Chapter 36 Lena
LENA
Imean, there are only so many twists and turns and gulps of whiskey a girl can take before she throws up. I manage to shift to the side just in time, sparing Aldo’s shoes the worst of it.
The capo mutters in Italian.
Despite the armed guards, Rem comes closer, his voice full of concern. “Shit, piccola. Are you okay?”
Not really, no. But I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up again, so I give him a weak thumbs-up with one hand as I wipe my mouth with the other. A moment later Aldo hands me a handkerchief, the edges so sharply pressed they could cut.
Stepping away from my embarrassing mess, I wave off all offers of help as I make a beeline for the window behind Aldo’s desk. It swings open without a fight, and I suck down the frigid night air.
I attempt to block out the heated argument that’s happening behind me, Rem and Aldo talking rapidly in Italian as I rest my forehead on the window casing. Eyes shut, I try and fail to block out the word that’s hammering itself into my skull.
Daughter.
The men are getting louder, one of the guards daring to intercede. I hear someone curse as furniture topples over. I look over, my growing irritation beating out all other emotions. “Hey. Hey!” I shout, “Stop!”
Oblivious, Rem and Aldo keep yelling at each other. The guard that hit the ground is scrambling to find his footing and his gun. The Italian curses are reaching a fever pitch, and my irritation escalates to full-blown anger. “Rem, Aldo—stop shouting!”
When neither do, I grab the heaviest thing close to me—a giant book off one of Aldo’s shelves—and hurl it in their direction.
My aim is shit. I miss the men entirely and instead hit one of the sconce lights behind Aldo’s shoulder. The fixture breaks, the lightbulb explodes, sparks fly, and four heads whip in my direction in comical unison.
“Lena?” Aldo and Rem say at the same time.
“Stop. Fucking. Shouting.” Each word is punctuated by a deep breath. “And stop talking about me in a language I don’t understand. And you—” I stab a finger in Aldo’s direction. “Tell your men to lower their guns. Make them to leave. Now.”
I’m seething, itching to throw another book as I glare at the foursome. When no one moves, I grab another one from the shelf, winding up for what will no doubt be another disastrous throw. “I said now.”
“Okay, piccola.” Rem is the one who ushers the guards out of the office, closing the door once they’re gone. Some sort of power shift has happened during their fight, Aldo apparently changing his mind about Rem being a danger to me.
I narrow my eyes at the two remaining men, waving the book between them. “That was too easy. What did you say to each other?”
Rem takes one step closer to me. “I was just reassuring my uncle that I would never hurt you. That I’ve never put your life at risk.”
“Despite being ordered to kill her,” Aldo growls.
“By you, stronzo,” Rem growls back. They are toe to toe and on the verge of another battle.
“Enough.” I slump against the window. “Please, that’s enough. No more fighting. We have other things to discuss.”
Like the fact that Aldo called me his daughter.
A new awareness crackles through the room.
Rem brushes past his uncle and is by my side a second later.
Despite the eye daggers Aldo is shooting his direction, my husband pulls me into a crushing hug, his lips a welcome pressure against my forehead.
“Are you okay, mia amata? Truly, you’re not hurt? Sick?”
“Not physically,” I assure him. “But I could really use a glass of water.”
“Of course.” Rem guides me to the small sofa next to the fireplace.
I collapse onto it. He’s back a moment later with a glass of ice water.
I sip it cautiously as Rem perches on the armrest next to me, his hand finding a home on the nape of my neck.
His touch is warm, grounding as Aldo watches our every move with a calculating gaze.
He lets silence settle before asking Rem, “You didn’t know?”
“No. I didn’t.” No elaborate protest, no prevarication. Just truth in his voice, conviction on his face.
“You’re talking about me again, aren’t you?”
Rem casts me an embarrassed glance. “Sorry. You’re a riveting subject of conversation.”
