Chapter 10
PIETRO
Something was different tonight.
Emily was nervous. Electric in a way that put me on edge almost as much as it drew me in.
Earlier that day, I called my uncle Hoka and told him not to continue the investigation I asked for. After I told Emily about my cerebral palsy and she opened up about her ex, guilt had started gnawing at me.
That feeling did not come naturally to me.
The men who raised me did not move through the world burdened by guilt.
Not in the parts of them I had seen, at least. Everything had a reason.
A purpose. A cost. They were ruthless when required, and just as absolute in their love for their families, their wives, their children.
It was a duality that had confused me when I was younger. Less so now.
I remembered one night in particular.
I was fifteen, old enough that my father had started taking me with him more often, to acclimate me to the life I had been born into.
That evening ended in blood. I stood in silence while my father tortured a man to death, watched him do it with the same terrible efficiency he brought to everything else, and then followed him back to the car with the sound of the man’s screams still lodged in my head.
We drove home in silence.
When we arrived, my father got out, removed his bloodstained shirt, and replaced it with a clean one from the spare garment bag he always kept in the trunk.
Then he looked down at me, his expression still grim, his face still carrying the residue of violence, and said, “You always do everything possible to keep the darkness at your door. You never let it touch what owns your heart.”
I started to ask him what he meant.
Then the front door opened.
And just like that, his face changed.
The severity remained underneath it, but it became something warmer, something only my mother and sister ever seemed able to draw from him without effort. By the time we walked inside, he was no longer Alessandro Benetti, feared capo and architect of half the city’s shadows.
He was Sandro.
Devoted husband. Loving father.
He kissed my mother like there was nothing in the world more worth coming home to, then bent and scooped Victoria into his arms while she squealed with delight. She could not have been more than two at the time and already had enough attitude for three full-grown adults.
Even then, I understood that the change in him was real.
Not an act. Not weakness. Not hypocrisy.
A choice.
And perhaps that was what I found myself circling back to now, as I walked Emily back to her apartment after dinner and watched her twist her hands together, trying not to let nerves show.
I was able to recognize the tells. The over-brightness in her smile when she was uncertain. The way her fingers found the hem of her dress when she was thinking too hard. The tiny pause before she stepped closer, making a choice each time and wanting it known that it was one.
Most men would not have noticed.
I did.
By the time we reached her door, all I could think about was kissing her.
That was becoming a problem.
I had assumed, at first, that the novelty of it would wear off. That after enough stolen kisses in corridors and outside cafés and in the shadowed corners she seemed to find half by accident and half by instinct, the hunger would settle into something more manageable.
It had not. If anything, it had worsened.
Emily unlocked the door, walked in and turned toward me as soon as the door closed behind her. Before I could say a word she rose onto her toes and kissed me.
I went still for all of half a second before my hand found her waist and pulled her flush against me.
Christ.
Her mouth was warm and soft and already opening for me. I kissed her hard enough to feel the answering breath leave her, then slowed only to lose myself more thoroughly, tasting her in deep, unhurried strokes that made my pulse slam harder with every passing second.
She made a small sound into my mouth.
That nearly finished me.
I backed her gently against the door, my body crowding hers without crushing, my free hand sliding up the line of her spine and back down again because once I touched her I seemed unable to stop.
Her fingers were in my hair now, uncertain first, then bolder, and when she pressed herself closer I felt every soft, warm inch of her with devastating clarity.
My cock was already painfully hard.
I was beginning to think it had developed its own personal hatred for me.
Emily kissed like she was learning and wanting at the same time, every hesitant sweep of her mouth turning surer the more I gave her. When her hand slid down my chest and lower, I caught her wrist before she could get there.
She froze.
I lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to the center of her palm, keeping my mouth there for a beat longer than necessary while I forced my breathing under control.
“Pietro?” she whispered.
I rested my forehead briefly against hers.
I wanted her.
Not politely. Not abstractly.
In her living room against her door until neither of us could think straight.
But sex with Emily would not just be sex. Not for me. Not for her. It would be trust and choice and exposure and all the things Hoka meant when he said “you do not get to build this alone in your head and call it love.”
