Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Fiero
It’s two a.m. when I return to the club but I don’t go into the lounge, or the basement, or the VIP suite. Instead, I walk straight through to the back and take the elevator to the twentieth floor. I can’t bring myself to have another human interaction tonight but I’m too destroyed to sleep.
I pour myself a thick whisky and sink onto the sofa looking out over Manhattan. When the sky is clear I can see Liberty. But not tonight—there’s nothing clear about tonight except for the realization I might just have ruined my life.
In being so fatally selfish, I’ve destroyed the one thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid, and I’ve removed precious hours from Pfeiffer and her father.
My role in the revenge is undeniable and I take full responsibility for it, but my despair knows no bounds and it’s directing itself at the one person who drove me on to the very end.
The longer I sit here with alcohol swirling in my blood, the angrier I feel until the next thing I know, it’s four a.m. and I’m pounding on Remo’s door.
I don’t know how his drawl slides around the bullet proof door but it does. “Come in.”
I enter his apartment and find him on the balcony, a glass in one hand, his other in his pocket, staring out over the city like he owns every inch of it. Because, in his own way, he does.
The breeze lifts his shirt slightly, exposing the edge of ink at his waist. He doesn’t turn when I step out beside him.
We both stand in silence—shoulder to shoulder, two brothers who saw too much at too young an age. As bitter as I feel toward him in this moment, he’s still my brother.
I withheld words from him for a decade. I owe it to him now to be honest.
“I went to see her.”
His jaw tightens but he doesn’t respond.
I lean against the railing, curling my fingers around the edge. “I went to apologize. I wanted her to give me another chance.”
He takes a long pull of amber.
“And?”
I lift a shoulder. “It’s too late. I broke her—”
I can’t get any more words out because I feel suddenly choked.
“That was the point,” he says, but there’s less bite in his tone now.
“No,” I say. “That was your point.”
“Don’t put this on me,” he says slowly. “You wanted to break her as much as I did.”
I breathe deeply. “Yes, I did. But not anymore.”
“And that has nothing to do with me.” His reply feels bitter.
I turn to face him. “If I can let it go, why can’t you?”
I need him to. Pfeiffer doesn’t deserve his hatred. We broke her. It’s done. And he needs to drop it—for all our sakes.
Remo’s gaze drops to the ground for a second before he laughs under his breath.
“Funny,” he huffs. “Your dick found a home in her cunt and you’ve conveniently forgotten you weren’t the only one changed by what our father did.”
I want to punch him for talking about me and her in this way but I feel as though I’m close to something and I need to take some shit to let him get it out. So I grit my teeth and nod for him to continue.
“He made us watch when he beat you.”
I swallow spit that tastes like rage. I wish I’d killed my father with my bare hands but instead I gave Nicoló Di Santo that honor.
“I know.”
“But that was just the beginning.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
After I was beaten so hard I chose not to speak again, I directed my energy into enforcing and gaining a sense of purpose in a line of work I could vent all my rage into. I didn’t really pay much attention to what happened to my brothers afterward.
“He made me watch…” he swallows. “Everything.”
I go still.
“He didn’t just beat you. He beat other men. Desperate addicts off the streets who’d let him kick in their faces for a hot meal. Men who betrayed not just our family, but others’. And he’d beat to the death if he could. He was a shit fighter, but fuck did he like getting his hands dirty.”
I look out over Manhattan, sensing he’s about to disclose something deeply uncomfortable.
“It wasn’t just men he beat,” he says, quietly. “And it wasn't just his fists and feet he used.”
I hold my breath.
“I had to watch him rape women.”
Plural.
“How many?” I ask, low.
“Lost count.”
The air thins and devastation wracks me again for the fiftieth time tonight.
“Fuck. Remo. I had no idea.”
He shakes his head like he’s shaking off a guilt that’s been inked to his shoulders.
“I learned early,” he continues, “that watching meant I wasn’t the one it was happening to.”