“Fuck you.” It’s half-hearted, but—“I’m tired of all of this. Of everyone knowing more about me than I do.” I look at Aldo. “So, start talking. You said something before, just when Rem came in… You said…”
I can’t get the words out. Aldo finishes the sentence for me. “That you’re my biological daughter.”
My heart starts pounding really hard, my hands clammy around the glass I’m holding. “Yeah. That.” I have to clear my throat to make the words intelligible. “Tell me more about that.”
Aldo responds by pulling one his leather armchairs closer to the sofa, settling in with all the grace of a king. If anything about the past few hours has unsettled him there’s no indication of it.
His eyes get a far-off look and then he says, “I met Maria Bianchi in our village in Italy when I was in my late twenties. She was young, no more than eighteen. That was the first problem. The second was that I fell in love with her long before she fell for me.”
A smile ghosts across his mouth. I’m not prepared for how sad it is. How wistful.
“The third problem,” Aldo continues, “was that we were forbidden from seeing each other. She was promised to another man. I was promised to another woman and about to take over the Family from my grandfather. Neither of us could afford to break with our families. Running away wasn’t an option.”
Aldo gives me a considering look. “I’m sure it sounds archaic to you, Lena, but arranged marriages are still alive and well within the 'Ndrangheta. It’s how alliances are made, power kept, expanded.
If it weren’t for this situation”—he waves a hand between me and Rem— “my nephew would’ve been getting married to a woman of my choosing before year’s end. ”
Rem sucks in a breath, as startled by the information as I am.
“Veramente? You can’t possibly be surprised, nipote,” his uncle says. “There’s very little room for love in our world. Not when loyalty trumps everything else.”
I lean forward, pinning Aldo with a hard look. “You really believe that?”
“What I believe doesn’t matter, not right now.”
I’m about to argue but Aldo preemptively waves away my protest. “Do you want to know the rest of the story or not?”
“Yes.” Fine. Rem massages the back of my neck and I lean closer to him, enjoying how our physical proximity makes Aldo twitchy.
“As I was saying—Maria and I were forbidden from having any sort of relationship. She got married and moved to another city. I took my position as the head of the Family and eventually moved to Chicago when we expanded west. I forced myself to stop thinking about her, to stop wondering about every facet of her life. If she was happy. If she missed me. If she had learned to love her husband.”
“Were you really able to do that, to force yourself to forget about her like that?” I ask.
That wistful smile returns. “No,” Aldo confirms. “I was horrible at it. But I was very good at lying to myself, telling myself it didn’t matter. She and I were forbidden. Our relationship was over.” He shifts in his chair, the first real sign of discomfort he’s given. “Until…it wasn’t.”
Aldo stands, goes to the bar, pours himself a drink. He downs the liquor with one toss of his head, his back tense as he gives himself a minute. “She didn’t keep her move to Chicago a secret. She wouldn’t have been able to even if she’d wanted to.”
He gives us a pointed look. “There’s little that happens in this town that I don’t know about.
Her husband, while not officially part of the Family, was an ally of ours.
A partner of sorts. A stronzo, but someone we wanted alive.
Or so I thought. They moved here three years before you were born.
And I stayed away as long as I could. I thought I was doing us both a favor, leaving the past in the past. Then I saw the photos. ”
A fission of awareness goes through me, dread curling through my stomach. Rem strokes my neck. I find his other hand, lace our fingers together. “What photos?”
“Police photos.” Aldo scrubs his face, like he’s trying to erase the images from long ago.
“Her husband had beaten her so badly their housekeeper had called 911 after he’d stormed out of the house.
The hospital called the police. The chief of police called me.
From that point on, everything changed.”
“You resumed your relationship, despite both being married?”
Aldo shrugs. “My wife and I had an arrangement. While we respected each other and became friends, we never loved each other. Not like that. I loved Maria, refused to let her suffer a moment longer with her shit of a husband. The arrogant fuck. I couldn’t kill him, but I could stop him from hurting her.
