the beach, swimming.
Laughing. Instead of stuffing my face with sandwiches and eyeing a cake cooling on a rack on the huge counter.
I hope there’s some ice cream to go with it.
I feel the sun on my back long before Matteo appears in the kitchen.
“Is that dinner?” he asks Maria, while leaning down to kiss the top of my head.
“Yes,” she says tersely, gathers up everything she’s chopped up and goes to the stove, where two huge pots are waiting. “But I will need some help if I’m to cook for so many men.”
He gives my shoulder a squeeze then takes off his silver-grey jacket, hangs it on the back of a chair and starts rolling up his sleeves. “I’ll help.”
I very nearly choke on the piece of tramezzini I just bit off. It’s not just that he offered to help cook—though most men I know wouldn’t be caught dead helping out in the kitchen—it’s the familiar ease with which Maria accepted his help, moving aside for him at the counter.
“You cook too?” I ask, maybe a little too harshly, maybe a little too shrilly.
He grins at me over his shoulder. “Sure, Maria’s an excellent cook and she’s taught me everything she knows.”
She swats his shoulder and gives him a sharp look that nevertheless carries a lot of fondness. “Not everything. Not even close.”
“Yeah, that’s probably right,” he says. The smile he gives her is nothing but fond.
But her eyes remain mostly sharp. “I wish I had taught you how to treat women better.”
She glances at me and then looks back at him pointedly. The look that crosses his face is hard to describe. There’s a lot of darkness in it, hard relentless anger, but remorse too. Just not the soft kind.
“Can’t be helped,” he says and puts the chopping board covered in chopped onions he was about to hand to her back down on the counter. “I’ll get you some help in the kitchen.”
She sucks on her lips and goes back to minding the pot, her eyes still very stern. He picks up the cake and brings it to the table.
“We could have this with some coffee,” he says. “If you’re done with your sandwich, that is.”
I lay the half-eaten tramezzini back on my plate, while he collects a huge knife from the counter.
Maria stops him. “I’ll bring the cake and coffee out to you. In the gazebo. I’m sure Gianna would like to go for a walk in the fresh air.”
They both look at me expectantly and I just nod, once again wondering why they have to be so damn nice to me. Why can’t they starve me and keep me locked up and be mean to me? Then I could just hate them and everything would be right.
“Let’s go then,” he says and offers me his arm. Which I don’t take. It’s the least I can do to keep our roles here in the right perspective.
He shrugs at my snub, darkness still swimming in his eyes, but it’s mostly been displaced by the regret and remorse now. So, what’s he thinking? That he’d rather not keep me as his prisoner? Well, he can let me go whenever he wants!
I walk out through the wide-open French windows, onto a narrow stone porch and down the side.
Maria was not wrong, I have wanted to go for a walk in the pretty garden surrounding this house.
All the way to the beach. Although we’re so high up on this hill that it would be a trek rather than just a walk. And I’m only wearing flip-flops.
I go down the three steps to the grass and just keep going straight. I can feel him right behind me and I wonder if that’ll ever stop. Me feeling the heat of his gaze. And whether I actually want it to as I feel it wane a little.
“The gazebo is that way,” he says, and I turn automatically. He’s standing a few feet behind me pointing in the opposite direction than the one I had chosen. I shrug and join him.
Then we start walking, side by side down a stony path that radiates the heat of the sun.
He’s so close I can feel the tension in his muscles, smell the intoxicating scent of his aftershave and that underlying musk that’s all him and which never fails to intensify the flapping of the butterflies in my stomach whenever he’s near.
He wants to put his arm around my shoulders. I feel that too. But he’s not doing it.
“Did you speak to your sister?” he asks as we turn a corner in the path and come to a part of the garden that is very nice indeed. Full of flowering bushes, lined with green grass, all the colors bright and vivid in the sun.
“Yes,” I say. “She’s getting better. Might go home soon.”
He nods. “I heard that too.”
“From Ferro?” I snap. “You two talk about us?”
