Chapter 8 #2
“My biological mother wanted money,” he said.
“My father had a lot of it. In our world, blood matters. She knew that and she got pregnant on purpose.” The muscles of his jaw jumped, though his tone stayed even.
“She loved drugs more than she ever cared about the child she was carrying. She got an infection from a dirty needle. I was born early, sick, addicted, already paying for her choices.”
I swallowed hard but he did not look away.
“By the time she died, there was very little left of her worth mourning,” he said. “My father tried to protect me from the worst of it, but some damage arrives before memory.”
The apartment felt very quiet all of a sudden.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured.
He shrugged, but the gesture didn’t quite hide the truth of what that history still cost him. “I’m not telling you because I want sympathy.”
“I know.”
“I’m telling you because when you said your sister hates people deciding what she can bear before she opens her mouth, I understood exactly what you meant.”
He looked at me then, really looked at me, and there was no bravado in his face at all now. No teasing. No smooth confidence. Just a man sitting in my small apartment with Chicago food on my counter and more honesty in his voice than I expected.
“I don’t know what waits for you back there,” he said.
“And I’m not going to insult you by pretending fear is something you can reason away in an evening.
But I do know this.” His hand settled lightly over the silver handle of his cane.
“The things that shape us are not always the things that define us.”
I stared at him.
That, more than anything, was what I had needed someone to say.
Not that I was wrong. Not that I was weak. Not that I should just get over it and go home. Just that the worst thing that had happened to me did not automatically get to become the whole story.
My throat tightened again, but for a completely different reason.
“Pietro—”
He shook his head once, stopping me. “You don’t have to decide tonight.”
I looked down at my hands. “I hate that she’s scared and I’m not there.”
“I know.”
“And I hate that part of me is more scared than she is.”
“That,” he said quietly, “sounds less like hate and more like honesty.”
I let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
“You’re annoyingly perceptive.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I’m sure you have.”
A faint smile touched his mouth, but his eyes stayed serious.
“If you decide to go, I’ll help you.”
I raised a hand immediately. “No. I can do it.”
“As I said, I have a plane,” he said at the exact same moment.
I looked at him.
He looked back, perfectly composed.
A helpless laugh escaped me. “You really do not hear yourself, do you?”
“Rarely.”
“That is insane.”
“It is practical.”
“It is billionaire behavior.”
That got the closest thing to a proper smile I’d seen on him all evening.
“Noted.”
I sighed and leaned my head on his shoulder just enjoying the presence, his warmth and the musk of his cologne.
I closed my eyes and realized I had to tell him something real.
He had just handed me one of the deepest, ugliest truths of his life, not for pity but for connection, and it had worked.
I felt closer to him now than I had any right to after such a short time.
I wanted that closeness. Craved it, if I was being honest.
But it would not be fair to let something grow between us while pretending I wasn’t carrying half my life into the room with me.
Before I had fully decided to speak, I was already saying things I had sworn to leave buried when I moved here.
“I had a reason for coming all the way across the country,” I said quietly.
I felt his lips brush the top of my head, soft enough that I might have imagined it if I hadn’t already become far too aware of every point of contact between us.
“We all have a past,” he murmured. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“But I do.” I pulled back just enough to look at him. “If we’re going to do this—whatever this is—I can’t pretend there isn’t something big standing in the middle of it.”
He went very still. His arm drew me closer—not enough to trap, only enough to remind me he was there.
“I had a boyfriend back home,” I said. “And things went bad faster than I could handle. We weren’t right for each other, and he…” I swallowed. “He didn’t like that.”
Pietro's body hardened under my hand. Not a flinch. Something slower and more deliberate than that. Like a man who had just been handed a piece of information and was deciding, very carefully, what to do with it.
"He never really hit me," I said too quickly.
The silence lasted perhaps two seconds.
It felt much longer.
His voice, when it came, had changed. Not louder. Worse. Quieter. The kind of quiet that had nothing to do with calm.
"What do you mean by 'really?’"
I exhaled and looked away. I didn’t want to say the words. Didn’t want to drag out the little accidents Adam had always dressed up as misunderstandings, bad tempers, mistakes I was meant to forgive because they could have been worse.
“It was more mental than anything,” I said at last. “Controlling. Manipulative. And sometimes…” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I left. I came here, and no one back there knows where I am. I promised myself I would get this degree, keep my head down, and stay away from men.”
I glanced up at him with a weak attempt at a smile. “Which, obviously, I’m failing at rather badly.”
A quiet huff of laughter left him, but there was no real ease in it. “I’m not just any man, Emily Hart.”
I smiled a little. “What are you, then? My protector?”
I meant it as a joke. The seriousness in his face killed it instantly.
“If you want me to be,” he said. “Say the word and he’s gone.”
I forced out a breath that I tried very hard to turn into a laugh, but the look in his eyes made it impossible to treat the words lightly. There was no humor there. Only a dark fierceness that sent a chill down my spine.
A chill that felt a little too much like relief.
The difference, I told myself, was that he was offering, rather than deciding. I wasn't entirely sure that was enough of a difference. But I knew he would stop if I said stop.
“I—”
Before I could even ask what he meant, he leaned in and kissed me.
“Go for your sister’s surgery,” he murmured against my mouth. “I’ll come with you. You’ll be safe.”
If only, I thought a little wistfully. “It’s not that simple.”
He gave me a crooked smile that ought to have come with a warning label. A genuine health hazard.
“I’m pretty sure it is. Don’t let the cane fool you. I can be lethal.”
And the ridiculous thing was, I believed him. He exuded danger, but not the kind that made me want to run. The kind that made me want to sink into it. The kind that made me want to be the one person it never turned on.