Chapter 7
AJLA
I couldn't sleep the entire night, and I blamed Nicolas the Capo Moretti.
And honestly the reason wasn't even because he was a Capo. Surprisingly, after my initial shock wore off, it kind of made sense. No, the reason I couldn't sleep was because he looked at me as if I was everything he's been waiting for.
But he didn't know that I was a girl who sometimes didn’t even know her own mind.
I was a girl who wanted love but was terrified of letting myself fall.
Terrified of letting anyone in, because I saw what could happen when you gave your heart to someone who didn’t deserve it.
And no, my heart hadn’t been broken by a fuckboy or some boyfriend who didn't know how to cherish me.
My heart had been broken a long time ago, when the first man I ever loved showed me how unreliable men could be.
My heart broke when the man I called my father showed me how weak and how unstable he could be.
Maybe it was fucked up to carry that trauma all the way into my thirties, but it was still there.
It was like a scab on my soul that kept ripping apart, reopening the wound every time I tried to let someone in.
Every time I told myself his lack of love for his daughter wouldn't stop me from finding that love somewhere else.
I failed.
Because how could anyone love me if my own father couldn't?
How could a man who knew nothing about me love all the broken pieces of my mind when the person who was supposed to hold me, protect me, guide me through life had shown me how fucking weak and pathetic some men could be?
How could a man love me when all I knew was a lifetime of war and an endless fight between what I needed and what I allowed myself to have?
So, no, I couldn't fucking sleep.
Because no matter how attracted I was to Nico and how genuine he sounded, I couldn't allow myself to even entertain the idea of us.
Not to mention that my mom would probably have a heart attack if she ever found out what he did for a living.
My grandma would take one look at him and ask, "?iji si ti"–who are your parents?
My sister would wiggle her eyebrows, because Nico looked better than any other man I’d ever liked.
But it didn't matter.
I had to stop my thoughts from running wild and imagining myself walking down the aisle toward the man who wasn't dangerous because he carried a gun, but because he could destroy my heart. And I wasn't sure I’d ever recover from that.
The sun was slowly rising on the horizon, visible through the windows to the right of the bed, and for a thousandth time, I regretted kicking him out of his own room.
Because if he’d stayed, maybe I wouldn't have been alone with my thoughts.
Maybe I would've allowed myself just one crazy night while the rest of the world slept.
But I was someone who had to be in control.
I planned. I calculated. I made decisions based on outcomes that had already been run through every possible scenario. I believed in signs from the universe, talked to crows in the park, and fed the black cats everyone else ignored. But right now, there were no signs.
I didn't know what to do.
Nicolas thought I knew something about Johnny, and in all honesty, if I ever saw that snivelling motherfucker again, I would kill him myself, no questions asked.
I couldn't begin to imagine the kind of drama Nicolas had to live with, but surely he couldn't believe I’d been sent to seduce him. To steal his secrets.
I didn't even know who he was when I saw him, not to mention anything else.
Huffing and pushing the blanket off of me, I sat up, burrowing my nose in the T-Shirt Nicolas had given me.
I would never admit it out loud, but the moment he dropped it in my hands, I wanted to inhale his spicy cologne.
I didn’t know if it was the cologne or simply him, but I’dnever smelled anything better.
I just wished it would've helped me sleep instead of reminding me that he was just in the next room.
He didn't push. He didn't try to kiss me—I would've let him. He’d simply handed me a T-Shirt, a pair of his boxers, and told me he'd be in the next room. That I should join him for breakfast.
Given that I didn't even have my phone, and I had no idea what time breakfast was being served, I had a feeling I'd be late.
But I wanted to be there.
I wanted to see him in the morning, and to see if this madness only lived in my head, or if he truly was the first man who made my heart try to jump out of my chest.
I looked toward the horizon, realizing that breakfast was too far away, and instead of wallowing in self-pity and overthinking every single thing, I got out of bed and tiptoed toward the doors, opening it slowly and silently thanking the universes for floors that didn't creak.
