10. — everyone pays. #3
“Even better reason to have a conversation with her if you’re concerned. But frankly, it’s a waste of time. She’s eighteen and knows about birth control. Christ, I put her on the pill when she turned fourteen. Whether she still is, well, that’s another matter. Again, talk to her, not to me.”
His blood pressure spiked dangerously.
“What?”
Carina’s expression turned passive. “Stop it.”
“You can’t just tell me something like that and not expect me to react, Carina. Why the hell would my daughter be on the pill at fourteen?”
“Because I took her to the doctor and put her on it.”
“Why?”
“See, you keep doing that. You keep raising your voice like that. And when I do it back, you’re not gonna like it, Sal.”
“Yeah, well—”
“The girl was bleeding into her mattress every month for three days, and then still bleeding heavy for another seven days after. If you can’t separate female reproductive health and pregnancy prevention, that is not my problem.”
“Right,” he returned bitingly, “because you would know all about preventing pregnancies, wouldn’t you?”
Her mouth popped open, and when her gasp hit his ears, he immediately regretted what just came out of his mouth.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I swear to God.”
“You sonofabitch!”
“Carina...”
“You prick,” she snarled, standing from the stool and taking a step his way.
Yeah, that had been bad. Way over the line.
“I’m sorry, babe. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just been a shitty, long day, and that’s not me trying to justify it, but I’m not thinking clearly right now.”
“Clearly? Obviously. Did you hit your fucking head again or something?”
“Carina, come on, don’t be like that.”
“I can’t believe you,” she screamed at him, throwing her arms wide as if to make her point.
“And what’s crazy—fucking insane, Salvatore—is that I’ve been waiting for you to get home all day!
All day, it’s wild. Because I’ve had something to tell you and there’s literally no one else for me to tell except you.
And how ironic that you would say such a thing to me, not even knowing what I do right now. ”
Every step she took, he’d backed up. Until then.
Salvatore hesitated. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Carina stopped coming forward, too. Her hand clapped over her mouth, but she laughed behind it.
A manic, almost desperate, laugh. Her wild gaze flitted around the kitchen, at anything but him.
She’d been off lately. Not long, a week or so.
Up late in the mornings. Later than usual for her.
Skipping breakfast, but she did that frequently enough for it to be concerning, anyway.
He only started to take note of that behavior if it extended into lunch and then dinner, too.
But her anorexia had been stable since her early thirties after an extended stay at the hospital where, for the first time, they force fed her through tube feeding.
She swore that would never happen again, and so far, it hadn’t.
“You’re okay, right?” he asked quietly.
Carina outright glared at him at the question. “Fuck you! You don’t get to ask me that after what you just said, and you know it.”
“Carina, I’m just trying to—”
“I’m pregnant, Sal.”
Nope.
His ears just chose not to work. He didn’t understand like his brain misfired.
“What?”
“Pregnant! P-R-E-G—”
“I know how to fucking spell it, Carina, but I don’t understand how it fucking happened! Do you see the difference?”
Her face scrunched up in a way that might be cute, if not for the situation. “Are you serious right now? Please tell me you’re joking. Like we haven’t been fucking for the last month and a half? You don’t know how it happened?”
“Okay, now you’re pissing me off.”
“Welcome to the club. You think your daughter needs sex education. What a fucking joke. I think it’s you, asshole!”
Every word she shouted turned louder and louder. The picture frames and artwork on the wall practically rattled. He roared right back. Just like old times. Nothing changed.
“I had a fucking vasectomy, Carina! Months before we married!” he added louder, snapping his palm into hand with every word. “You know this!”
She nodded violently, her hair flying wildly. “Yeah, and I also know they fail, Sal.”
“Not ten-plus years down the goddamn line!”
Carina covered her face with both hands, her head tilting back as she mumbled, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh. My. God. I can’t believe you.”
“Me? Me?” he retorted hotly. “You’re the one who told me—literally again last night—that you haven’t fucked anyone else in over four years, but you’re pregnant.”
Her hands dropped. “I haven’t!”
“Is it him again? Is it his?”
All emotion bled from Carina’s face. Even her eyes went a little blank. Like earlier, he immediately regretted the thing he said, but he couldn’t take it back once it came out. That’s not how words worked.
