Chapter Twelve
Enzo Rissi
I hadn’t seen the woman since I was too young to remember, but I recognized her all the same.
The long ringlets of auburn curls hung down her shoulders, and her tanned skin glowed as if she had spent an entire season outside. Her eyes and mine were identical, and I could only stare at her as she walked through the doors to my bedroom. She lingered there as if checking on a young child before closing the door for the night.
“You’ve grown so much,” she said happily.
I had only ever heard her voice once in my adolescence, and it had been in the video of my birth—the video where she pulled me into her arms and cooed my name down at me. I had been eleven, and I had watched the video a dozen times before my father had caught me.
It had been the first time I had asked about her, and he explained to me why she had left and why Lia was now considered my mother. That was the day all dreams of my biological mother had vanished.
She spoke with that same nurturing voice. It was the only tone my mind could create for her.
“It’s been such a long time, baby,” she said as she approached my bedside.
I sat up slowly, watching as she walked toward me.
How was it possible to hate someone so fiercely? She was long dead. My mother had not been around since I was little more than a baby, yet the fury that bloomed in my chest as I stared at her was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
She had betrayed us.
She had betrayed me .
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I need you to forgive me, baby. It will kill me knowing that you’ll hate me forever. Killing her wasn’t what I had planned.”
Killing her.
I tried to think back to the people who had died because of her betrayal, but none of them were women. Her words had my mind reeling.
“Who did you kill?”
My voice sounded both like mine and nothing like it. I felt like I needed to whisper the words, but I wasn’t sure why. Whatever was happening didn’t feel right. She shouldn’t have been here.
“Your wife, Aria. It was an honest mistake. I was working for her father, and she wasn’t supposed to be caught in the middle of it. She was supposed to be kept safe and out of the line of fire…”
Her words trailed as she sat beside me on the bed, placing a hand on my thigh.
The words took a moment to process, but when they did, the world fell out from under me. Aria wasn’t dead, was she? She had been with me just last night. I vividly recalled our shower together and the sweet taste of her on my lips. Her addicting noises and the way she felt around me. She was mine . She was better than me in every way, and I would never deserve her.
If I were a better man, maybe I would have let her go. I would have let her escape the danger of this life, but I hadn’t done that.
I had held onto her.
And now she was dead .
I couldn’t get a grip on my thoughts as they whirled. Dead. Dead . How could she be dead?
I had promised myself I wouldn’t let her get hurt, but here we were.
“No,” I shouted, my voice echoing in both my mind and around me in a jarring way. I grabbed my mother and flipped her viciously onto the bed, wrapping my hand around her throat. “What did you do?” I shouted.
She coughed and sputtered, and I felt her nails dig into my wrists. It should have anchored me, but it brought me further out of my body. My anger brought me further from my body.
“What did you do to her?” I shouted again.
My fingers were tight enough that my mother couldn’t get a word out, but I didn’t care. She would die for what she had done. For all the ways she had betrayed our family. I thought she had been dead before, but she would be now.
I wouldn’t trust someone else with this after she took Aria from me.
“Enzo,” she sputtered. “It’s me. Stop.”
Her voice was no longer hers. It sounded familiar in a different way. I looked down at her face, and everything snapped back to reality. The world around me went dark as my mother’s smug face faded and I opened my eyes.
I opened my eyes to Aria beneath me. Beneath my unbreakable grasp.
My hands wrapped around her throat, legs pinning her in place, and she clawed at my wrists, trying and failing to scream.
I flung myself backward off the bed, tumbling to the ground and panting as I looked around the room, partially expecting to see my mother lingering in the doorway or grinning down at me. What I had experienced—what I had believed to be real—came rushing back.
The feeling of Aria’s throat in my hands scalded me in a way I couldn’t describe.
I had hurt many people, and I had never cared. Never like this.
The dream felt real. Too real. My body’s visceral reaction to Aria’s death still lingered, and nothing I tried to think about could convince my heart to stop pounding. Last night should have changed nothing, yet it had somehow changed everything. It had brought a new fear to life that I had never expected.
My mother was the reason I would never love or care for a woman too deeply, yet she had been the one who brought out this demon in me. She had been the one to prove that Aria had grown on me in a way I didn’t want to acknowledge.
Hands rested on my back, and I jerked away. “Stay the fuck back!”
What if I saw her as my mother again? What if I unintentionally irreparably hurt her?