I stop and glare at him. He looks surprised at my anger. “Among other things, yes.”
“Do you also talk about what will happen to my family?”
The darkness returns to his face. Hard, unyielding, made of angry regret. “Yeah, you know we do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me my family was here in LA?” I ask. “Why don’t you let me see them?”
He looks away, down the path and towards the glimmering ocean visible through the bushes and flowers.
“We’ve already had this conversation, Goldie.
I need your father to do something for me first. And he’ll be more loyal if he thinks your life depends on it.
I’m sorry. But it’s the way it has to be. ”
“Are you? Sorry? Because I’m thinking the least you could do is let me speak to my mother. I haven’t given you any trouble… I’ve…”
The grin on his face turns so sharp, I forgot what I was going to say.
“Haven’t given me any trouble?” he asks. “You ran away from me in the middle of Atlantic City. And you tried to stab me not so long ago. In case you forgot.”
“I did forget,” I say. “Because it was never something I would’ve done. Not really.”
Why am I even telling him this? I should be making him believe I’m dangerous to him. Then maybe he’d stop being so nice to me all the time and let me just hate him.
He shakes his head and walks off the path, past two huge lilac-colored oleander bushes—or trees more like.
They’ve been hiding a pretty, all-white gazebo that has an unobstructed view of the ocean.
He has his back to me as I approach, busy removing the grimy tarp coverings off the chairs and table.
Everything here looks so nice, straight out of some movie. But an old movie. A forgotten one.
He uses his hand to get the worst of the grime off the glass table in the center and points at one of the chairs. “Sit. The cake will be here soon.”
“I don’t want cake,” I say and take a seat in one of the white wicker chairs regardless. “I want to see my mother.”
He takes a seat next to me. “This used to be my mother’s favorite place in the garden. Possibly in the whole house. She’d spend the whole day here sometimes.”
The emotion in his voice leaves me speechless. It’s at once soft and fond, but angry and dark too. A weird ball of opposites that reminds me of how I can neither hate him, nor love him. How what I feel for him is a weird mixture of both that will never be right.
“What happened to your mom?” I ask before I even decide to. Because something had. I’m sure of it. And it was bad.
“Your mother is fine,” he tells me, ignoring my question. “Your sister and father are too. And they’ll stay that way. You have my word. But you can’t see them. Not yet.”
“That’s not good enough.” I cross my arms over my chest and turn away from him.
“It’ll have to be for now,” he says and chuckles. “Besides, what happened to you not asking me for anything?”
I shake my head and turn even more away from him. “I don’t really have a choice, do I? Seeing as I’m at your mercy for everything.”
The silence that follows drags. I’m sure that if I looked at him I’d just see more of that angry, dark remorse in his face and that’s not what I want to see.
“It won’t be much longer now,” he finally says. And all that dark remorse and anger is in his voice now.
“Good.”
The silence drags again. Only it’s not silent. It’s filled with pretty bird song, the sound of the wind in the trees and the distant whooshing of waves. All very nice things. Beautiful even.
“My mother overdosed on her pain meds and antidepressants when I was thirteen years old,” he says. “We don’t know if she meant to do it or if it was an accident. I like to think it was an accident. But either way, she wasn’t a happy person.”
I don’t know what to say to that, but I do look at him. And feel only overwhelming compassion. And love. Painting all my fantasies of hating him as lies.
“I understand how you feel, Gianna, I do,” he says. “But I never meant to hurt you. I hope you’ll understand that one day.”
Maria comes through the bushes, carrying a platter filled with cake and two coffees. He helps her bring it to the table, but doesn’t sit back down.
“I have to leave,” he says. “You two enjoy the cake.”
“No,” I say quietly, but he’s already leaving and doesn’t turn.
And that’s the only part of all this I do understand. That I don’t want him to leave. Not that it makes any sense. None at all. If he heard me, he probably thinks I’ll never understand what he wants me to understand. And that’s true and not true at the same time.
I already understand he doesn’t want to hurt me. But it’s not enough.