52. Isabella
CHAPTER 52
Isabella
“ W hat in hell are you doing answering Gemma’s phone?” I had never gotten so angry so quickly before. My heart pounded so hard that I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked down and saw it knocking into my ribs.
My father chuckled, like I was being so silly. The sound made my skin crawl. “I’m just spending time with my youngest daughter,” he said. “Now that she’s in college, and your mother isn’t constantly in her ear, we can build our relationship again.” He tsk -ed. “You should be happy that she and I are getting to know one another again. It was all you talked about when you were younger.”
“Things change.”
He hummed. “Obviously.” His voice was less friendly now; there was a thread of anger beneath his tone.
A shiver ran through me, and I wrapped my free arm around myself, as if I could fight away the chill. But it was bone-deep and had nothing to do with the air conditioning. “You need to leave her alone,” I demanded. “Gemma wasn’t raised around your bullshit, and she doesn’t deserve it now.”
“I really don’t know why you’re acting like this. I’m only trying to get my family back.”
I scoffed. Did I really use to buy this bullshit? The longer I was on the phone with him, the angrier I became. Not only at him, but at myself. It was infuriating to think back to all the times that I let him talk his way back into my life. “What trouble are you in this time, Santino?”
My father was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed, and it was an ugly thing. Mean and jagged, and it dug into my body like knives. “I’m not the one in trouble, honey,” he said flatly, as if that horrid laugh had never come out of him. “I’m not the one shackled to Lorenzo Vitali.”
“Well, who’s fault is that?” I shot back immediately. I was tempted to hang up, but I couldn’t do that, not while my father was getting Gemma to agree to God knew what. The best I could do, for now, was keep him talking. “I didn’t sell myself to the Mafia.”
“But you don’t have an issue being Don Vitali’s slut, do you?”
“How did you know that?” My throat felt like a vise was wrapped around it. I didn’t even have time to be upset about the insult. Instead, my insides felt like they were freezing together.
“You’d be surprised what I know about what you’ve been up to.”
That was the least comforting thing that I had ever heard. “It’s your fault that I’m in this situation,” I repeated. “I was fine before all of this; I had my life in order. And you ruined that for me.”
He made this pathetic sound in his throat, a mockery of some kind of kicked puppy. “You know that I would never intentionally hurt you,” he said, and it was scary how sincere he sounded. “I will never forgive myself for getting you into this mess.”
He’ll never forgive himself, but he hasn’t bothered to ask for my forgiveness at all . “Put Gemma on the phone,” I told him. “Now.”
My father scoffed. “I don’t remember you being so rude before you became Lorenzo’s pet, Isabella.”
“It happens when you learn what I’ve learned in the last few months,” I snarled. “Put my sister on the phone right now.”
He deflected again. “Why are you acting like this? When have we ever spoken this way to each other?”
My father wasn’t exactly wrong. Despite all of our issues in the past, despite my keeping him at arm’s length as an adult, I had always tripped over myself to be polite to him. I didn’t know if it was filial duty, or if I was so hellbent on turning him into the kind of father that actually was worth something that I became a doormat.
“I think I’ve earned the right to speak any way I want to you,” I said. “Don’t you think?” When he went silent, anger boiled in my veins. “You don’t have anything to say? Really?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I scoffed. “Are you not even man enough to admit what you did to me?” More silence, and I was in a full rage now. “You sold me to pay off your gambling debts. Not once, but twice !”
“What are you?—?”
“I almost died ,” I shouted. “You knew what they were going to do to me, and you let it happen. Would you have even cared if I had bled out on the floor?” Tears, hot and embarrassing, rained down my face. There was so much I wanted to say, to scream, but the words were getting clogged in my throat. This would be the last time I spoke to my father, if I had any say in the matter, and I wanted some kind of excuse or explanation as to why he didn’t care about hurting me.
But from the pit of silence on the other end of the line, I knew that I wasn’t going to get that from him, and I had to be okay with that.
“Put Gemma on the phone.”
“No,” he said, completely ignoring everything that I had just said. “If you want to speak to your sister, you’ll need to do it in person. I’ll text you the address.”
Panic gripped me. “Santino.” I swallowed hard. “ Dad , put Gemma on the line.”
“Come alone, honey,” he said. “I don’t want to involve the Vitalis in our family business.”
And then, he hung up.