Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
ANTHONY
I stand on the beach, the sand wet beneath my feet, the ocean still loud behind me.
Anger, fear, and frustration thrum through me in equal measure.
What I did? What the hell did I do? Her words chase me up the beach, impossible to unhear, impossible to set down.
She says it with such certainty, not as an accusation thrown in anger, but as a fact she’s carried for years.
I storm after her, catching up only when she reaches the manicured edge of the gardens, where the beach gives way to trimmed lawn and the house rises white and indifferent above us both.
I clasp her arm and wrench her around to face me. "What do you mean by that? I didn't do anything to you."
Isabella scoffs and looks at me as though I’m a piece of lying shit.
"Don't pretend to be all innocent and blind to what took place.
Five years ago, when I told you about the baby, you were speechless.
I thought it might just be shock. We were both very young, after all, the differences between our families made us difficult, but then after you'd gone for a walk, Alex came and told me everything. "
The word lands like a stone dropped into still water.
I go still. "Everything?" I say it slowly, buying myself a second, because the memory of that day is already surfacing. Not the version she describes, but mine. The version I live with. I remember that day. I go for a walk and stop at a baby clothing store, where I buy some things for Isabella, hoping to make her day a little better. I want to celebrate. Young or not, we’re going to be a family. I love her. I’m terrified and twenty-three and completely certain, all at once.
So what the hell is she talking about? "When I return to the apartment, Alex drove me to a bar nearby and told me that you'd left. That even though you’re pregnant, you don't want to have the baby. "
"What?" Isabella frowns and starts to pace across the lawn. "You’re a liar. Alex didn't say anything of the kind."
Oh yes, he fucking did… "He did,” I growl, clearing my throat so I don’t scare her off.
“I swear on my brother’s lives. He told me you had been using me all those months, wanting to make a Moretti fall in love with a Romero just to dump me when you were successful.
He told me the game you were playing had gotten out of hand, and you'd pushed it too far, and now you were pregnant.
Alex told me you were going to abort the baby because the world didn't need another Moretti. "
The words taste foul in my mouth, even now.
I had believed them. Isabella gapes, and I watch her face move through something I don't have a word for—astonishment first, then a kind of dawning, crumbling horror, as though the ground beneath her is quietly giving way. My mind blurs with memories, horrible and painful, recollections that don’t align with what she’s saying now. "Was that true?" I ask.
She swallows before biting her bottom lip. "Alex told me you left. That you didn't want the baby by a Romero whore, and that you wanted me to get rid of it. That everything between us had been bullshit, so I did. I got rid of it."
"Isabella…" My chest does something I’m not prepared for.
It doesn't tighten so much as collapse inward, a slow implosion behind the sternum that takes my breath and doesn't return it.
I stand there in my wet board shorts, salt-dried and sand-covered, and I feel twenty-three years old again and absolutely gutted.
I want to vomit. I want to punch the wall, the ground, Alex Romero.
I want to hit something until this severing pain has somewhere to go other than directly through the center of me.
"I never said any of that. I went to get you a present and flowers. Alex informed me that you were playing a game and that it was over. That I’d lost. That I wouldn't be seeing you again because you didn't want to see me. "
I hear how it sounds as I say it. How clean and simple and devastating. Two people stand on either side of the same lie, both of us believing it completely, both of us alone with it for five years. It festers and contaminates us both with its growing hate and infection.
She stops pacing and stares at me, as white as a ghost. She sways, and I reach for her, but she swipes my hands away. "My brother?” She swallows and looks away. “Alex is capable of many things, but this is too cruel. I don’t believe you."
I look at her for a long moment. She’s still shaking slightly.
From the ocean, the shock, from something she hasn't named yet.
The lie her brother forged as truth. Her hair is wet and tangled about her shoulders, her eyes too wide, and she looks in this moment the way I imagine I appear, like someone trying to hold a shape that is no longer solid.
I run a hand over my jaw and stare at her.
