Chapter 26
PIETRO
Note to self: never take romantic advice from mafia dons.
Ever.
It did not matter whether they were Italian or Japanese. Criminal empires apparently did not translate into emotional intelligence worth relying on. In fact, if this whole disaster had taught me anything, it was that advice from men in general should be treated with suspicion.
Ask her to marry you. You’ll see, she’ll fall right into your arms.
Tell her you’re sorry. She’ll forgive you.
And Matteo’s contribution, naturally, had been the most unhinged of all: Just kidnap her. Your father still has that island, doesn’t he? Perfect. She can’t run.
That had been said with enough sincerity to make it genuinely concerning.
Which was why I was currently moping in a scalding bath, trying to loosen muscles that seemed to have turned to wire from stress, guilt, and general romantic incompetence.
The water should have been relaxing. It wasn’t. It was only hot enough to make my skin red and my thoughts marginally less murderous, which at this point counted as self-care.
I tipped my head back against the edge of the tub and stared at the ceiling, letting out a long breath.
I missed her.
That was the central problem. I missed Emily with a kind of persistence that had become humiliating.
I missed her voice, her expression when she was trying not to laugh, the way she looked at me when she forgot to protect herself from how much she cared, and the highly unflattering Christmas sweater she had somehow still managed to look beautiful in while dismantling my character with terrifying accuracy.
The worst part was that she had not been wrong.
I had been a coward.
A well-intentioned coward, perhaps, but history was not kind to men who insisted on being judged for their motives rather than their choices.
I sank lower in the bath and scrubbed a hand over my face.
Unfortunately, all of this still did not provide me with a useful plan.
Because the truth was that I wanted the decision to be fully hers, but I also could not picture a life without her in it and call it one I was willing to live.
I groaned as I massaged my scarred thigh, which had decided to join the general protest against my existence.
By the time I dragged myself back into the living room feeling marginally more human, if no less miserable, and no more willing or able to disguise the limp, I found Olivero unpacking Italian takeout onto the kitchen counter.
He glanced up. “Oh, good. You’re here. I was worried you were going to cry all night in your bath.”
I gave him the finger. “I was not crying, asshole.”
“Mm.” He slid one of the containers toward me. “On a scale of one to ten, how badly did it go?”
I dropped onto a stool and opened the lid to find pasta alla puttanesca. My favorite. I hated that he knew I would need it.
“Minus five,” I said.
“Ah.” He nodded as if this were a respectable data point. “So she didn’t call the police or attempt murder. That’s good. It leaves us hope.”
I just started eating.
Olivero waited a full ten seconds before proving, once again, that silence was impossible for him to maintain.
“What did she say?”
I took another bite, chewed, swallowed, and then answered because I had forgotten how to suffer in private.
“She’s not sure she can trust me anymore.”
The humor slipped off of his face at once. “Ah,” he said more quietly. “That does suck. I’m sorry.”
Then, because he was still Olivero and allergic to remaining serious for too long, he added, “But did you at least tell her you were an idiot?”
I looked up and glared at him. “I think that was implied in my pathetic attempt to apologize.”
“Okay.” He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. “Then what you need now is not another apology.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. You need to show her she can actually be happy spending her life with a man who has emotional limitations and a documented tendency toward idiocy.”
I stared at him. “That is a truly inspiring pitch.”
“You’re welcome.”
I rubbed a hand over my jaw. “And how exactly do you suggest I do that?”
Olivero shrugged as if the answer were obvious.
“Have her spend time with the two women who married the two biggest idiots in our combined families and still somehow look suspiciously happy.”
I frowned. “What?”
He looked at me like I was exceptionally slow.
“Lily and Violet.”
“You want me to bring my mother and my aunt here so they can explain to the woman I love why loving men like us is survivable?”
“Exactly.” Olivero nodded, entirely too pleased with himself. “See? You are smart. Emotionally delayed, but smart.”
“It’s completely out of the question.”
He shrugged and opened his own container. “Unless you’re desperate enough.”
I glared at him. “I hate when you’re helpful.”
“No, you hate when I’m right.”