I pulled back just enough to look at her.
“I can’t.”
The hurt on her face was instant.
My stomach dropped.
“Oh,” she said too quickly. “It’s okay. I mean, we don’t have to?—”
“No.” I tightened my hold on her hand. “Not like that. God, no.”
She blinked at me, confusion and embarrassment warring on her face.
“I can,” I said, my voice rough now. “Believe me, Emily, I can. And when we do this, you’ll be begging me to give you a minute to breathe. What I mean is I can’t do this with you unless you know me.”
Her brows drew together.
“I know you,” she said softly. “You’re a rich grump in his final year.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
“You keep saying final,” I murmured. “As if that’s the end of you and me.”
“Isn’t it?” she asked.
There it was. The real fear under all of this. Not sex. Not desire. The deadline.
“Not if you don’t want it to be.”
The words came easily.
The truth behind them did not.
I still had not told her what I was or what waited for me in Chicago. What “family business” actually meant.
It was the reason I kept my distance. I couldn’t take her being honest.
The softness in her face morphed into something more guarded. She stepped back first, putting a little space between us. That small distance felt wrong.
“I think,” she said, and her voice had become too careful for my liking, “maybe you should go.”
Frustration hit hard and fast, mostly at myself.
“Emily.”
“No, it’s fine.” She reached for the door handle, though she was already standing against it. “Really. I just… I think I misunderstood things.”
You did not misunderstood a single thing, I wanted to say.
Instead I nodded, silent for one disastrous second too long, because how was I supposed to explain that I was stopping not because I wanted less of her, but because I had reached the point where wanting her without the truth felt like theft?
Her chin lifted in that way she had when she was trying very hard not to let someone see she was wounded.
And then Hoka’s voice came back to me with infuriating clarity.
If she matters, you do not get to build this alone in your head and call that love.
I had reached the point of no return with Emily.
I could tell her the truth, or I could let her go.
As I looked at her standing there, trying so hard not to reveal the shine gathering in her eyes, I understood something.
I was not going to let her go.
Not a chance.
I stepped back slowly, giving her the distance I could not yet fix.
“Goodnight, Emily.” If I stayed another second I was going to tell her everything, and I needed to be prepared.
She nodded once.
I turned and walked away, each step costing more than it should have.
By the time I reached the stairs, I could still feel her mouth on mine, her hand in mine, the tremor in her voice when she implied that “final” meant the end of us.
I did not yet know how I was going to tell her the truth, only that I would. Walking away was one thing. Letting her go was another. The look she gave me as I left tasted bitter all the way home.
I ignored Olivero’s questioning look when I walked through the front door, sexually frustrated and emotionally bruised.
“I assumed you’d stay the night,” he called after me, unable to stop himself.
I slammed my bedroom door hard enough to rattle the frame.
Childish, perhaps.
Effective nonetheless.
I sat on the edge of the bed and turned my phone over in my hand. I already knew who I wanted to call, whose voice I wanted to hear tell me it would be all right, and knew I would believe it simply because it came from her.
I lay back with a low exhale and looked at the ceiling.
“You’re supposed to be a grown man, Pietro Benetti, and yet all you want to do is call your mother,” I muttered to myself.
I checked the time.
Only nine in Chicago. Late enough that Victoria ought to be in bed, but early enough that I was unlikely to interrupt my parents in one of the more psychologically damaging expressions of long-term marital happiness I had, unfortunately, encountered more than once in my life.
I let the last scrap of pride leave my body and opened the video call.
My mother answered almost immediately.
“Hi, sweetheart. How are you?”
The sight of her smiling face on the screen—wild red curls, green eyes—did what it always did and eased some of the pressure in my chest before I had even said a word. The smile that appeared on my own face in answer was entirely genuine.
I sat up. “Hi, Ma. How are you? How was Vicky’s dance recital?”
She draped a dish towel over one shoulder and gave me a wink. “I’m fine. Hold on, let me get myself a glass of wine and we’ll have a proper talk. Your father’s still in his office. Do we need him?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I just need you.”
My mother’s expression softened at once in recognition.