Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nathalie
"What?"
I look at Luca's face and this is the first time, the first time in all the time I have known him, that I see him at a complete loss. His mouth opens and closes. The ears come before I can stop them, clouding everything, turning him into a blur of dark suit and pale eyes.
"Nathalie." He takes a step toward me. "If you'll just sit down I can explain—"
"That's a lie," I snap, pushing him away with both hands, stepping back. "That's a lie, that's a lie, that's—"
But it isn't.
Even as I say it I know it isn't. He has no reason to construct this cruelty, this devastation, and I know it and knowing it is what takes my breath.
My father had cried at her funeral.
I had watched him. I had stood beside him in the black dress that was too big for me because I had lost weight in the week between the accident and the service.
I had watched my father weep and I had thought, at least this, at least we have this, at least we are both here in this grief together and it is something that belongs to both of us.
All my life I had made excuses for him. His coldness, his distance, the way he looked through me and past me and around me.
I had told myself he was broken. I had told myself that a man who had lost his wife the way he lost her, suddenly and violently and on a random road, had earned the right to be unreachable.
I had tried harder because of it. I had tried to fill the space that she left because I thought if I could be enough then maybe he would come back from wherever the grief had taken him.
He hadn't lost her. He had handed her over.
Luca's voice reaches me from somewhere close and then further away as he shouts for Renzo to get the doctor and then his arms are around me and I can feel them but I cannot coordinate my breathing and the room is falling and I hear him saying breathe, Nathalie, breathe, against my hair.
I think, you stupid girl, you stupid stupid girl, and then everything goes dark again.
* * *
I wake up in bed. Luca is sitting beside it holding my hands. When my eyes open he sits up and helps me up, one hand at my back, careful, and he looks at my face and asks quietly, "How are you feeling?"
I look at him.
"Tell me the whole truth," I reply. "Everything you know about my mother."
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he releases my hands and he rests his elbows on his knees and he looks at the floor briefly before looking back up at me and he says, "I don't know much.
I heard about it through the family, word of mouth.
I was in college in Italy when it happened, and I wasn't part of any of it.
" He pauses. "What I know is that your father came to my father and made an offer in exchange for help staging an accident. "
I sit very still and I listen.
I feel very cold and very still.
"What about my mother?" I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. "How was she supposed to know when to get out?"
Luca swallows.
His jaw tightens and he looks at me and I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and I wait.
"She wasn't," he says.
The room is very quiet.
"She wasn't part of the arrangement."
Tears stab my chest, he leans forward and his hand comes up to wipe my face and I turn away from it and I look at the window and I exhale through my nose until the worst of it passes.
"I want to go home," I say flatly.
"Nathalie, you're still weak, you were drugged last night and you need—" He stops himself. I feel him looking at me and then he says, very quietly, "I know you hate me."
I sit with that for a moment.
I don't know what I feel. There is too much of it and it is all arriving at the same time and none of it has had the chance to settle into anything I can name yet.
"Nathalie." He moves closer and his hands cup my face, tilting it up toward his, and his eyes are desperate in a way I have never seen them before. "Your father is dangerous. You know what he is now, you know what he is capable of. Let me protect you. I can keep you safe, I swear it."
I look at his face.
I take his hands from my face slowly, deliberately, and I hold them for a moment and I set them down in his lap.
"After you protect me," I ask, "then what?"
He leans forward. "Then you stay with me. Be mine. I'll protect you forever, I swear it on my honor and my life."
I look at him.
If he had said this an hour ago I would have melted. I would have folded into him without hesitation and I would have felt something close to peace. I know this about myself and I know that it is the truest thing about who I am when I am near him.
But an hour ago I didn't know about my mother.
"I can handle my father," I say.
"Nathalie—" Frustration moves through his voice.
He stands abruptly and grabs my shoulders, his grip firm but not rough, and he looks at me with something close to pleading.
"If this is about my father's role in this, stay and hate me for it.
Stay and I'll take it. I'll avenge your mother, I'll keep you safe, I'll give you everything I have. Just stay."
I look at his face. The jaw, the pale eyes, the weight he has lost, the desperation in him that he has never shown to anyone and is showing to me now, and I feel it move through me like something breaking.
"You're right," I tell him quietly. "I hate you."
It is the biggest lie I have ever told. How could I hate a man I desired deeply?"
I throw back the sheets and I feel his eyes on me.
I don't look at him because looking at him will undo everything and I say, "My family affairs are my business.
I don't need your revenge or your protection.
" I make myself say the next part. "Why would I want anything from a man whose father helped murder my mother? "
The silence that follows is the worst silence I have ever stood in. I make myself look at him this time.
His face has gone pale. I feel my heart sink through the floor because fate is genuinely, spectacularly cruel and I cannot think of another word for what this is.
The door opens.
Renzo comes in with a doctor behind him and he looks at me and then at Luca and he reads the room as Luca stands.
"Make sure she gets home safe," he tells Renzo, his voice stripped of everything, and he walks out without looking at me again.
The doctor looks between us, puzzled. Renzo dismisses him quietly, promises him payment, and the doctor goes, and then it is just Renzo standing in the doorway looking at me.
"It's not what you think," he says carefully. "Luca would never hurt you. The things his father did, the work we do, Luca is not his father, and he—"
I press my fingers to my lips.
He stops.
I walk over to him, I lean up and I speak quietly into his ear. He listens without moving, without changing his expression or giving anything away. When I step back he looks at me with an expression that is equal parts reluctance and something else, something that might be respect.
"Why would I do this behind his back?" he asks.
I shrug. "Your choice," I tell him.
He is quiet for a long moment. He looks at the door Luca walked out of and then at me and then at the floor and then back at me.
"Fine," he says finally. "I'll help you."