7. Giulia
T he funeral for Luka lasted well into the evening. I wasn’t sure how Renzo was able to hold up with it all. He seemed so distracted and moody throughout the funeral and the wake. Instead of looking sad and grieving, he seemed annoyed.
More than once, I noticed him checking me out. While I felt giddy that I’d ensnared his attention, I knew better than to entertain anything happening between us. I’d begged him to not tell anyone about what we’d done together. He had to lie along with me.
Still, my mother honed in on my sitting next to him. She’d pass out in shame if she knew I was telling Renzo about what she was gossiping about at Luka’s funeral, that she was trying to get juicy drama about Cecilia being missing. We weren’t the only ones curious about why the new bride wasn’t at her husband’s funeral, but no one had any actual facts to share. Only speculation.
“I don’t even want to see you near that man,” she scolded as she told me to get ready to leave.
She’d finished harassing my father for “letting himself get into another fight”, this time, with Nickolas. I wasn’t sure what started it all, but I was grateful that my younger sisters hadn’t come to the funeral.
Everyone seemed on edge at the funeral, and Nickolas was no exception. Maybe the Romano son was still suspicious of Father being near Cecilia when Luka was dead. Whatever the reason, whatever sparked the embers of violence, they’d fought. Mother was furious about the crass and ridiculous display, and it was only after she’d gotten him to be taken to the car that she sought me out.
At least Renzo was smart enough to leave.
I let her rants go in one ear and out the other. The whole ride home, she complained. She bitched. And she got on to my father again, lambasting him for trying to act like a macho man half his age.
After I helped my sisters to bed, tiredly telling them that they didn’t need to concern themselves with why our parents were arguing—again—I headed to my room and paced.
Being near Renzo stirred something within me. That desire he’d flamed and fanned in this very room was turning into a persistent, nagging need, but I had to stop this nonsense. Nothing could ever happen between us, and I was stunned by how much that concept bothered me.
All this time, all those years, I didn’t concern myself with Renzo Bernardi. He was there, always in the background, but now, he was at the forefront of my mind.
As I lay in bed, wondering about where he was and what he was doing, I thought back to how he’d reacted since his brother was killed. Renzo was a playboy, chasing easy pussy and doing whatever he wanted. Since he was no longer the spare brother but next in line to take over the Bernardi name, he had to be struggling.
And if he was suffering from the changes in his life…
I want to be the one to comfort him and support him.
“Stop this,” I whispered to myself as I closed my eyes.
Dreaming about being Renzo’s partner was stupid. Nonsense. Our being together would never, ever make sense in our world. Too many years had passed with our Families hating each other. Yet as I drifted closer to sleep, I wished to feel him on this bed again, his lips hard against mine and his hands holding me tightly.
When I woke, it was too soon and because of my mother’s phone. It rang and rang, over and over again.
“What the hell…”
My room wasn’t near hers, and when I said hers , it was only hers. Father often slept in another bedroom, and if that wasn’t representative of how poorly they got along, I wasn’t sure what else could be.
The trill repeated without pause, and as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and damning the noise that came far too early, I realized she was likely still sleeping in and had forgotten it up here.
I growled, leaving my room to shut off the device. I didn’t have to search for it. With a frown, I looked down and stared at it. Right there in the hallway. Her cell phone lay buzzing and lighting up with an alarm clock going off, over and over and over.
“Oh, shut up,” I muttered as I stooped to pick it up.
Maybe she dropped it? Or it fell out of her pocket? I didn’t care. I just wanted quiet to sleep a little longer.
I held the device and looked both ways up and down the hall. Marianna, Beatrice, and Lucia stayed in rooms further down the corridor, but Father’s “room” was nearer.
How am I the only one who heard this? It hadn’t stopped in all those five or ten minutes when I tried to lie in and go back to sleep.
Heading toward their rooms, I yawned and bemoaned how terribly I’d slept. Thinking about Renzo threw me off. Missing his touch and yearning for his kisses kept me antsy, and wondering about who killed his brother intrigued me.