“Enzo,” she said through a gravel-stricken voice. “What happened?”
“What do you mean, ‘what happened?’” I bellowed, pulling myself to my feet and stepping back from her. “I could have killed you, Aria.”
She grabbed her throat gently, hiding any marks that would likely blemish her skin later.
Her eyes hardened. “Don’t yell at me,” she chastised, reaching for the end of the bed and pulling a coat to herself. One of my suit jackets, I realized. She wore nothing beneath it, but she used it to cover up, as if she couldn’t bear standing naked before me. “After what you just did, I deserve to know what just happened.”
“It was a dream,” I replied tersely.
“Who were you talking about? You asked what I did to her .”
I could only blink at the question. I countered, stepping forward when I knew I had grounded myself deeply enough in reality. “How badly did I hurt you?” I asked.
“Who were you talking about?” she countered, continuing to hold her throat and hide it from sight.
“Aria.”
“Enzo.”
A scowl deepened my expression as I took a deep breath.
Too much had happened within the past day. Many of my men were bleeding and dead. I had killed half a dozen Russians and tortured another two for information. I had been so deep into the bloodlust that I hadn’t even seen Aria in front of me until my lips were on hers. When I sank deep enough into that killing calm, I knew nothing short of a miracle could free me.
But she had.
And with each thrust into her—with each moment we spent together—the haze began to clear. As we moved into my bed, on the kitchen table, and then on the sofa in the living room, I found myself again.
But in sleep, the demons came back.
“I have nightmares after a situation like the one I faced yesterday.”
“You’re evading the question,” she retorted, shaking her head. “What was the dream about?”
I moved toward her and wrapped an arm around her waist, bringing her into me. Somehow, despite what I had done, she didn’t flinch away. “Tell me you’re okay first, Aria.”
“I’m fine.”
The softness in her eyes told me she was being honest.
“I had a dream that someone killed you.” She gasped, her chest rising at the words. “Let’s just go to bed.”
“Talk to me, Enzo. Tell me why it bothered you so much.”
I didn’t know why it bothered me so much. It should have, but I couldn’t get past the way I felt about her. The way she had wormed her way into my head and nested there.
I moved, guiding her back toward the bed.
I never planned to reveal anything significant to her. Not about myself, my businesses, or my family. But she did deserve some level of explanation after tonight.
“My father built our empire and expanded it all through New York. My Uncle Giovanni was on board, and he happily allowed my father to be the boss of the entire crime syndicate for years. He was feared and brutal, and it’s the reason we still have a substantial foothold even in Manhattan and Brooklyn where other bosses reside and do their businesses.” I had to find the line between the story she needed and the businesses we kept from the other rivaling families. “And then he met my mother.”
“Not Lia?”
I shook my head with a chuckle. “My biological mother, Rebecca. They were married within a month, and she was pregnant shortly after that. He loved her fiercely. She held sway in every part of his life, including his businesses. She was everything to my father, especially after having me.”
“Where is she?”
“Dead.” Aria’s eyes widened as I said the words. “She used her influence to coordinate an attempted execution of my father and uncle with the Russians. She wanted to become the boss. But the attack was a failure. The evening ended in the death of Uncle Giovanni’s only son—a five-year-old boy. And he was given the right to kill her. My dad loved her so much that he couldn’t be there to see it happen. That love was a weakness. And in my dream—the dream I often have after a brutal attack—she’s there. She’s always fucking there, reminding me that I got the same traitorous genetics. I became this because of her.”
“That’s when your dad stepped down and gave the title to Giovanni?” Aria guessed.
“Yes.”
She placed a hand on my chest and pressed me back. I didn’t fight her as I fell backward and landed on the plush bed. I closed my eyes as her fingers ran circles around my bare chest.
“You dreamed that she killed me.”
I only nodded.
“I am not your mother, Enzo. I know that’s your fear, but I am not her. And I am not going to be hurt by her.”
Heaviness overtook me slowly, and I shook my head. “My dad had a weakness, and people were killed. A child was killed. And because of her, I could have killed you too.”
The truth lingered around us, but she didn’t comment on it. Not even as the heaviness of the truth hung there. Sleep began taking over once again, and I couldn’t bring myself to fight it as she lay close.
“I am not your mother,” I heard her whisper before I fell asleep.
It sounded like a wild plea more than a claim, but I couldn’t bring myself to consider the reason before I drifted into unconsciousness.