Chapter 24 #2
“See?” Matteo said, pointing at me as if I had just proven something useful. “I told you the boy would want to know.”
Either he missed my sarcasm completely or, more likely, simply did not care.
“I went to see her,” he said. “She was delightful. Much more than expected, frankly. She fits. Then Adam appeared. Tiresome, but useful in the end.”
Every muscle in me went rigid.
“Adam is there?”
“Was,” Matteo corrected. “Let me finish, Petrolino.”
I turned toward Hoka so fast I nearly spilled the drink. “Adam was there? I thought you tracked him. I thought you were making sure he couldn’t get close.”
“And I thought,” my uncle said, his voice colder than I had heard it in a very long time, “that you no longer cared.”
That hit hard enough to silence me.
Hoka’s face gave nothing away, but the disappointment in him was unmistakable and far worse than anger would have been. He had always been stern, always demanding, but this was different. This was judgment.
“You let her go,” he said. “You decided she was not worth keeping safe. We fought like hell to keep ours. You threw yours away.” His eyes stayed on mine, unwavering. “She deserves better.”
I actually took a step back.
That landed.
Matteo calling me an idiot meant nothing. Matteo called everyone an idiot eventually. But Hoka, my mentor, the man who had taught me more than anyone alive about discipline, control, and survival, looking at me as if I had failed something essential did damage.
“It’s all right,” Matteo said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Your uncle told your father, your father told me, and I said I would handle it. Which I did beautifully, by the way. I tried to keep your worlds separate, but then she looked at Adam like she had already accepted his fate and gave him away without a flicker of guilt. No hesitation. No moral little crisis. It was glorious.” His grin widened.
“She’s bloodthirsty. I adore her. I was just telling your father that if Niccolo were ten years older, I’d kidnap her for him. ”
I couldn’t even form a response.
Too many things were colliding in my head at once.
Adam had gone after her. Matteo had found her.
Matteo protected her. That should have been my responsibility, my place, my right, and the realization that my grand, miserable sacrifice had accomplished nothing except leaving her alone to face all of it without me made something vicious turn over in my chest.
“What is it with you and kidnapping?” Hoka asked, tilting his head slightly. “It seems to be your answer to every problem.”
Matteo shrugged, wholly unrepentant. “It works. And don’t be a hypocrite, Nishimura. We both know you kidnapped your pretty little Violet.”
“That was different,” Hoka said, with a flatness that warned against further commentary. “I had no choice.”
Matteo laughed. “That is the lie you tell yourself so you can continue believing you are a good man with principles.”
My father raised an eyebrow over the rim of his glass. “Interesting. I notice you are not including yourself in that category.”
“Of course not,” Matteo said easily. “I’m not a good man. I am, however, an honest one. I love my wife to insanity. I would bleed anyone who tried to hurt her, and I would eviscerate myself to keep her happy, but she knows perfectly well there is no leaving me. Ever.”
The room went quiet after that. Matteo hadn’t shocked anyone, but with him there was always something worse in hearing a man tell the truth too plainly.
I looked down at the drink in my hand, then finished it in one swallow.
Emily had been in danger again. Matteo stepped in where I should have.
Hoka thought I had failed her. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the one thing that should have brought me relief, the fact that she had been strong and cold enough to hand Adam over without guilt, only made me want her more and hate myself for leaving her alone even harder.
“Well,” Matteo said at last, as if we had all just finished discussing weather patterns instead of dismantling my life, “if it helps, she also told me very clearly that she was not Adam’s anything, and not Pietro Benetti’s girl either. She is Emily Hart.”
That made me look up.
My father’s expression changed by the smallest degree. Hoka said nothing at all. Matteo, of course, continued to look delighted.
And that one detail, more than the rest of it, lodged itself under my ribs and twisted.
Not Pietro Benetti’s girl.
Emily Hart.
Of course she said that. Of course that would be the line she drew. And of course some part of me, even aching and furious and half drunk on grief, admired her for it.
I wanted a woman strong enough to stand beside me.
It turned out I had found one strong enough to stand without me too.
“I did what was best for her.”
“Okay,” my father replied.
“I did,” I insisted. “You said it yourself. Bringing her into our world was a heavy thing to do.”