I knocked and opened the door to their master bedroom, surprised that Father was actually in the bed for once. Mother wasn’t there, though, but I figured she couldn’t have been up for long.
“Father?” I called out as I entered. Although he liked to drink—a lot, and often—he was often one of the first ones awake in the household. When I was younger, when Lucia and Beatrice were still toddlers, I realized that he rose from bed early so he could have an hour or two of silence to himself in the house. My sisters were no longer that young, but it seemed that the habit stuck.
Until today.
“Father?” I asked again, furrowing my brow as I approached the bed.
He didn’t stir.
At all.
I stopped and stared at him as another, bigger realization hit me.
He’s not snoring. He always did.
But he wasn’t now.
“Father?” I hurried to his side of the bed and studied him closer. A scream built in my throat. It remained trapped there, lodged without any escape. My heart raced as I tried to comprehend what my eyes were suggesting. That my father, so still and unmoving—not breathing—might be…
“Father.” I shook him, feeling the lifelessness of his weight being pushed. “Oh, fuck .” I shoved at him harder, moving one hand to hover over his face. No air huffed up. His chest didn’t rise and fall. With shaking fingers, I laid my hand over him, waiting for a telltale thump-thump of a heartbeat to reach my skin.
Nothing. He wasn’t breathing. His heart had stopped.
I choked on air, stuttering to breathe through this shock. “Dead?” I whispered, shaking him harder one last time. His hand fell off his stomach, flopping to the mattress with a weight that couldn’t be denied.
“Oh, fuck.” I staggered backward, staring at him as horror and dread consumed me. Dizzy and scared, I almost tripped on my own feet. But I managed to turn and run.
“Francis!” I shouted, hoping he was the patroller on duty near this wing of the mansion. He usually was, but I couldn’t bank on normalcy. Nothing about finding my father dead this morning was “usual”.
“Francis!” I tried once more, louder, no longer worried about waking anyone else up. With this eerie feeling of being so alone up here, I needed to see another person. “Mother! Francis!” I called out for them, frantic for someone to reply.
When Beatrice stepped out of her room, I held my hand up and told her to go back to bed. “No. Just stay in your room until I come to you.”
Lucia opened her door and poked her head out too. “Giulia? What’s happening?”
Marianna showed too, snapping to attention. I could only imagine how tense I looked, but whatever expression she saw on my face, it prompted her to listen. “Come on. Let’s wait in my room.” She tossed a worried glance over her shoulder at me as she ushered Beatrice and Lucia into her room.
“Mother!” I ran down to her room as the sound of guards and soldiers rushed through the house.
“Mother—” I stopped short after flinging her door open. She lay on the floor, face-down. The pale-pink carpet cut a sharp contrast to the blue of her nightgown, but I saw at once that she lived. Lying on her arm, with it trapped under her stomach, she reclined in an awkward position that emphasized how her chest still rose and fell.
She was breathing. She was alive.
“Mother!” I dropped to my knees and rolled her over quickly, seeing that she was out of it, but breathing.
“Miss Giulia,” a guard said, announcing his arrival as he rushed into the room. As soon as he noticed my mother on the floor, I backed up.
“She’s asleep.” I shook my head as I slapped her face. Then I shook her. As the guards filed in, I let them try to rouse her too. “She was asleep on the floor. I found her like this. But?—”
Shouts sounded from across the hall. They’d found him. “Father’s dead,” I told the guard still trying to revive my mother.
He pressed his fingers to her pulse point, nodding. “She’s got a pulse. Stay back, please.”
I scrambled back, staring wide-eyed as they took over. We employed a medic, but that was it. More and more soldiers and guards entered the room. In the hall, they hurried to the master suite to deal with my father.
In the frenzy of too many actions, all the men speaking and working as a team, I tried to follow what they decided and instructed.
Securing the premises. Taking my mother to the hospital. Guarding my father’s body. Checking on who else could have been hurt.
“Giulia.”
I whipped around at Uncle Dario’s voice. He hurried with his cane the best he could, and I ran to him, helping him stand steady.
“What’s going on?”
“Father is dead. It seems that Mother was drugged.”
He frowned down at me. “Drugged?”