“How dare you?” she whispered.
Carina stepped backward.
This time, he moved after her.
“Wait, I—”
“How dare you?”
That scream startled him. It came from somewhere else inside her. That wasn’t just anger at him and his bad reaction to her news.
“He raped me! Again, and again, and again. And he took my babies from me, whether I wanted them or not, he just took them. He fucked me when I was sixteen, and his wife slept down the hall. And you know what he did to me; you know all of this! You know what he fucking did to me, and you say that to me!”
“Carina—”
“No, fuck you. Don’t come near me.”
She turned on her heel but stopped instantly.
Salvatore realized why almost immediately.
There, at the far end of the kitchen where Sissy had left from earlier, stood Frankie.
It was the dart of his daughter’s gaze to something, or someone, over his shoulder that made Salvatore’s heart drop to the floor.
Carina spun around, but Salvatore didn’t.
“Nico,” Carina croaked.
Salvatore forgot the order he gave Larkin to send Nico to him immediately if he was on the property.
The squeak of shoes reverberated after Salvatore looked away from the broken boy, unable to swallow the unrelenting tidal wave of guilt. He tracked his wife watch Nico leave but her attention quickly snapped back to Salvatore.
“Great fucking job,” she said, laughing brokenly. “Wow, Sal. Even I couldn’t have done that, and I have done some shit.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied.
It wasn’t enough and he knew it.
Too many minutes later, Frankie departed after Nico and with a comment about going to her penthouse, but Carina and Salvatore had still not spoken or moved.
He knew the moment he asked her if the child she carried was her adoptive father’s as if there had ever been a choice to the equation for her that he was wrong to form those words.
Worse to let them pass his lips, knowing all that he did.
So, he broke the silence with the first words he should.
“I’m sorr—”
“Don’t you even...”
“The vasectomy—”
“You better call the doctor, Sal.”
“Hey,” he tried, reaching for her again.
She just pulled away. “No, you don’t get to do that.”
Her heels clicked on the floor as she left the kitchen.
Salvatore took another minute to decide what to do.
He opted to give Carina her space and went after Nico.
History said he might pull a total one-eighty on his recent achievements given the setback he just faced.
Nico was a runner first when it came to emotional pain. History never lied.
Salvatore found Nico quickly enough, and his daughter.
In the drawing room nearer to the living room, Nico sat at a small writing desk.
With his arm propped up, face resting against his pointer finger and thumb, his knee bounced a steady beat against the floor.
He dead stared the wall ahead of him, not even reacting to Salvatore entering the room.
He came in just in time to see his daughter lean down to press a kiss against Nico’s cheek.
There, she whispered something too low for him to properly hear what she said.
Nico relaxed momentarily, leaning into Frankie for the brief seconds it took before she pulled away. Then she left the room altogether.
Again, saying nothing to Sal.
“Nico,” he started.
His companion chewed on his inner cheek before asking, “How long did you know that?”
“I don’t think I’m the person you should be—”
“How long?”
Salvatore sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Since she was seventeen, and pregnant with you.”
He nodded jerkily. “So, uh, Carmen, too?”
Sal nodded back.
Nico’s gaze darkened. “Can you imagine, I thought she hated me all this time because I’m me, right? That’s why everyone else does. Really, it’s—”
“She doesn’t hate you. She just never got to love you, Nico.”
A quiet noise escaped Nico, but he looked at Salvatore then. “Larkin said you needed to speak with me?”
Salvatore’s heart ached. “No, not anymore.”
“But, uh...”
Salvatore shook his head. “I fucked up enough shit today. We’re going to leave this one for now, okay? Maybe I revisit it with you another day. It’s not important right now.”
“Yeah.” Nico sniffed, and swiped at his mouth before asking, “Did my moth—fuck. Uh, did his first wife even kill herself like they said?”
“No.”
“Marco was four.”
“Yes,” Salvatore confirmed.
“And like twelve or something when Carmen came along.”
Salvatore took a deep breath, but he didn’t respond. That wasn’t what Nico needed him to do, and he knew it.
“This is so fucked up,” Nico breathed into his hand.
“Oh, it gets worse. It always gets worse with Giorgio.”