“That too.” I leaned back on the stool and let out a long breath. “Dragging my mother and aunt into this feels like cheating.”
“Please. Your entire family has been interfering in your love life since I can remember. At this point it would simply be formalizing the process.”
I let that sit because, annoyingly, he was not wrong.
“Or,” I said slowly, “I give her the true choice.”
Olivero frowned. “What would that be?”
I looked at my half-empty plate for a moment before answering. “Stepping down as sotto capo.”
He stopped eating.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I said nothing.
He looked at me, eyes narrowing, and slowly raised his brows. “You’re serious.”
“If that’s what she wants…” I rubbed a hand over my jaw. “I don’t know. I won’t make the same mistake twice and decide for her what she can or cannot live with. But I can offer her the option. The real one. Me as I am, or me outside of it, if that is what would make a life with me possible.”
Olivero stared at me for a beat longer, then whistled low under his breath.
“Well,” he said. “That is either the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or the beginning of a family civil war.”
“Possibly both.”
“Your father is going to love this.”
“No, he won’t.”
“Your mother will cry.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Matteo will call you weak for three to five business years.”
“That would require him to shut up eventually, which seems optimistic.”
Olivero laughed at that, then set his fork down and leaned against the counter. “And if she doesn’t appreciate the potential sacrifice?”
I held his gaze before looking away.
“Then I’ll call my mother and aunt for help.”
He pointed at me with his fork. “See? Growth.”
"You're an asshole," I said.
"Good. At least we're on the same page."
Three days later, Sophie's cane was finished. It was a reason to see Emily that wasn't entirely selfish, even if the fact that I would have invented one didn't contradict that.
I found her in the library.
At our table.
I stopped and simply looked at her, and the memory hit me with such force that it almost made me smile despite myself.
Six months ago I had seen her there for the first time, all focus and quiet irritation, and thought, with the arrogance unique to men like me, that she might become an interesting distraction.
Since then she had managed to alter the entire shape of my life and become the altar I wanted to worship at every single day.
She looked up.
“It seems I see you more in this building now than I did when you were still a student,” she said. “You know it’s vacation, right?”
I walked over and sat across from her. At least the sharp frown of disapproval that had greeted me the last time was gone, which I chose to interpret as wildly encouraging.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m considering doing a master’s in economics and history.”
She shook her head, and for one precious second she looked almost amused.
“Very funny. You have a job to do.”
And then it hit me, so simply I almost hated myself for not saying it this plainly sooner. I straightened in my chair.
“I can be serious, if you want me to.”
She closed her highlighter slowly and leaned back. “What do you mean?”
I held her gaze.
“I mean that in the life I was born into, I can’t honestly promise you safety.
I can’t promise that my world will never reach for you again or that I’ll always be able to separate blood from home the way I want to.
I can’t promise I won’t hide things. I can’t promise I won’t lie sometimes.
I can promise I’ll fight for it, but I know now that wanting to keep a promise and being able to keep it are not always the same thing. ”
She said nothing.
So I kept going.
“And if that life is too much, if the cost of loving me as I am is more than you should ever be asked to pay, then I can step down.”
For the first time since I’d sat down, her face changed.
“What?”
“I can stay in Boston,” I said. “Take over the company here. Build something legitimate and let the rest become someone else’s burden.
I’m not saying it lightly and I’m not offering it as manipulation.
I’m saying that if the life and the choices I make in it are what makes us impossible, then I am willing to remove the life from the equation and let the decision be about me. ”
She stared at me.
“You would do that?”
“In a heartbeat.”
The silence after that stretched so long I stopped breathing.
Then she said, very quietly, “No.”
For one strange, weightless second I could not tell what she meant. No to the idea? No to me? No to us?
“No,” I repeated carefully. “To what exactly?”
She looked down at the table for a moment, then back at me, and when she spoke her voice was calm enough that it made my chest ache.
“No to you offering me a version of yourself cut down into something smaller just so I can feel safer saying yes.”
I said nothing.
“Do you really think that would fix what happened?” she asked. “That I could respect you more because you amputated your life and handed me the severed bit as proof of devotion?”
That was…vivid.
Also not unfair.
“Emily—”