I was guessing there, but I had no other instant idea coming to mind. She was alive. I saw no signs of an outward injury. “I don’t know, but?—”
“Just now?”
He turned to Francis as he rushed up to us, relaying the basic facts that my mother would be transported to the hospital now.
“Giulia?” Marianna called from her room.
I winced, running to her and keeping her in her room.
“What’s going on?” all three of them asked as I stepped inside Marianna’s safe haven.
“I’ll tell you…” Later. I didn’t want to break the news to them, but they had to know one way or another.
“Your father is dead,” Uncle Dario answered for me when I hesitated. He came into the room, hugging Lucia as she cried out.
“Is Mother…?” Marianna’s eyes bugged out.
“No. She’s breathing,” I told her. “But I found Father dead and Mother lying on the floor. They’re taking her to the hospital now.”
At the news that one of our parents was dead and the other was unconscious and needing medical assistance, the trio of sisters reacted with tears, shocked gasps, and so many blurted, panicked questions. None of which I could answer. I’d only discovered this hell this morning, and with Dario’s help, I tried to keep them as calm and safe as possible.
Francis directed the guards. They rushed through the house. I heard them shouting outside. When they weren’t, their fingers were lifted to their earpieces as they conversed with each other.
Dario hobbled out of Marianna’s room, leaving me with them and expecting me to do my best to calm them.
No one was calm. How could they be? Waking to this news rocked us all. I looked cool and collected, but it was a sham, a brave front I put on for the sake of my sisters crying and clinging to me as they struggled with this double discovery.
Uncle Dario was furious, raising his voice at Francis and the other guards. Through the door, I caught every angry word he flung at the men who were supposed to protect this home. He demanded answers, expecting someone to report in with evidence of someone breaking in to kill my father and drug my mother.
Word came back quickly that she seemed fine. Drowsy and still loopy under the doctor’s care, but alive.
I didn’t want to know what they did with Father’s body, and when they wheeled him out of there, I turned my head and ordered my uncle to shut the door after him. We didn’t need the girls to witness his being removed from the house.
Marianna was sullen and quiet, likely reverting inside and clamming up. She helped, though, hugging Lucia and holding Beatrice’s hand. We weren’t orphaned. Mother lived, but without our father at the head of the Family, it dawned on me that we were in dire straits.
We were just at a funeral yesterday, and now we’d woken to more death. Death at home. On our turf.
As I listened to Dario speaking with the guards again, I thought back to Renzo’s reaction to the death in his Family. I’d never thought of the Bernardi brothers as close siblings. Not like I was with my sisters. If one of them had passed away, I wouldn’t have been able to remain this calm and level-headed, even though I was so shaken and bewildered, confused and nervous.
Renzo hadn’t cried and freaked out at Luka’s death. All I could discern was that he wanted to seek justice. To find the killer.
That burning need to avenge my father’s death hadn’t sunk in, and I wasn’t sure when or if it would. Shock kept me from being motivated to do anything yet, and I felt guiltier not to be sadder.
I’d never been close with my father, but I already felt the depth of his loss.
He was, for better or worse, a source of security. The patriarch. The head of the Family and the Boss of the Acardi organization.
Without him…
Freedom wouldn’t come. I felt too lost and disoriented to know what would happen next, and at the realization of accepting the unknowns that would come, I missed Renzo even more.
Stupid as it was, I wished he were here. That he could just be here and look at me with that sharp, yet adoring, gaze he seemed to save just for me. How he’d gaze at me with challenge but respect. He didn’t scold me like my mother did. He didn’t dismiss me like my father had. And he didn’t merely leer at me like a pervert like all the other men did.
Renzo looked upon me with something like reluctant acceptance, and I wished I could lean on him and soak in the security of his presence now.
“Fucking Bernardi.”
I whipped up from zoning out at the wall. Uncle Dario breathed heavily as he entered the living room hours later. We’d eventually all gotten dressed, but the day was too skewed to do much else. My sisters were in Marianna’s room, napping or just lying together after a late lunch no one had really touched.
