Chapter 10
GIANA
M y old bedroom is just as I left it.
I know it hasn’t been that long, and yet…it feels like a lifetime ago. The whole mansion feels that way. It’s like someone stole the familiarity of it the moment I chose to run from home.
Home. Something I don’t think this place is anymore.
I set my bags down, letting out a bone deep sigh. Exhaustion weighs down on me like a thousand rocks, and for a moment, I'm tempted to collapse onto the untouched bedspread, but I resist.
My weary eyes take in the room. Once a comforting hue, the lavender walls now seem disconcertingly bright and garish. This is my room. I know that. It just doesn’t feel like it belongs to me anymore.
A thin layer of dust covers my old bedside table. I guess the housekeepers no longer frequent this room since I’ve left, and my dad isn’t one to keep on top of staff matters regarding the household. Now that I’m back, it’ll probably fall on me to manage staff.
I run a finger over the surface, watching as my fingertip paints a clear line through the gray. The sensation is oddly comforting. Reminiscent of a past life.
For a second, I close my eyes, thinking of…him. The things he said. How I make him reckless. Out of control. How he makes rash decisions with high-priced consequences because of me.
A part of me hates that I do that to him, but a different part of me feels a strange thrill at the thought. The power of sending someone spiraling out of control with just my presence is intoxicating, even if it's wrong. It's a sick, twisted validation of my significance in his life.
Since day one, the night in the woods, we’ve been fire and flames, heat and destruction, constantly teetering on the edge of disaster.
But that’s us.
That’s who we are together.
Two people who can turn the road to ruin into a path to liberation. For us. Not for those around us. People got hurt. A life was lost. And now my brother’s life is caught in the crossfire.
This is no longer about us and our addiction to chaos. We're not isolated in our little world of fiery passion and rebellion. We're entangled in a web of consequences that spreads far beyond our volatile relationship—if one can call it that.
Because of me, because he no longer trusts his instincts around me, he’s refusing to help my father protect my brother.
Does he really hate my father that much?
I saw the way Caelian looked at him, the darkness in his eyes. The fury. It scared me. In a way, it hurt me, because the man is still my father. He might have done wrong, done questionable things, but he’s still my flesh and blood, the one thing that holds utmost importance for a family like ours. A family like the Del Rossas.
On our way here, my father didn’t say a word. The tension was palpable, a thick fog of silence that filled the car and nosed its way into every corner. His face was set in a hard line, his eyes staring straight ahead.
I watched as his fingers drummed on the leather armrest, a rhythmic beat to the silence. He’s worried. Nervous. And rightfully so. Aurelio is nothing but unpredictable, and Caelian made it clear he’ll get no support from the Dark Sovereign. And Nicoli didn’t intervene, which means he agrees with his brother. Cristiano’s safety is in our hands— my hands.
After we arrived back at the house, my father mumbled something about meetings, and I haven’t seen him since.
So, with my father off doing whatever business he has, I take the time to settle in.I find myself bypassing the turn for the kitchen and heading to the back where the pretty gardens are, and a small parlor.
The light filters in from the garden beyond the picture window. I look around, taking a moment, breathing in the still-perfumed air.
The polished wood beneath my feet glows. My mother loved this room. It’s so pretty, feminine, with delicate velvet furniture in rich colors, the wall of books, the art deco desk where she’d work. Writing letters, sending gifts, doing…whatever it was that her era of mafia wives did.
I move about, touching the room diffuser that smells of a French rose garden, the reeds only freshly turned, as they glisten with the oil.
Mother wore a perfume that matched, so the air is her. And if I close my eyes and breathe in, I can see her—nearly hear the soft scratch of her pen against paper, her musical laughter while Cristiano and I played near her feet.
I touch the many books lining the shelves, remembering how she read to me when I was younger. The smell of the paper, that comforting scent, the rustle of pages as she turned them—it all transports me to a time that seems like yesterday yet feels like a thousand lifetimes ago.
Nostalgia starts to give way to a fresh wave of grief as memories trickle in, but I’ve had enough of hurting for one day and decide to step out of the parlor, heading back to the house.
I leave and go to the kitchen, getting juice from the large refrigerator. Sipping, I go from room to room, then back up the stairs to the library, and finally back to my own.
The air everywhere holds whiffs of the past, echoes of voices and laughter. Of tears. It holds my childhood dreams, like the one where I wanted to be swept up and taken off by a prince I chose. Someone from far away who had nothing to do with the world I grew up in.
But childhood is full of dreams. Full of lies. Full of naivety that is cruelly stripped away as we age.
I throw myself on the pale cream linen-covered bed and sigh.
This isn’t my home anymore. Nothing about this place feels comforting like a home should.
The decor, the architecture, even the air is imbued with an identity that isn’t mine. Not anymore. Not for a long time. I don’t really know where home is. There was a fleeting moment I thought it was with him. Caelian. His family. But I was wrong.
I press my lips together at the thought of his name, the bright and brilliant flare of memories, and a sharp ache twists and turns in me.
“Don’t think about the prick,” I mutter. Easier said than done, because while he said?—
I shut that down. Then I sit up and grab my old blue bear that’s worn in places and hug it to me.
