Chapter 11 #2
No, of course not.
My mind spun faster. He wasn’t just rich.
That much I already knew. He was rich rich, and yes, I looked him up yesterday after he walked away.
I’d found enough to confirm he was the heir to some giant conglomerate, the kind of family empire built to impress people who liked boardrooms, private schools, and generational wealth.
But even then, I felt it.
There was something wrong with how curated it all was. The media was too clean, too controlled. Not a life, a version of one. The sort of public image that looked like editing.
His apartment was exactly what I should have expected. Dark wood. Clean lines. Understated in a way that probably cost twice as much as anything gaudy. It should have felt impersonal. Instead it felt controlled. Very Pietro.
He set his keys down on the marble counter and turned to face me. For a moment he said nothing, and the silence stretched just long enough to make my pulse begin to pound.
Then, very quietly, he asked, “Did you mean what you said this morning?”
I blinked, surprised that was the first thing out of his mouth. “About what?”
“In class.” He held my gaze. “About morality. About what people tell themselves in order to live with what they’ve done.”
I felt my palms getting clammy. “Is that really so important?”
His face didn’t change, but something in his eyes did. Something darker, exposed and most of all wary.
“More than you know.”
He didn’t need to say anything else for me to understand. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
The expensive clothes. The bodyguard-friend. The private plane. The way people reacted to him. The way he spoke about power like he had held it in his bare hands and found it heavier than expected.
Fear moved through me. I didn’t think he would hurt me, but I was suddenly terrified of hearing a thing that would make it impossible to keep pretending I didn’t already know.
“It was a seminar,” I replied, a little too evasively, but the unwavering look in his eyes only made me more uncomfortable.
He took a step toward me.
I took one back.
He let out a quiet sigh at the gesture. “It’s important.”
“Why?”
His gaze didn’t waver. “Because your answer will tell me whether, after the conversation we’re about to have, I’ll ever see you again. And if the answer is no, then I’d like to spend the last minutes I have with you memorizing your face.”
How was a woman supposed to not fall for a man like him?
“Pietro…”
“It’s a simple question.”
“No,” I said softly. “It isn’t.”
I exhaled and dropped onto the sofa without grace, not caring about posture or poise or any of the other useless little things.
“Because yes,” I said after a moment. “To some extent, I do mean it. I understand that context matters. That people justify things differently depending on how they were raised, what they were taught, what kind of world shaped them. I know what Adam did to me was wrong, and I also know he doesn’t think of it that way. ”
I looked down at my hands.
“I’m writing a thesis on power and the corruption of power, so yes, I believe all of that. I believe morality is more complicated than people like to admit.” I swallowed. “But whether I can separate a crime from the person committing it…”
I lifted my eyes to his.
“Whether I can do that with Pietro Benetti is another question entirely.”
He nodded once. I knew it wasn’t the answer he had hoped for. And yet he still came closer.
Not to sit beside me on the sofa, though. Instead, he perched on one of the stools by the kitchen island, leaving enough space between us that I knew he was doing it on purpose.
“You already know, don’t you?”
I could have denied it. In truth, I knew nothing for certain. But he knew me better than that already, and I respected him too much to insult him with a lie.
“I suspect,” I said quietly. “I’m bracing.”
His shoulders dropped a fraction. “Bracing.” He nodded once, more to himself than to me. “Yes. So am I.”
He drew in a slow breath and looked at his hands before lifting his eyes back to mine.
“Because I need to explain why I stopped yesterday. Not because I didn’t want you. Quite the opposite.” His voice roughened. “I want you with a force that is dangerously close to insanity, Emily. The problem is that I cannot take what I want and then leave you to deal with the fallout.”
I said nothing.
“I’m not like other men,” he went on. “And the responsibility people carry when they decide to be close to me, to my family, is not light. Bringing you further into my life without giving you all the facts felt dishonest.” He shook his head once.
“And that is not how I want to build anything with you.”
My throat tightened.
“If I ask you to stop here and let me go?”
The sadness on his face hurt more than I wanted it to.
He gestured toward the door anyway.
“It’s unlocked. Now or later, you’re free to leave whenever you want.” His gaze held mine. “It took me time to tell you, not because I doubted how you would handle it, but because I needed to know whether I trusted you.”
My heart climbed into my throat.
“And I do.”
The words settled into me with awful weight.
Then he said, “I’m the heir to the Benetti family.”
I swallowed.
“Yes, I’ve seen your business empire.” But even as I said it, I knew that wasn’t it. I knew it from the way his face changed, from the way he looked at me like he was already watching something fracture.
“No,” he said. “That’s part of the fa?ade. The legitimate side. The version built for the public.” He drew in another measured breath. “That’s not the blood of it. It’s not the legacy I was born into, and it isn’t the role I’ve been raised for.”
Something in me pulled back before the words even came.
I wanted him to stop.
“Pietro—”
But he kept going.
“I’m not just Pietro Benetti, future businessman.” His voice stayed level, which made it worse. “I’m also Pietro Benetti, son of the head of the Chicago outfit. And when I finish at Hawthorne, I’ll go home and be named sotto capo.”
For one second, I didn’t understand it.
Then I understood it too well.
This wasn’t money.
It wasn’t family power in some abstract, polished, corporate sense.
It was blood. Violence. Crime dressed in tailoring and old names. It was headlines and courtrooms and the kind of danger that never really left once it learned your face.
“Mafia?” I whispered, more to myself than to him.
“Mafia,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Mafia,” I repeated dumbly, because my mind seemed to have caught on that one word. Not just someone connected to it. Not just adjacent. “The heir…” I whispered.
“Not just an heir,” he said quietly.
I looked up then, almost ready to laugh from the sheer shock of it, because the scale of what he was saying was so far beyond anything I had prepared myself for that I could barely take it in. Fear was part of it. Disbelief too. But neither of those hit hardest.
He held my gaze as though looking away now would break something between us for good.
“An heir,” he said quietly, “who is desperately in love with you.”
The silence that followed felt different from ordinary silence. The kind that settles after something has already changed, before your thoughts have caught up enough to name it.
Because in the end, that was the part that undid me most. Not the mafia. Not the blood and violence sitting beneath his beautiful face and careful hands. It was the love. The impossible honesty of it.
I didn’t know what he saw on my face, only that whatever it was made something in his expression lift, hope and resignation tangling together so tightly I couldn’t tell them apart.
“Emily,” he said softly.
I still couldn’t answer.