Chapter 27 #3
He lets out a short laugh. “Awful is one word for it.” He shifts a little, sitting up slightly, adjusting his pillow so that he's not lying flat. “We all grew up knowing what he did, what he’s capable of, who he is. He destroys people when they get in his way. He always has. Aurora, his wife, took the news badly. She later took her own life, drove off a bridge.”
I gasp loudly, my mind going to Jett, Dex and Zach. Even though I’ve never met them, my heart aches for what they lost. My mom died in an accident, but this … a life taken by suicide … seems too terrible to contemplate.
“And when Mama found out, she blamed herself. She fell apart even more than she had when she learned he was married, and had been lying to us all.”
I put a hand to my mouth. Every word he says fills me with more sadness, more horror, and an almost painful disbelief. I can’t imagine living with someone for years and never knowing who they really were. “She never suspected anything?” I manage to say.
“Not a thing.”
A groan leaves my lips. They were so young. Just children, like I was when my own world fell apart. They experienced such devastation and then carried a burden no child should have to bear.
I no longer feel as if we’re from entirely different worlds, Matteo and I. I’ve felt that we’re similar in so many ways, but to have this in common, a family trauma neither of us chose and neither of us ever truly escaped, makes the distance between us feel smaller somehow.
I feel bad now for what I said that day in Central Park, telling him he was so lucky to have a father.
“It’s why I struggle with donating my kidney,” Matteo says. “But I'll never forgive myself if I deny him a chance to live. No matter how despicable he's been, I need to be able to look in the mirror and be fine with what I see.”
I snuggle up close to him, my face resting against his chest. He tells me how he never trusted his father after that, and how they were summoned from Italy to go and live in the US because Paul wanted them all in one place, but he still managed to keep them apart.
I can’t believe that after everything they’d gone through, Paul still didn’t have them live together.
Matteo falls quiet for the longest time.
I place a kiss against his warm skin. “I’m sorry, for asking you and dredging up the past.”
“You keep apologizing, but it’s not your fault, and I know you don’t mean it like that but ... you don’t need to feel bad.”
“I feel bad for you. Can’t help it. I care for you, more than I think is good for me—”
I look up to find him looking down at me.
“Is that so?” He lifts a brow.
“That is so.”
I love the way he looks at me in this moment, like I’ve said something he's going to treasure for the rest of his life. We lie quietly for a while, then. Just breathing and being.
After a while my curiosity gets the better of me. “I don’t understand how you can still work for him.”
“It hasn’t been easy. I often question it myself, but …
he doesn’t get to spend decades manipulating us and then walk away with everything.
We’re his sons. We’ve earned our place in the company despite him, not because of him.
Besides, he’s become even more vindictive and controlling now that we're not toeing the line so easily.”
“How?”
“He's done a lot of bad stuff. He offered Cari, Jett's girlfriend, a hundred thousand dollars to walk away.”
“For what?” I lift my head, in shock.
“I’ll tell you one day. We’d need hours for me to tell you everything.”
“How much is there?”
“Plenty.” He pauses, then, “He convinced Dex to enter a marriage of convenience.”
My eyes widen.
“With Rio he did a real dirty. I don't have the headspace to go into that right now.”
I’m still reeling from shock about what he offered Cari, and why.
Every sentence gives me whiplash. I’ll be here for him, listening, but I’m not so sure revisiting everything his father has done is helping.
The hurt is still there, buried just beneath the surface, and every memory seems to rip it open all over again.
“You don't have to tell me all at once,” I say, not wanting to put him through what clearly is trauma, recalling such a troubled past.
“It helps. I hardly ever talk about it, but with you it seems natural. It’s like I’m letting it all out and it helps. You help.”
I sit up at that, then lean forward and press my lips against his for the longest time.
“Thank you,” he murmurs.
“For?”
“For being you.”
I lie on my side and gawk at him. “You said he fell out with Zach,” I prompt.
His jaw clenches, and I see a muscle tick. “Zach was the only one who really cared about him, but he offered Maya fifty thousand dollars to go away and to leave Zach alone.”
The scale of it is overwhelming. Every story seems tangled up with another betrayal, another secret, another person hurt by the same man.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Why does he break up relationships?”
“Because they don't fit what he expects.”
I try to process that. I won't fit. Me, working for Matteo. Me, a foster care child. Me, an ex-hacker.
I'm starting to see Paul Knight in a different light. He's always struck me as being cold, but I expected that, given his wealth and position. Yet, what he did to his family, to his wife, and to Matteo's mother, what he did to both sets of brothers is unforgivable.
“I know what you're thinking.” Matteo cups my face. “But you don’t need to worry about the old man. You fit, with me. I don’t care what he thinks, because you're ... you're the best part of my day, Elizabeth. The part I look forward to.”
His reassurance fills me with relief, and joy, but now that I have an idea about Matteo's childhood, and the family dynamics he's dealing with, I understand it all so clearly.
“So, you, Rio and Enzo are brothers, and so are Jett, Dex and Zach?”
He nods.
“But ... you all look ... like brothers.”
“Because we are.”
“No, I mean, you don’t look like half-brothers, and Rio and Dex ... they look so alike.”
“Weird, huh?”
“Fascinating.”
“All you need to know about my father is that he’s a selfish bastard.”
I reach out and take his hand, lacing my fingers through it. “You don’t have to carry everything on your own,” I tell him. “You can offload on me, and talk about anything that's on your mind.” I pause, then ask another question that’s been on my mind. “Why is your mom back in Italy now?”
“She went back once we were all old enough, to live here. She wanted to look after her parents because they were getting old. We’d go back often, to see Nonna and Nonno, but they passed away years ago, and Mama decided to stay there.
She said we were old enough to look after ourselves.
We talk every few days, and one of us goes every month or so, so it’s not like we’re distant or anything. ”
A yawn interrupts him, and his eyes drift closed for a second before reopening. The tension that's been riding him all evening seems to have eased, his words becoming slower and softer.
I think about asking another question. There are still so many things I want to know about him, about his brothers, about the family that shaped him into who he is, but tonight he's given me more than enough.
I curl closer and rest my head against his chest. His arm tightens around me automatically, as though he can't help himself. I lie there, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and thinking about everything he's told me.