Chapter 21
Viktor~
It didn’t matter how many times necessary, I was never going to be comfortable in Marchetti territory. Despite the legal relation now, I didn’t belong here, and I wondered if this was how Aurora felt every day. I was also beginning to understand why she never left our bedroom.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I said as I shook Roman’s hand.
“Well, I figured that it must be important for you to reach out, especially when you requested that you come here alone,” Roman replied diplomatically.
Imagining that he wasn’t the type of man who appreciated someone wasting his time, I got straight to the point. “I’m in love with your daughter.”
Roman leaned back in his seat, eyeing me with the same dark gaze that Aurora had inherited. “I suspected as much when you showed up here after her attack. I couldn’t imagine that it was easy to walk into my home unarmed.”
“You’re not wrong,” I drawled out.
“So, what’s the issue, Viktor?” he asked candidly.
“She’s unhappy,” I answered just as candidly. “She’s unhappy, and I don’t like it. However, I also don’t know how to fix it.”
After digesting that for a few seconds, he said, “When Aurora was ten and Santino fourteen, he had come racing into my office, his nose a bloody mess, his left eye already forming a bruise, and I’d been certain that Stefano would be coming running in behind him, just as bloody, but he didn’t.
Instead, a furious Aurora had come marching in behind him, and I could remember the shock of having to race around my desk to tear her off him, and once I’d been able to pull them apart, Santino had been yelling about how crazy Aurora was, and Aurora had been screaming that she was going to kill him. ”
“Jesus, what had they been fighting about?” I asked, picturing the scene in my head.
“Santino had broken the news to Aurora that she’d never become the Marchetti Don,” he answered, surprising the hell out of me.
“Oh, it wasn’t anything that she hadn’t already been told a million times before, but for whatever reason, the truth had finally sunk in, and Aurora had been ready to murder Santino for shutting down the only dream that she’d ever had. ”
My brows jump a bit. “That’s not unhealthy at all.”
Roman just smirked. “Once I’d gotten to the heart of the issue, I had sent Santino to his mother to get looked at, then had sat Aurora down to have as serious as a talk that I could have with an enraged ten-year-old.
” He shook his head at the memory before continuing on with the story.
“When I was finally finished explaining why she’d never become any kind of don, she cried in my arms for hours.
Hours, Viktor. She had cried in my arms like there’d been a death in the family, and it hadn’t been fun. ”
“I can’t imagine that it was,” I remarked.
“Now, you would have thought that that’d been the end of it, but not for Aurora,” he went on.
“After that, she’d been on a mission to prove us all wrong, and not wanting her to feel like her gender was any more of a handicap, I’d chosen to include her in the same rearing as her brothers.
She got the same lessons as Santino and Stefano, and when she turned eighteen, I’d given Aurora her very first Marchetti assignment, though it hadn’t been anything near what her brothers had been required to handle. ”
“What happened after that?” I asked, wanting to learn as much about my wife as possible.
“That photographic memory of hers had impressed us all,” he answered.
“She had executed her mission flawlessly, and from there, I had begun upping the antes until she had proven that she had what it took to run every last one of us. In fact, out of all of my children, Aurora’s the most ruthless of them all. ”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I knew about her being Astaroth, but I wasn’t sure if he’d see that as a betrayal or not, so I kept my mouth shut. That was the only thing that Aurora had trusted me with, and I wasn’t about to break my word, even if it was to her father.
“I tell you all that, so that you understand that what you see is what you get with my daughter,” Roman said. “She’s not acting, and she’s not being combative because you’re the enemy. If Aurora is being combative, it’s because you don’t respect her.”
“She’s my wife,” I quickly replied. “Of course, I respect her.”
“Aurora doesn’t need you to respect her as your wife,” he stated seriously.
“She needs you to respect her as an equal. It’s only then that you’ll be able to trust her, and when I use the word trust, I’m not talking about her being a Marchetti.
I’m talking about letting her be her without slowly going insane.
Trust me, ask me or her brothers, and we’ll tell you that we know exactly what we’re talking about. ”
“So, I’m just supposed to let her run around loose, is that it?” I asked, surprised at what I was hearing. “Because it’s one thing for her to run free on Marchetti territory, it’s quite another to have her unguarded in Korolev territory.”
“She was never unguarded, though your point is valid,” he replied. “Nonetheless, you came here to asked me for advice on my daughter, and that’s the only advice that I can give you.”
Not caring that I sounded like a wounded schoolboy, I asked, “She’s never going to love me, is she?”
Roman eyed me from across his desk. “Are you sure that you want her to?”
I scowled at that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Aurora’s love and loyalty isn’t a fleeting thing, Viktor,” he answered.
“She has spent her entire life proving herself over and over again, and it’ll never be enough because she will always be a woman, and us men are too stupid for our own good sometimes.
” My brows shot upward at that, but he just continued.
“The point that I’m trying to make is this...
when we heard about what our enemies had been planning, I had two sons ready to go to war, no questions asked.
Everyone had been ready to take their chances, accepting our losses in a bid to win in whichever manner necessary. ”
“Then how did Aurora get roped into marrying me?” I asked, hating how much I wanted ours to be the love story that it was never going to be.
“She didn’t,” he answered, flooring me. “She was presented with our options, and even with Santino and Stefano in favor of going to war, she’d chosen to protect her family at all costs.
She’d chosen to go live and lay with the enemy if it meant that her family would be safe.
With no idea of what life with you would be like for her, she’d chosen to go in blind, her love for us giving her no choice.
” Roman sat up straighter in his chair. “So, again, I ask you...are you sure that you want her to love you back, Viktor? Because if it ever comes to that, you’re going to have bigger problems than you do now. ”
“Such as?”
“My daughter doesn’t fear death, something that you’ve already learned,” he replied. “Loving you back puts her in a position where she’ll do anything for you, including throwing herself in front of a bullet if it means saving the man that she loves. She also won’t think twice about it.”
I shook my head, wanting to call him a liar, but knowing that he wasn’t lying at all. “How do you do it? How do you let her...let her be her and not lose your fucking mind in the process?”
“Long ago, I accepted who she was over how I feel about her,” he answered. “You can see it in the video of her attack.”
I shook my head again. “I’ve watched that footage a million times, Roman.”
“Through the lens of a worried husband and an outraged Sovietnik,” he pointed out.
“Go back and look at it again, Viktor. Only, this time, try to look at it objectively. Look at everything that she does to protect herself, not at what they are doing to her. Look at how she was capable of killing four grown men, even though she was injured and the odds were stacked against her.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” I told him honestly.
Roman let out a sympathetic sigh before saying, “Then you’ll just have to learn to live with Aurora being unhappy.”
“I don’t know if I can do that, either.”
“Well, which would you rather have, Viktor?” he asked. “Her love or her unhappiness?”
“Before I spoke with you, I would have said her love. However, now that I know what I know, her being unhappy seems like the safest choice for her,” I answered.
“And what about your children? What will it benefit them to be raised by unhappy parents?”
“We’re not going to have children,” I informed him, making his head rear back in surprise. “For precisely that reason.”
“I see,” he said after a few seconds. “Is Aurora aware of this?”
“We haven’t discussed it yet, but if she’s as smart as I believe she is, then she probably already knows that having children will be an issue between us,” I replied.
After another few seconds of silence, he said, “Well, is there anything else that you’d like to know?”
I shook my head. “No, I think I know more than enough.”
Roman stood up, signaling the end of the meeting, then said, “Well, with that settled, we’ll return to focusing our energies on who put the hit out on her.”
“Luckily, I can focus on more than one thing at a time,” I drawled out, and the man just grinned.