At least, that’s what I thought. I moved Maria into one of my houses and for almost a year we were together. Happily, or so I thought.”
“What happened to change that? Why did she run away?” Question after question compounds in my head. “Why did you tell Rem she betrayed you? Why, after all this time, did you order him to track her down?”
“So many questions, Lena.” Aldo settles back in the armchair. “Are you always like this?”
“Unwilling to stay uninformed about my own life? Yeah, I’m always like this.”
Rem chokes back a laugh as Aldo just sighs.
“The answer to your first two questions is, I don’t know.
Or I didn’t, not at the time. I knew Maria was unhappy about some parts of our arrangement.
We were both raised in strict Catholic families.
That alone prevented us from getting divorces, let alone how much it would’ve fucked up Family alliances.
And while I spent as much time with her as I could, we weren’t able to live together as we wanted.
I was only partially hers, and she was only partially mine.
That weighed on both of us. And, looking back on it, I think it made Maria feel less safe than I realized. ”
“What do you mean?” Rem asks.
“Well, in the eyes of the law and the church, her husband still had claim to her. He couldn’t lay a finger on her in Chicago, but it was harder to protect Maria outside the city.
Returning to Italy safely was almost impossible, so she was separated from her mother and sisters.
The sense of isolation must’ve been overwhelming.
On the other hand, if Maria dared step outside the little world we’d created, she was putting her life at risk.
From her husband, from his family, even from my own enemies who would hurt her as a way of attacking me. ”
Just hearing Aldo describe Maria’s situation makes the walls feel like they are closing in.
Maybe because I’ve had my own taste of what she was going through.
“She couldn’t live like that. Alone, cut off from everything and everyone she loved except you, and unable to have you the way she wanted. So, she decided to leave.”
Rem’s hand stiffens in mine, his large frame going still. I’m guessing he’s made the same correlation I have. I can picture Aldo and Maria having the same fight about safety and seclusion that Rem and I have had.
Aldo is watching us, his wickedly sharp eyes catching every nuance of our unspoken exchange.
He’s addressing both me and Rem when he says, “At the time, I didn’t know why she left.
I’m still not absolutely certain. I only have an educated guess based on what I’ve learned since.
But what I do know is that I wish she’d come to me before running away.
I wish she’d told me what she found so unbearable about our life that escaping it seemed like her only option.
I wish she’d told me so we could’ve fixed it together. ”
“When you ordered me to find Maria, did you already know she was dead?” There’s tension in Rem’s voice, an undercurrent of betrayal.
“I didn’t know but I suspected,” says Aldo. “Twenty-three years is a long time to stay hidden from me.”
“But you didn’t know she’d had a child?” says Rem.
“No,” Aldo answers. He leans toward us, his eyes tracking every inch of my face.
“I didn’t know Maria had given birth. I didn’t know much at all.
I only had suspicions. Ones based on a bruised ego and a broken heart.
I knew she’d left me. I knew she hadn’t given me a reason, at least not one I was smart or mature enough at the time to understand.
I believed she’d betrayed me, our relationship, our life together.
I knew she’d vanished, and I was so angry. Angry and broken.”
Aldo releases the breath that he’s been holding, like confessing this has lifted a weight from his shoulders.
“I didn’t suspect that Maria was pregnant.
I like to think that if I had known, I would’ve understood her decision better.
Not agreed with it, mind you. I would’ve fought tooth and nail to keep Maria, to keep our child—and yet knowing that’s how I would’ve reacted, I understand even better why Maria felt she needed to leave. I understand, but I don’t forgive.”
The vulnerability in Aldo’s expression vanishes, shields dropping over his eyes. “I loved your mother, Lena. I grieve her death. But I cannot forgive her for leaving me and taking you with her.”
I hold the older man’s gaze. “That’s one hell of a story, but how do you know I’m your daughter? You keep repeating it as if it’s fact, but how do you know?”
“Simple,” he says. “Rumor, science, and a little gold necklace.”