Chapter 43 #2
God. His scent. I’d missed it. It was no longer there, on my pillows, in my kitchen, in my closet.
All the telltales he’d been to my apartment along the years, stalking me, terrorizing me.
I’d always straddled the line between terrified and enamored with this man.
He was the monster from the closet I’d always hoped would sneak into my bed.
The one I fell in love with, even though the fairy tales warned me not to.
“I drank your sister’s breast milk today.” My lips moved over his stubbled jawline as I spoke.
Achilles stiffened, his arms tightening around me possessively. “What kind of kinky shit are you two into these days? I don’t share, Tierney. Not even with my sister.”
“It was an accident.” I forced myself to step back. “She put it in a jug in the fridge, with no label or anything.”
“Only more reason not to touch it. Who keeps unlabeled milk?”
“Is everyone begging to be stabbed today?” I threw my hands in the air. “I made an error in judgment. I’m a little out of my depth here, all right?”
“You should come live with me.”
“Achilles, I barely agreed to one drink with you,” I groaned, aghast. “Anyway, did you bring me what I asked for?”
“Wine, yes, cigarettes, no.”
“Why not?”
“It’s unhealthy.”
“You smoke.”
“No shit. And I don’t care about my life nearly as much as I do yours.”
Deciding we had plenty of time to bicker, I stepped aside and let him in. Our first stop was upstairs, in Nero’s room. Achilles always took a moment to nuzzle his nephew and speak to him in Italian.
“Gennarino, you rascal. Look how big you are!”
I stood at the door, hugging myself as Imma watched the scene from the nursing chair while Achilles blew raspberries on Nero’s tummy.
My nephew cooed happily, throwing clenched fists in the air and trying to bite Achilles’s nose with his mostly toothless mouth.
A deep, bone-crushing agony tore through me.
Family was important to him. This had always been true.
He’d be a good father one day.
If he doesn’t end up with you.
Clearing my throat, I stepped back. “I’ll go open that wine downstairs.”
“Now behave, piccolino.” Achilles handed Nero back to the nanny and followed me silently down the stairs and through the patio doors.
A server had already spread different cheeses, olives, and prosciutto on a charcuterie board.
The wine waited for us with two tall glasses.
Achilles opened and poured it, his silence buzzing in my ears.
“How’s the war with Coppola going?” I asked, wanting to steer the conversation into a more neutral subject.
“In full swing.” He took a sip of his wine. “He’s been taking over our territory while we chip at his manpower, taking out his soldiers one at a time. Luca thinks we should give him concessions after what happened and eat the loss. I think we should off him.”
“It’s unlike you to listen to Luca.” I popped a garlic-stuffed olive into my mouth, chewing slowly. “You usually do what you want and deal with the consequences later.” If at all.
“Usually,” he agreed blandly. “But everyone’s riding my ass after I detonated the two-century Camorra Alliance structure to get my dick wet.”
“I can imagine Vello’s going to make you jump through hoops now to make you don.”
“Nah, I blew my chance for the crown.” He waved me off. “Got demoted. It’s done.”
My heart ceased to beat. A shot of pain zipped through it.
Being the don was what Achilles had worked for ever since he was twelve.
He sought his father’s approval in a fierce, obsessive way.
It was why I’d almost killed myself when we were young.
I knew he’d regret the decision to marry me forever if he knew I couldn’t give him heirs.
“I’d say I’m sorry, but none of it was my making.” I fiddled with the stem of my wineglass.
“All right, Tier. Let’s cut the crap. I love you. You love me. Everything else can be sorted. Get off your metaphorical high horse. Say the word, and I’ll announce our engagement in tomorrow’s newspapers.”
I choked on an olive, coughing it out into my fist. “That’s the lousiest love declaration—”
“It’s not a love declaration.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “To declare is to announce new information. This is old news. I’ve loved you since that first night I found you bundled up in your bed like a little mouse when we were kids.”
New or not, the information brought me to my knees.
No matter how hard I tried to fight it, his affection and approval always mattered to me.
But admitting it terrified me. He’d hurt me so much over the years, putting my trust in him felt like suicide.
Putting my trust in any man felt like a colossal mistake.