Uncle Dario sought me out in the library, though, furious and worked up emotionally and physically as he labored his steps to the sofa.
“What?” I stood, hurrying to help him sit.
“Bernardi.” He winced as he lowered to the cushion. “He fucking killed Rocco.”
I’d just been thinking about Renzo Bernardi in a forbidden, wistful way. How could my uncle be speaking about the same man in such a different manner? “What?”
“I heard him.” He glared absently, shaking his head. “At the funeral. I heard him.”
I sat next to him, desperate for an explanation. Mother and Father never shared information with me freely, but Uncle Dario never seemed to mind. He’d often called me the only level-headed adult in this house. “You heard who say what?”
“Renzo.” He met my gaze, showing me the anger there. “Renzo Bernardi killed your father.”
“And drugged Mother?” I shook my head. “No. I can’t see it. That’s not…”
“I heard him.”
“You heard what ?” I insisted, unafraid to raise my voice with him. Uncle Dario never played games with my head.
“Giovanni and his son. I heard them at the funeral. He insisted that Renzo kill whoever murdered Luka.”
I reared back, alarmed as I stared at him. “What? Hold on. Are you saying that Father killed Luka?”
He grimaced. “No. Of course, Rocco didn’t kill Luka.”
I narrowed my eyes. He seemed so sure. “How do you know?”
“Because Rocco is—was—a spineless coward. He never would’ve had the balls to kill a highly regarded man like Luka, even if he was our Family’s rival.”
I agreed.
“Why would he have?” Uncle Dario said with a wry huff. “What would Rocco gain from killing Luka?”
That was exactly what I told Renzo that night he came here to speak with Father. As far as I knew, he never did speak with him. Since that night when Luka was killed, I hadn’t seen Renzo—not until the funeral.
Renzo seemed to change his mind, anyway. When we talked, or argued, before he made me come, he’d appeared to come to terms with my rationalization. He only accused my father of killing Luka because he had been close to the head table when Luka was found dead, and that wasn’t a strong argument to begin with. If anything, it seemed like Renzo had left with the consideration that Marcus or Nickolas Romano had likely killed Luka.
“I’d be accusing Nickolas before Renzo,” I said, thinking back to how the younger Romano had fought my father at the funeral.
Uncle Dario shook his head. “No. Nickolas fights anyone he can. Just because he and Rocco fought earlier doesn’t mean anything.”
I’m not so sure about that.
“I can’t ignore what I heard, Giulia.” He implored me with an intense stare, begging me to heed his words wisely. “I just heard Giovanni telling Renzo to avenge Luka. And now Rocco is dead.”
I pressed my lips together, unable to persuade him to drop that line of thought. No, that line of assumptions. Renzo and I had talked about the possibility of my father being Luka’s killer, and I refused to think he would have changed his mind enough to come out and just kill Father like this.
And why would he poison Mother, too?
Nothing was adding up, and I was stuck to keeping my encounters with Renzo private. The last thing I needed on top of all this trouble and drama was anyone suggesting I was no longer a pure virgin to be married off.
“Let’s not rush to any assumptions,” I warned him gently.
“Are you defending Renzo?” he demanded sharply.
Shit. I could see how he’d notice my line of argument and get curious.
“No.” Yes. I licked my lips, searching for something better to say. “Let’s just calm down first. We’ll wait to see what Mother says. What comes up as the men search and watch the surveillance of the property.”
He nodded, but the tight scowl on his face suggested he wouldn’t relax anytime soon. Just like I had, he’d lost his leader. The head of the Acardi Family was gone, and without any guidance, we would all feel lost.
I had no clue what was coming next, but I could count on one awful fact.
With my uncle so quick to assume Renzo killed my father, I would never have a chance to spend time with my sexy enemy again. His rash words promised that I wouldn’t be able to look forward to being in Renzo’s company, no matter how much he hogged my attention and stayed in my mind.
Renzo couldn’t have killed Father.
I wanted to swear on it.
Because if he had, I’d lost my chance to know the exquisite pleasure that man—my enemy—could evoke in me.
And it felt like a crueler loss that I wouldn’t be able to overcome.