I’m a stranger in a stranger’s room in a stranger’s house. Maybe it’s because I’ve changed? It hasn’t been that long, yet it’s like I’m in some museum.
I put the bear down and rise, going over to the vanity, cream-painted wood, a beautiful antique I remember picking out with my mom.
Something simple, she told me, not too girly, not modern, but something that could move through life with me. She thought if I ever had a daughter, it’d be perfect to pass on, and if I didn’t, it could serve in a dressing room in a house of my own.
I try to picture it among Caelian’s things. I can’t. His strong personality doesn’t make room for such things. Or maybe mine doesn’t either. This is something Mira would love. I’m not sure it’s me.
Not anymore.
When I ran to New York, desperate to escape the life my father picked for me, one of marriage to a man who, even before I met him, felt like a monster, I was pretty much still a virgin. In my head. In experience? Well, once removed. And now… I’ve changed.
But the world I come from has stayed exactly where it was, making me estranged. Because I’m not the little girl or the teenager of this room. I’m not the woman who let a stranger fuck me in the middle of the woods to try to be something a man like Aurelio wouldn’t want.
I’m not the girl who ran from home to hide in New York. The girl who fled to find freedom, to let the spirit in me fly.
All I’d ever wanted was that freedom. To be me, to own who I was, and fill my life with my own decisions, ones that might be right or wrong, to make mistakes. To win or fail. Fairly. Without anyone else dictating or forcing or even guiding me.
Mother always lamented I was a free spirit, but I still don’t see what’s so wrong with that. Yet all those dreams, that girl, it’s all fragmented. The past me is a remnant of a dusty shelf or a frame.
Now…
Now, I’m a woman. I’m young, yes, but I’ve got a perspective. I realize everything can’t be about me, about what I want—especially not if it hurts someone I care about. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our wants for the needs of others.
In my efforts to cling to the soul inside, to let it bloom, I became someone with life experience, and I know what lust and passion and desire are. At a bone level. Heart pounding, body melting level.
I know they don’t exist alone; they tangle with heartache, frustrations, laughter and tears, and quiet moments. There are highs and lows, gentle hills, small valleys, and frightening cliff drops.
Those emotions come with words that lash like storms and leave havoc and devastation in their wake.
I go to my window and stare out at the grounds, once so familiar and now seemingly a cage, a place I’m too big for.
This house, this estate is nothing compared to the Del Rossa property. Everything about that family is larger than life. Their world seems to extend infinitely, opulence and grandeur following them wherever they go.
Their power is this living, breathing thing that swallows anyone who comes too close. It's intoxicating, captivating, the kind of influence that leaves everyone in their orbit spellbound. The Del Rossas don’t simply exist, they reign. They command.
They seduce.
I swallow hard.
Caelian. The world’s most annoying, frustrating, addictive man ever. If it were a free choice, I would never have chosen him. But we don’t only clash, we mesh. We’re like wind and rain. Together, we’re a hurricane—destructive, disastrous, catastrophic…but so damn powerful.
The urge to cry is overwhelming. For the first time in months, he’s not here, not around me. I’m the farthest from him I’ve been since it all started—physically and emotionally. And I hate it. Inside, it’s like I’m hungry, like there’s a hole I don’t know how to fill.
Is this what passion, desire, lust, and… love do to someone?
Makes you crazy and all over the place all at once. Makes you want the thing that doesn’t want you, the thing that’s bad and good and everything all at once.
I stop.
Love.
My breath shudders.
I love him. And today I told him that. It was a shitty day to confess something so profound, but odds are I’ll never get the chance to say those words to him again. Rather now than never, although I did think saying those words and meaning it for the very first time would be different. It’s supposed to be a happy moment. Instead, it was the opposite.
I stare down at my hand, at the wedding ring glinting. With a breath that catches in my throat, I slip it off, closing my fist around it a few moments before going to my vanity, dropping it in the drawer and closing it.
A door slams somewhere downstairs. Maybe Dad’s home.
I don’t go to see if it’s him or one of the people working here, a maid or a guard, or even my brother. It’s probably Dad, though; he said he wouldn’t be that long. But I’m not ready to talk with him because I need to be stone when I do. I need my head on straight, thinking rationally if I want to survive what’s ahead. And right now, my heart hurts. My bones hurt. Everything hurts, even breathing.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up stronger. I have to.
“Oh, my God, Giana, Dad said you were back.”
Cristiano races into the room and picks me up, whirling me about, and planting a big kiss on my cheek.
I put on a smile and hug him back, heart full as I squeeze him, looking up into his handsome, smiling face.
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” I ask with a grin.
“Hey, I’m allowed to visit my favorite sister. Besides, school’s out, remember? End of term?” He gives me a playful smirk. “I know you’re ancient, but surely you can recall those days.”
“Cut it out.” I pinch his stomach with a light twist of his t-shirt, his jeans riding low.
He jerks away, feigning pain. “Ow.” Cristiano glares at me with narrowed eyes. “So…where’s your husband?”
The words stick in my throat like broken glass. I can’t say it. I can’t get myself to say the words out loud.
It hurts too much.