Chapter 37
Isabella
“Will you tell me about Sienna?” We were in bed, curled around each other, and the words had welled up in my chest before I could stop them.
Lorenzo froze beneath my cheek, and I almost took the question back.
We’d returned from our attempted date, and Lorenzo made us turkey sandwiches.
We ate them standing at the counter in the kitchen.
My heart would skip any time I would catch his eyes on me.
I thought that we would go upstairs and have sex, but instead, Lorenzo had run me a bath.
Afterward, he’d tucked me against his chest and held me in a way that he never had before.
For a date that didn’t start off well—not that I knew it was a date to begin with—it had become one of the best I’d ever had. No one had ever taken such care of me.
Now, here I was ruining all of that. “Why do you want to know?” His voice was tight, but he didn’t sound angry. Not yet, anyway.
I shrugged. “She’s literally a forbidden topic in this house,” I said. “You don’t even have any pictures of her.”
Lorenzo was quiet, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was going to answer me at all. I listened as his heart thumped against my cheek. “What happened to Sienna was one of my worst failures,” he said. “I didn’t like the constant reminders, so I got rid of all of her pictures.”
I tipped my head back so that I could look at him. Lorenzo had a faraway expression on his face. “What happened to her?”
He shook his head.
I reached up and touched his cheek, bringing his pensive eyes down to me. “Talking about it might help.”
He didn’t believe me, but Lorenzo didn’t shake off my hand either. “How would it possibly help?”
“Your guilt has turned her into a ghost. Even if you’ve gotten rid of her, in theory, she’s in every room of this house. You can only pretend that she isn’t for so long.”
Lorenzo studied me for a long while before his gaze drifted. I thought he might push me away, but his arms tightened around me. I wonder if he even notices, I thought and decided not to ask. “I never anticipated falling in love,” he said after a while. “Marriages in the Cosa Nostra…”
“Amalia told me that they’re usually more business arrangements,” I said.
He nodded. “My father arranged things for us with the Bianchi family. Don Bianchi is a wealthy man, and marrying Sienna brought in new business avenues for us.” He chuckled humorlessly. “No one expected for us to have genuine feelings for each other.”
Lorenzo might not have realized it, but his face filled with a warmth the more he spoke about her, and I could practically feel it soaking into me.
Maybe it was odd that I liked how he spoke about Sienna, but it finally felt like I had met the real Lorenzo.
“When did you realize that you loved her?”
He made a sound of disbelief, but then he looked down at me, eyebrow raised. “You really want to hear about that?”
I nodded. “Please.”
“It wasn’t anything grand,” he said. “We had been married for a little over six months, and we were still feeling each other out. We had a standing weekly date so that we could spend time together, but we were really leading separate lives most of the time.”
“What changed?”
“It wasn’t anything huge,” he said. His eyes were far away again, like he was lost in a memory.
“I had to go to Chicago for business, and I got into it with the Irish outfit there. It went worse than expected and they’ve been trying to worm their way into New York ever since.
” He shook his head, as if clearing away a memory.
“Anyway, the week that I was meant to be gone stretched into two, and I missed her. Not just sex with her, but everything about her.”
“Did you tell her? When you got back?”
Lorenzo laughed. “No, it would take me months to actually say the words, and when I finally did, Sienna teased me for it. I had to beg her to say it back.”
I giggled at the thought. “She sounds wonderful,” I told him.
He hummed in agreement, and then his expression went grim. “Falling in love with her was her death sentence. I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t answer me right away. He was quiet for so long that I thought the conversation was going to end entirely.
I wasn’t going to push him anymore if that was the case.
I had already gotten way more information than I ever thought I would get.
I got to imagine what Lorenzo would look like if he were a fool in love.
It filled my chest with something that felt a lot like hope.
Not that I had any reason to hope…or any desire for it either. Lorenzo had never given me any indication that what we had was romantic, and it wasn’t like I was rushing to put a label on whatever was between us either.
“Damian hasn’t always been my vicecapo,” Lorenzo said, surprising me. “A cousin of mine, Francis, was my second; he was my father’s choice, and we’d argued about him, but I had to admit that he was good at the job. I trusted him to run my businesses and run the security here when I couldn’t.”
A chill ran down my spine. His voice had become detached, and I could see in the way that he was stiffening against me that he was trying to shove whatever he was feeling away. “He betrayed you?”
Lorenzo nodded. “He killed her and left her in our bed for me to find.”
My stomach rolled at the thought. I could imagine how afraid she must have been, how she must have prayed for Lorenzo to come and save her. “Why would he do that?”
“Traitors are fairly common in this life,” he said. “I killed him before I got his exact reason, but I imagine he wanted what I had and knew that she was my weakness.”
“But you don’t know that for sure because you killed him before you could get an explanation.”
Lorenzo was quiet for a moment, and then hummed. “I know that he didn’t act alone. He wouldn’t have dared to move against me like that unless someone was pulling his strings.”
“You never found out who.” It wasn’t a question, but Lorenzo shook his head anyway.
“They hid their identity well,” he said. “No matter who I squeezed for information, I couldn’t get a whiff of a hint.”
I could feel my forehead wrinkling. “But if you didn’t find the answer, why did you stop?”
Lorenzo pinned me with a stare that made me shiver. “The Cosa Nostra doesn’t wait for a broken man to put the pieces back together. I had business to attend to, so I had to put it away.”
I wanted to tell him that I was sorry, but the words died in my throat.
Nothing I could say would make any of this better, after all, and it would only come across as trite.
Instead, I leaned up and pressed my lips to the underside of his jaw.
“I don’t think loving Sienna made you weak,” I said finally. “I think she made you strong.”
His eyes were stormy. “Then why did I lose her?”
“Because a weak man was afraid of your strength, and he wanted to break you.” I kissed him again, on the point of his chin this time. “But you didn’t break, did you? You experienced profound loss, but you didn’t fall to pieces like he was hoping.”
“I still failed her.”
I shook my head. “If you thought, for even a second, that Francis would harm her in any way, would you have ever left them alone together?”
“Of course not.”
“You were blindsided by someone that you were supposed to trust. That’s not a failure of yours. That’s a betrayal, and you can’t plan for that.”
Lorenzo’s eyebrows wrinkled inward, like he was trying to figure something out and couldn’t. “It’s my job to plan for everything,” he said eventually.
I reached up and touched his cheek. “That sounds incredibly lonely.”