She'd nearly drowned twenty minutes ago, and now I feel as though I’m the one underwater, struggling to reach the surface.
"You don’t believe that the same brother who is now in cahoots with the Russians isn't capable of lying to you? Of breaking us up merely because I’m a Moretti and you were a Romero?
" I don’t think it possible, but she pales even further.
"He would not…" Her voice trails off and I know she knows.
"You give him far too much credit than he deserves.
He is capable of putting you into the line of fire merely to take over the Romero family.
What happened in Lucien's office is proof of that.
" I shake my head, and the anger that moves through me now is not at her. It’s at myself, at the twenty-three-year-old version of me who stands in that bar and lets Alex Romero dismantle everything without so much as going back to ask her.
I should have gone back. Why the hell hadn't I gone back?
"He’s your brother, and so of course you believe what he says, and back then he hadn't proven himself untrustworthy.
But now you must see that he doesn't have good intentions.
And he didn't have them five years ago."
The garden is very quiet around us. Somewhere beyond the hedges, a bird calls once and then stops.
The sun is full and warm and completely indifferent to what is happening between us out here, and I’m aware, distantly, of how wrong that feels.
That the world carries on so normally when something I buried five years ago is being exhumed in real time.
I stare at Isabella. She looks so frail standing there.
Small and wet and broken open in a way I have never seen her, not once in all the years I've known her, not even today in the water when she was frightened.
I want to reach for her, to close the distance between us and do something useful with my hands.
I also want to shake her for being so easy to manipulate.
I then immediately retract that thought, because I was just as easy.
We both were. We were young, and we trusted the wrong person, and Alex Romero knows exactly which buttons to press on each of us to make us collapse.
"I would never have asked you to abort our child. You should have known me better than to believe that."
"When you left, I just thought…" She reaches up to cover her mouth with her hand. I see it then. The first fracture in the facade she’s been maintaining since the moment I pulled her out of the water.
Her eyes go bright and glassy, and she lifts her chin, fighting the inevitable.
The hard, impenetrable front she upholds isn't as strong as she'd like it to be.
Not after everything that has already been asked of her today.
I don't move toward her. I'm not sure she'd let me, and I'm not sure I trust myself with her right now. So I stand there and take it. The weight of what she’s saying, the burden of what we’ve both lost, the load of five years of hatred built on a foundation that never existed.
"I believed him," she says at last.
"And so you had an abortion?"
Her eyes meet mine, wide and glassy. "I did," she admits.
The two words are very small. They don’t feel small.
I nod. There’s nothing adequate to say. No version of language covers this.
A child existed and then didn't, because two people who loved each other were fed the same lie by the same man, and neither of us had the courage or the clarity to go back and check.
We were lied to. The baby is gone, and we both have to live with a truth that isn't ours, and the consequences of that.
Five years of hate. Built on one conversation in a bar.
Built on Alex Romero's voice and my own willingness to believe the worst when I should have believed better. Five years of hatred built on a brother's malice. Not just for me, but for his own sister. For the man she loved. I think of every cold look she’s given me since New York. Every wall. Every cutting word. I think of her face in the water today, when she finally looked for me, and I understand now what it costs her to allow me to help her. I understand now that it isn't just pride she’s swallowing. It’s five years of grief she has nowhere to put.
Alex Romero, whether the Dragunoviks kill him after they are finished with him or not, will die. And it will be by my hand. "I'm going to kill your brother," I state, knowing that nothing she says will change my mind.
"Not if I get to him first, you won't."
She says it quietly. Not with heat, not with bluster, just with the flat and absolute certainty of a woman who has already made up her mind.
Isabella turns and leaves, and I let her go.
I watch her cross the patio and move through the open doors of the house and disappear into its cool interior, and then she’s gone.
I stand in the garden with the sun on my back and the sound of the ocean behind me, and I feel absolutely nothing.
I stand there for a long time.
The child would be five years old this year.