The last thing I needed was to wake him. Or anyone else. Besides, he’d said I could leave my room.
He said many things after I pushed away from him as if he were on fire, but I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy trying to stop my feelings from showing on my face, because I couldn’t show him that the devouring look in his eyes made my heart ache for things I knew I would never have.
So, avoidance it is.
There was a reason my friends called me the Ice Queen, incapable of feeling anything. Never angry. Never sad. Never in love. Nver fucking heartbroken.
The truth couldn’t have been further from it.
I felt everything.
I wanted everything my friends wanted. I yearned for love, for understanding, for someone to hold my hand and tell me everything would be okay instead of always being the strong one. I didn’t need a man to fix my life, but it would’ve been nice to have someone who sometimes I needed to rest.
Unfortunately, my heart thought that Nicolas fucking Moretti was just the person for the job.
And unlike every other time I’d ignored attraction, this felt different.
Deeper. This feeling of belonging wrapped itself around my heart, and since he told me he wanted me, since he looked at me with our future together written all over his face, I couldn’t fucking shake it off.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what ifs.
What if I were braver?
What if I were better at taking what I wanted?
What if I wasn’t so concerned about the future and where it would lead me?
What if I let myself fall, just this once?
It was difficult wanting love when you were terrified of letting it in. My past dates and boyfriends told me I was too frigid, too stiff, too cold. Icy, as one of them had said. They never understood that I couldn’t let go of control so easily.
Even now, as I walked through the dark hallway toward where I remembered the staircase was, it took everything in me not to peek into these other rooms. Not to look for a study or something similar, just so I could find out more about my captor.
But curiosity killed a cat, or at least that's how the saying went, and I was already too involved to get out of this unscathed.
The light was on in the foyer, and I thanked the universe for small miracles as I went down the stairs, trying to shake off the icy tendrils of anxiety crawling over my skin, but the lack of sleep and the adrenaline from last night were not a good mix.
And the further down I went, the stronger the chills erupting all over my skin became.
For some silly fucking reason, I trusted that Nicolas wouldn't hurt me.
At least he wouldn't hurt me unless he had to.
And if there's one thing books and TV shows have taught me, it's that people like me, unsuspecting civilians, usually ended up being collateral damage in the mess they’d found themselves in.
And who's to say that I would ever be able to get back to my normal life?
Nicolas didn't say anything about letting me go, and I blamed my frazzled mind for not asking him to let me go.
I understood that a man like him, with his position, needed to be careful, but there was nothing I could offer him.
He wore the face of a man exhausted by the world, by the duty he carried, and my fucked-up mind immediately came up with the not-so-wonderful idea that I could fix him.
I could barely hold myself together, not to mention trying to fix a man who dealt in things that were extremely foreign to me.
Even if I allowed myself to entertain the idea of the two of us together, there was no way that our worlds could coexist. And even if it weren’t for the whole illegal-dealings-and-illegal-life part of his world, I still stood by what I said to him.
He might think I'm the answer to all his prayers, but he had years of life to live before he could even decide that he wanted a family, and I wasn't about to waste my time on yet another emotionally unavailable guy.
So, control it was.
Control over my emotions.
Control over my actions.
Control over every single aspect of my life.
I was sufficiently self-aware to understand that these were coping mechanisms I’d adopted in order to function in a society that wouldn't want me if I ever allowed my chaotic thoughts to spill out.
I was the reliable one. I was the golden child.
I was the one my mom called whenever my sister did something crazy, and I knew I would keep on being that person no matter how much it hurt.
And it did fucking hurt.
What hurt the most was the fact that I never really got to be a child.
The responsibilities that were piled onto my back from a very young age taught me that there were no other people I could rely on.
But what kept hurting was the fact that my family no longer saw me as a big sister, a daughter, a granddaughter or a niece.
No, they saw me as the solution to their problems. As the rational one that could swoop in and save the day, because I so rarely allowed my emotions to spill into the ether.
Unlike them.