My eyes close and my fingers grip tighter around the railing. All this time I’ve been directing my rage at my brother and I had no idea what he’d been carrying too.
“Watching meant my turn never came around.”
Jesus Christ.
Remo laughs again, but there’s no humor in it. He rubs a hand over his mouth, then drags it down his face.
“There was this one time,” he says, slowly. “I was twelve, maybe.”
My stomach hollows out.
“He brought someone in. A girl. She wasn’t much older than us.” His eyes go distant. “She was crying—begging.”
My vision edges with red and my fists clench so hard around the metal it wouldn’t take much to yank the whole thing off.
Remo’s voice stays eerily calm. “He made me stand there. Told me if I looked away… I’d take her place.”
The sky seems to fall around us and a new understanding of what we all went through rearranges in my brain.
“I didn’t look away,” he says.
A long, suffocating silence follows.
“I watched everything.”
His voice cracks on the last word, and suddenly I get it. I get why he’s so angry all the time, why he’s so hellbent on any form of revenge, why he feels a visceral need to control everything—every outcome.
Remo exhales tensely and shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it.
“And now I can’t stop.”
I frown. “Can’t stop… what?”
His eyes flick to mine. And for the first time in my life, I see in them something completely untethered.
“You’re not the only one who watches people, Fiero.”
“What…” I swallow, my throat drier than bone. “What do you watch?”
A beat passes and I pray he isn’t watching the same kind of thing—beatings, rapes, raw-knuckled murder.
“Women,” he replies.
“In what way?” I ask slowly.
“I follow them. Track them. Learn their routines.” His lip curls like he hates himself for it. “I don’t touch them. Don’t speak to them. I don’t even want to.”
A hollow laugh escapes him.
“But I need to know where they are,” he continues. “What they’re doing. Who they’re with.”
“How many?” I ask. “At any one time?”
“For a long time I’d watch two or three.” He lifts a shoulder. “But lately… Well, for about two years now… just one.”
I nod slowly.
“I hate it. I hate that I can’t stop. That it feels like…” He sighs heavily. “A weakness.”
I finally release the railing and stuff my hands into my pockets. “Is that what you thought when I got close to Pfeiffer? She was my weakness?”
His brow dips like he’s coming to the same realization as me. “I guess.”
The truth hits me like a freight train.
“You projected it onto me.”
“I suppose I did,” he says simply. “I needed you to be wrong.”
The honesty in that nearly knocks the breath out of me.
“So I pushed and pushed, until you did what I wanted.”
My stomach twists.
“And it had nothing to do with her,” I finish.
Remo lets out a long breath.
“No,” he admits. “It didn’t.”
Silence settles between us again. I don’t feel the need to chastise him. I’ve waded back through my trauma and come out the other side. He’s still caught in the middle of his.
“I’m sorry,” he says, surprising me with how raw and genuine it sounds. “I didn’t realize it until tonight. Until you walked in the way you did.”
I bark out a bitter laugh. “Fucking heartbroken you mean?”
“Yeah.” He looks down at his glass. “I thought I was protecting us.”
I nod slowly. “I know.”
Remo scrubs a hand over his face again. “You should go back to her,” he says with a resigned sigh.
“She doesn’t want me.”
His gaze flicks to mine. “Then make her.”
“I wish I could.” My focus drifts again. “It’s not that easy. I forced her to neglect her father, took away her means of supporting him, broke her trust. I don’t deserve her.”
“It was a mistake, Fiero. It was all one giant fucking mistake. You and her…” He rakes a hand down his face. “You were meant to be. I fucking hated that but it’s true.”
I don’t move or respond.
“You know what you deserve?”
“What?” I deadpan.
“To be happy.”
“So?”
“So… do whatever makes you happy, brother. And she’ll come back.”
My laugh is bitter. “How do you know that?”
Then he shocks me by issuing a statement he must have stolen from a sappy romance novel. “Because true love doesn’t know how to hold a grudge.”