“Well, I don’t lov—”
“You do.” His eyes were locked on mine. “Stop fucking lying, Tierney.”
I tried swallowing the lump in my throat.
“I’m scared to love you.”
“Why?”
“We’ve treated each other horribly. Your love is toxic, mine, barren; we’ve hurt each other too much to just move on like nothing happened.”
“We never gave up on each other,” he countered. “We never tapped out. That means something.”
“I’m too haunted by the past.”
“No, you’re finally facing it,” he said fiercely. “You’ve been ignoring who you were, your story, for most of your adult life. This is healing, Tierney. It’s messy as fuck, but anything worth doing is.”
I wanted to believe him. I did. Because the alternative was admitting to myself that I wasn’t healing. That I was just stuck in an inferno of never-ending agony and vomit-inducing flashbacks.
“You’re a controlling piece of shit.” I sighed in despair.
He opened his mouth, likely to bite my head off, realized he was about to validate my accusation, and closed it with a scowl. “I’ll do better.”
“I need to see you’ve changed before I tie my fate to yours,” I said.
“How can I do that?”
I licked my lips, meeting his gaze. “Show me you’ve changed your ways. No more stalking. No more overbearing rules. No more surveillance. None of that. Freedom. I want my freedom.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He didn’t like it. But he didn’t have a choice, either.
“I can do that.”
“Can you?”
“Ye—no.” He scratched his jaw. Blew out a breath. “Fuck, yes. Yes. For you, I’ll do that.”
I wanted to throw up. Was I really giving him another chance?
Do you really have a choice?
He was a vital organ nestled inside me. With a pulse and a function—a living, breathing thing. If there were no him, there’d be no me.
He was the one person I knew would always be there, would always help, not because we shared a bloodline or trauma, like Tiernan, but because we shared a soul.
We stared at each other from across the table.
“I can’t give you heirs,” I reminded him. “So if this is something that’s important to you…”
“You’re important to me.”
“And issues,” I went on, ignoring his statement, eyes stuck on the table in front of me stubbornly. “I have a lot of them. I will put you through hell.”
“I would choose hell with you over heaven with anyone else, any day of the week.”
The panic inside me increased tenfold. We were doing this. Really. Weapons down. Just…letting ourselves succumb to our feelings. Over a decade after the fact but better late than never, right?
“How did you lose it?” Achilles cleared his throat. “Your…”
“Uterus?” I swallowed, pasting on a nervous smile.
He was so careful not prodding, not asking anything about my past, not when we were kids and not at the cabin.
But he deserved to know. “I was raped one too many times, by five too many men, at the work camp.” I recited it as though it didn’t happen to me but to someone else.
Sticking to the facts. “I was twelve, and although being subjected to rape was a punishment Igor loved giving us, I did this one to myself.” A grim smile found my lips.
“See, the work camp we lived at in Siberia had a terrible food shortage. I was hungry all the time. Sometimes that hunger drove me to do stupid things. Like offering my body for a bowl of oatmeal or dry crackers. We’d go to the woods, and I’d let the older soldiers…
use me, in exchange for food. My logic was that I was already being raped on a weekly basis.
What did it matter if it happened a few more times or a few less?
” I let loose a self-deprecating laugh. “Still, I didn’t do it as often as I’d wanted to because Tiernan went ballistic whenever he found out, but it happened enough. ”
Achilles schooled his face to look unreadable. Probably so I wouldn’t see the pity in it. I took another swig of my wine.
“I went to the woods that night with five boys. They said they had beef jerky, and I believed them. I think I was hallucinating from hunger at that point. Immediately when we got there, I knew that time was different. They were drunk. Very drunk. They stole alcohol from Igor. As soon as we were off camp, they pinned me down to the snow and started…experimenting with me.”
I closed my eyes, rattled by my own admission.
I hadn’t told this to anyone. Not my friends.
Not my family members. Not my therapists.
Many filled in the details in their minds but I never outright spoke the words.
“They stuffed snow into me until my body temperature dropped and I fainted. They cut me. They hit me. They bit me to a point that, when Tiernan later found me, he thought I’d been mauled by wolves.
And they raped me while I was unconscious, including with the vodka bottle. So many times, I nearly bled out.”