“I did,” my father said, and the evenness of his tone scraped across my nerves so hard it almost made me laugh. He sounded like a man pacifying a child too stubborn to notice he was losing an argument with his own reflection.
He is though, isn’t he? That is exactly what you are.
“Say what you want to say,” I muttered.
My father looked at me for a moment, then set his glass down. “I’m not here to advise you anymore, Pietro. I told you before there are some realizations no one can hand you. You have to arrive at them yourself. Otherwise you spend your whole life mistaking inherited wisdom for conviction.”
I said nothing.
Hoka, irritatingly silent for longer than usual, finally leaned back in his chair and crossed one ankle over his knee.
“There is a difference,” he said, “between protecting a woman and deciding her life for her because you are afraid of what loving her will cost you. One is strength. The other is fear wearing principle as a disguise.”
That landed too cleanly.
I gritted my teeth and looked away.
Matteo, naturally, chose that moment to sigh with theatrical disappointment.
“God, you are all so exhausting when you try to be philosophers. The answer is simple. You love the woman, the woman loves you, she gets kidnapped, you kill half a warehouse, then she looks good in an elf costume and hands a man over to me without blinking. This is not complicated. The two of you are clearly deranged in highly compatible ways.”
Elena, who just appeared with a plate of hors d'oeuvre, let out a long-suffering breath. “Darling. We discussed this.”
“What?” Matteo said. “I’m being helpful.”
“You never are,” my father said.
Matteo ignored him with dignity. “For what it’s worth, Petrolino, your mistake was not loving her.
Your mistake was thinking heartbreak chosen by you would hurt her less than danger chosen by her.
Women hate that. Elena hates it when I do things for her own good.
” He paused, looked at his wife, and corrected himself.
“She hates most things I do, but especially that.”
Elena didn’t even glance up as she came forward, put the platter down and kissed her husband’s head. “A rare moment of accuracy.”
The room almost laughed.
I didn’t.
Because underneath Matteo’s unhinged nonsense, underneath my father’s maddening restraint and Hoka’s knife-clean wisdom, something had begun to change in me.
My father had been right. He could not explain it.
I had to feel it.
And now I did.
Not all at once, not like lightning, but with the cold, relentless certainty of a blade being slowly turned.
I had called it sacrifice because that made me sound noble.
I had called it kindness because that made the grief bearable.
I had dressed my fear in all the right words and mistaken restraint for courage.
The truth was uglier.
I had not let Emily go because it was best for her.
I had let her go because I was afraid. Afraid of hurting her, yes, but also afraid of failing her, afraid of watching the light in her eyes change because of what I was, afraid of loving her so much that I would have to live every day knowing exactly what I could cost her.
And instead of trusting her with the choice, I made it for her.
Cowardice.
That was the realization.
Not mercy. Not sacrifice. Cowardice with expensive language wrapped around it.
Matteo rose from his chair with the lazy grace of a man who never once in his life doubted he was the most alarming person in any room. “Oh,” he said, as if only just remembering, “I kept him alive, by the way.”
I looked up.
“The whiny ex,” he clarified. “He’s in your basement.” His grin widened into something feral. “I thought it was your role to finish him. Merry Christmas. Don’t you agree I’m the best gift giver?”
No one stopped me when I set my glass down.
No one spoke as I walked out of the library and toward the basement stairs.
By the time I reached the first step, the truth lived in me fully, sharp and humiliating and clarifying all at once.
I had made a mistake. Not when I fell in love with Emily Hart, not when I brought her into my life, not even when I let myself imagine rings and Christmas and forever.
My mistake was believing I could protect her from my world by becoming one more man who took her choices away.
I couldn’t undo the hurt already done. I couldn’t give her back the moment she had looked at me and seen, not a savior, but just another man deciding her life for her.
But I could stop pretending that walking away had been noble.
And I could do everything in my power to repair what I broke and win back the woman I loved.
That certainty steadied me by the time I reached the basement door.
Whatever waited below and whatever waited after, whatever humiliation or groveling or blood would be required to put this right, I would take it.
This time I knew exactly what I was fighting for.
And I had no intention of letting her go again.