Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NICO
“Ithink I’ll ditch my cable subscription,” Stefano said as I stalked past him.
Eighteen steps and I hadn’t calmed down. Of all the possible times he could have turned up, this was the worst one.
I was cool. I was calm. I was fucking collected.
What I wasn’t was someone who lost his mind when he got close to a woman.
She was just a woman. If I stepped out, I’d come across ten beautiful women in one minute.
But they wouldn’t be like her. That was the problem.
She was one in a million. Unique enough for me to lose control in twenty-one minutes and tell her I was fucking hard for her.
Christ. I might as well have put a gun to my head.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
His voice grated on my nerves. Why it did was a mystery I didn’t want to dwell on. What I wanted was to lock myself in my room and pace up and down one hundred and forty-four times, dissecting everything that had happened in that room. But then he’d know. If he didn’t already.
I forced my feet to come to a stop. Took a deep breath to clear my head of the cobwebs, and instantly my nostrils filled with the scent of a rockrose.
Fuck. How was she all over me? With a slight shake of my head, I turned to my annoying brother.
“Let’s get on with our meeting.” My tone was cool. Calm. I was back in control.
He wasn’t fooled. “Ask me why.”
“Why?”
He was all too happy with himself. “Because that scene back there,” he pointed behind his shoulder, “stuff from soap operas.”
I bet it was, but I gave him a blank stare. Telling him nothing.
He wasn’t discouraged. “I’m still trying to dissect it, though. Do elaborate. The suspense is killing me.”
“She’s just my maid.” Nothing more.
His comeback made my jaw tense. “I’m sure her services are heavenly.”
He was watching me like a hawk. The wall behind him held three picture frames. One foot by two feet. One of them hung crooked by a quarter inch.
“I wonder if she’ll tend to my needs.”
I didn’t give my fucking body permission, but somehow in the next breath, I had my brother pinned to the wall in a chokehold. One frame crashed to the floor from the force of my action.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his gaze on my grip, not in the least bit put off. I knew what he was thinking. Because I was realizing the same thing. Why the fuck am I behaving like Enzo?
Fuck.
Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one… thousand five hundred and ninety-seven. I released my grip. Stepped back. I had to get to ten thousand nine hundred and forty-six before I could get my breathing to ease.
Stefano shook himself off the wall and observed me. “She’s not just a maid,” he stated the obvious.
I sighed. No. She wasn’t. She wasn’t just a woman either.
She was the woman. Images filtered through my mind.
It was her eighteenth birthday, and she was at the beach, and a boy was seated next to her.
I didn’t know jealousy until then. Her voice filtering down the hallway while I sat with her father, learning everything I’d wanted to learn but yearned to be outside with her.
Her gaze, the terror behind the slatted cupboard.
The sorrow in her eyes when she heard music.
The agitation in her steps when she’d run from me the other day.
Her breathing. Her voice. How it always cracked when she got emotional.
Her eyes. Her hair. Her words. Her Spanish.
“Forget it,” I muttered to him and to myself.
As if I could.
“Nico.”
Jesus! He was a dog with a bone. “What?” I snapped.
“Why did you give your maid a knife?”
So she could kill me, of course.
“I’m teaching her.” She was a fucking amateur. If I didn’t give her a hand, I was going to make it to eighty.
“What?”
She had to learn to live again.
“Is it some kink I don’t know of?” Stefano sounded annoyed.
“None of your fucking business.”
A beat of silence passed.
“You’re not planning on doing anything stupid, are you, Fratello?”
Behind his shoulder, Anna rushed out of the office. She stopped, shot a nervous glance my way, and fled to the living room. For six seconds, she was in my view. My breath eased.
“Stupid? No.”
Only what I deserved.
I heard it just before I turned into the living room.
Crack.
“What was that?” The new girl’s voice reached my ears.
“A stone?” Anna questioned.
Footsteps followed. I pressed against the wall. A fucking intruder in my own home. “Ohhh, it’s a bird.”
“Poor thing.” Anna’s voice had softened.
“Stupid thing didn’t see the glass.”
A few beats of silence followed. I wondered what they were doing.
“Are you crying?”
“No,” Anna snapped but her voice cracked.
“It’s just a bird.”
“It’s someone’s mom or dad.”
Fuck.
“I thought it was a stone.”
The girl scoffed. “No one’s going to stone a house with a Mafia man in it.”
I beg to differ.
“Tell you what, let’s give it a funeral.”
“I’d like that,” Anna agreed.
Footsteps approached the hallway, and I slipped out of sight.
A stone hit the glass, and soft giggles exploded below.
I shifted away from the window. Anna and Mara tried again.
When there was no reaction, Mara ran away, but Anna kept trying.
Her mood went from playfulness to annoyance to anger.
I almost wanted to open the window and stick my head out.
She was curious, as usual, why her papá sent them away when there was one particular visitor.
A person she’d never seen or heard of before.
But I’d seen her plenty of times. If only she knew.
“Anna,” her sister called out, but she ignored her, collecting a new set of stones to aim.
“Joel’s here.” A smile tilted her face. Heat rushed to her cheeks.
Her first love. Joel Laguna. I’d found out his name and everything else about him.
I watched her drop the stones and run to him.
Her tanned skin and bright pink bikini were inked into my memory.
It was her favorite color. Fuchsia wasn’t just any pink.
I’d listened to her educate her little sister.
From then on, I knew what fuchsia was. A color as uncommon in my world as an innocent man.
Just as uncommon as a made man being with a civilian. A non-Italian at that.
‘Joel’ had no such issues. He grabbed her ass and pulled her to him, smacking his lips to hers.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets. Didn’t want to break the glass and someone’s bones.
The door shut behind me. When I turned, Juan stood there with his cigar pipe in his hand.
He watched me thoughtfully. I’d been so distracted I hadn’t noticed him come in.
Nor did I smell the distinct flavor of his sweet cigar.
His gaze dropped to my pockets, where my balled fists still fought for control.
Zero, one, one, two, three… after eighty-nine, I slowly relaxed my hand and walked to the desk.
We never spoke of it.
Until the next time he caught me looking at his daughter.
Eighty-four hours had passed.
She hadn’t tried to kill me again.
She was scared of the knife, but she was easing into it. It bothered me that I didn’t know what she was getting up to for eight hours at night. So, I’d installed a half-inch-sized camera in her room. Every night she did two things. Scribbled in her diary and practiced holding the knife.
I wanted to possess her. Keep her as mine forever.
But what I wanted more was for her to find joy in life again.
Some days she walked from room to room in a daze.
She fucking irked me then. I wanted to throttle her and comfort her at the same time.
I wanted that spark of hers to be back. She was fire eleven years ago.
Now she wanted to be ice when she was born to set the world ablaze. And I was going to make sure she did.
I’d pissed Magda off by asking Anna to make my meals. She’d have been outraged if she knew the real reason behind it. Every time Anna served my meals, I taunted her. Asked her if she was being a coward. Every time she cursed me in Spanish, a little bit of life crept into her lungs.
The day before, I’d caught her in one of the guest rooms and wondered aloud if she was even capable of killing me. “Do you have the guts to do it, mia piccola assassina?”
The Spanish that had flown out of her mouth was fucking music. She’d been so riled that she hadn’t noticed that the speakers had subtly been playing her favorite sonnet while she’d been in there. Asturias for a solid fourteen minutes.
Each day I watched her, I increased the length and upped the volume. Always after riling her up.
She’d get to put me six feet under. But only after she learned to live again.