35. Alessandro
“That was cold. Why were you so cruel to her?” Val says, storming into my study with Nico on his heels.
“Why do you care? Want my sloppy seconds, again?” I scream at him.
Val takes a step back at my venom and then charges at me, shoving me up against the wall. “You fucking bastard,” he sneers at me.
“Go on, hit me. It’s in our blood. Do it,” I tell him.
Nico pulls him away from me. “Leave,” he says, pushing my cousin out of the room before slamming the door shut behind him. “Talk to me.”
I shake my head and walk back to the paperwork I was looking over before I was interrupted.
“I want her access revoked,” I tell Nico.
“Who?” he asks. He fucking knows who but he’s testing me.
“Natalia’s. I want all her stuff packed up and shipped to her parents’ house,” I advise him.
“You think you’re being noble and shit but you’re being an asshole,” Nico tells me.
“Fuck you,” I say, turning back to my papers.
“Everyone is tip-toeing around you, but I’ve had enough of this self-deprecating bullshit. No one is sad your father is dead. Except for a couple of prostitutes, maybe.” My blood boils listening to his words. “He was a shit human being.”
“Guess you’re not doing the eulogy,” I sneer.
“Neither can you, look at your face. Your father did that to you,” Nico says.
“No fucking shit, the memory is seared into my mind on a torturous loop,” I scream at him. “The last words I said to him were I wished he was dead. Guess God turned his listening ears on that day, didn’t he.”
“He had just laid into you, Andro, you’re allowed to be angry,” he tells me.
“I killed him, Nico. Me. And now I have to tell Rome that the man he thought was his father isn’t,” I yell at my best friend.
“Oh shit,” he says, running his hand through his hair.
“Yeah, that fucking asshole tells me that while screaming at me,” I tell him.
“That’s fucking messed up,” Nico agrees.
“I can’t be like him, Nico,” I tell him.
“You’re nothing like your father,” he says.
“I trapped her,” I scream. Nico stills. “I set her up.” Nico shakes his head in confusion. “When I saw she was in Vegas, I hatched the plan.”
Nico’s brows pull together. “You came up with it after you were married.”
I shake my head as I swallow hard. “I planned the entire night as soon as I saw she was in the same club. I made sure to ply her with drinks. I watched the drunk guy follow her, and then I swooped in like a knight in shining armor, saving her from him, showing her my humanity, and making those walls come down between us. It was so easy. She was so drunk, and I was drunk by that stage when we turned up at the chapel to get married, and the rest is history,” I say, waving my hand before me.
Nico stares at me dumbfounded. “I … I … had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t, no one knew,” I say.
“Then what happened?” Nico asks.
“Fucking Natalia Fiorenzo is what happened. I thought she was going to be an easy target. I was so fucking wrong. She turned out to be everything I never imagined I’d deserve,” I confess to him.
“You’re a fucking idiot you know that,” he says, shaking his head.
“I fell in love with the enemy.”
“You need to talk to her,” Nico says.
I shake my head. “I’m just like my father, using people to get what we want. She’s better off without me.”
“Don’t you see that you’re nothing like your father? You gave up the deal for her. You signed the papers setting her free. Do you think your father would have lost a deal like that for a woman, for love?” Nico asks.
“Of course not.”
“That’s your answer then. You did. It didn’t start out like that, but in the end, you made the right choice for love.” He grins.
“And look where that’s got me,” I tell him.
He rolls his eyes. “Let’s bury your childhood trauma first and then we can sort your future.”