20. Olivia
OLIVIA
brEAKING POINT
“No, it was Pisa Centrale first, and then the railyard in Lagaro!”
“No, no, no, I tell you it was Porta Susa in Turin, then Lagaro! You did Pisa Centrale on your own after our branco di Guerra had to split because hunters caught our trail!”
“See, this is why I never parlare di des tings with you! Your memory is worse than mi amore before he passed.”
Both Nonna Rizoli and Nonna Bianchi made the sign of the cross over their chests.
“Gods rest his soul.”
“Gods rest his soul.”
“This is so fascinating,” Miss Angela cut in, defusing my two grandmothers’ argument about their various wartime escapades. When I was a kid, I used to imagine myself being the hero like them in such situations, fighting against Nazis like a red-blooded American, but I grew out of it.
Maybe I never should have. After all, it was never too late to punch a Nazi.
“Eh, don’t get them started!” my great-uncle Marino drawled.
He was one of my older relatives whose accent was almost as mild as my father’s.
He’d inherited a stereotypical Yonkers accent from when he’d immigrated with my dad.
“These broads will only admit to half of what they did, remember only half of what they’ll admit, and have always been terribile at names. ”
“Only because back then everyone in Italia had zee same name!”
“Especially the men. I think I was courted by three Vincenzos.”
“And twelve diversi Tonys.”
“Now that I would love to hear about!” Miss Angela said, leaning in to show that she was all ears. She had that same sort of earnestness as her son, which made sense, because he had to get it from somewhere.
Where the hell was he? He’d disappeared about two hours earlier.
While normally that would be a concerning amount of time to go missing, I knew how seriously some of my younger family members took their leisurely sports activities, so I wasn’t worried, just curious.
Especially since I was certain I had already seen several of the people who had left to play dodgeball return and snacking on appetizers.
My fiancé was trying to make a good impression on my family, but I doubted he’d purposefully miss the hors d’oeuvres after I’d spent so much time boasting about my family’s cooking.
“If you don’t mind me, I’m gonna stretch my legs,” I said, mostly to Miss Angela.
She seemed at ease with my relatives, but I didn’t want her to feel abandoned.
Normally I would be reticent to leave her alone with the elders who were most likely to forget that they weren’t supposed to be directly mentioning anything wolfy, but I was sure I would return before they blew up that particular house of cards.
“Oh, of course, dear! No need to hang out with us fuddy-duddies,” Miss Angela said with a laugh.
I got the feeling that my grandmothers would take offense to that phrase if they knew what it meant, but as it was, only Marino snorted into his hand.
“Go mingle and have fun! And maybe grab me some of those deviled eggs on your way back if there are any left.”
Giving her an apologetic look, I kissed her cheek. “I’ll go check for you, but I should warn you, no matter how many we make, those are always gone within ten minutes of being set down.”
“Well, glad to see that some things are the same no matter the culture. I’ll cross my fingers, but I won’t hold my breath.”
I headed off, doing a complete circuit of the perimeter of the party. I was stopped occasionally, but it seemed either my relatives could tell I was on a mission or they were avoiding me entirely.
Not that I could blame them. A good portion of my pack was incredibly miffed that I had invited my fiancé and therefore forced them not to be outwardly shifter unless they were in the woods beyond our property.
I got the feeling that if my father wasn’t the alpha, it never would have happened, and maybe it was abuse of power, but I wasn’t about to have my soon-to-be-husband miss the engagement party of my closest-in-age sibling.
Unless, of course, Roma had been against it.
No matter how I felt, it was her engagement party, and what she said was law as long as it didn’t hurt anybody.
But surprisingly enough, the Italian princess had been the one to suggest it.
I had assumed that the only big celebrations I would be able to bring Keith to would be my own and Rolando’s, but no.
It turned out I wasn’t the only romantic hanging around.
It certainly made me look at the woman in a different light.
Perhaps she was the reason my brother had grown a whole lot more tolerable in the last handful of years.
When I’d walked the entire perimeter and still hadn’t found Keith, worry bubbled up like a geyser along the back of my throat.
Trying to school my scent so I wouldn’t draw any undue attention, I hurried into the house, hoping he was stuck in the line for a bathroom after a particularly invigorating game of dodgeball.
No dice.
He wasn’t in the basement, playing video games with some of the guys who were less sporty, and he wasn’t in the kitchen, helping my mother with any last-minute stuff she decided to do even after all the preparations were done.
He wasn’t in the sitting room being regaled by some of my uncles about the glory days, and he wasn’t out front with all the kids.
Where the hell was he?
Those nerves were growing into outright sirens in my head, and I beelined to the closest person I knew who’d been with him.
Massimo. I found him by the fence in the back, dribbling his soccer ball by himself while he listened to a game on his phone in one hand and sipped on a glass of wine in the other.
Okay, seeing it like that made me realize that maybe, just maybe, my family tended to fall into certain Italian stereotypes. Oh well. There were worse things to be than a football head, and at least he wasn’t guzzling my uncle’s strong wine.
“Hey, have you seen Keith?”
“You mean your giant of a man?” he said, laughing fondly in a way that told me the dodgeball session must have gone well. “Last I saw him, he was shielding three other men with his body to clinch us the victory! He’s a noble one, that umano.”
“He is,” I agreed, feeling proud despite the fact that my nerves were beginning to fray at the edges. “Oh, word to the wise, his mom understands rudimentary Italian and definitely knows that means human. I told her we use it as slang for a generic dude, but I figured you should know.”
“Oh shit, really? Thanks for the heads up. I’ll spread the word.”
“I know it’s inconvenient, but I appreciate all of you being willing to put the whole shifter thing on the down low for now. I know it’s not in our nature.”
“Olivia, for being my elder sister, sometimes you are so silly.”
“You wanna come again now with that?”
He stopped dribbling and gave me a rueful expression before striding forward and catching me up in a hug. It certainly wasn’t what I expected, and I nearly flinched at the contact.
“Okay, what’s going on now?” Maybe I was wrong, and he had gotten into the shifter wine.
“You’ve always asked for so little. Too little, in my opinion. And I think we’ve gotten spoiled because we could always count on you to fill in the gaps. So when my big sister asks for something so directly for the first time in her life, you can bet a lot of us are going to try to make it happen.”
My heart squeezed at that, and I felt myself blushing.
I knew I was loved—my family showed it in many ways—but after so many years of feeling taken for granted, it was good to not only have my feelings validated by another, but also to hear that they were trying to make up for some of the snafus in the past.
“But...”
Ugh, I should have known there was a but.
“You’ll tell him eventually, right? I get this being a stopgap because you haven’t found the perfect way to rock his entire perception of the world, and that you wanna make sure he can fit in before exposing us, but he has a right to know before you marry him.
And the rest of us have a right to be known. ”
He had a point. He knew it. I knew it. And any of our ancestors who just so happened to be listening to the conversation knew it.
But I wasn’t ready.
If dating Keith had been a dream, being engaged to him was like a fairy tale come true.
I woke up every morning feeling loved and excited for the rest of my life.
I went to bed daydreaming about all the possibilities that awaited us.
He made me happy. He made me feel safe. He made me feel seen, appreciated, and desired in a way I thought wasn’t possible for someone like me.
Keith made me want to be a better person, and a better wolf.
But most of all, I was so fucking terrified of him knowing that I had been lying to him from the day we met.
How could he ever forgive that? I’d dug myself into a hole, and I had even warned myself from the very start that it was doomed, yet I’d allowed myself to get caught up. Now, I was at the point where it felt like there was no way to win.
No way to win outside of keeping up the lie.
“I know,” I said finally. “But it’s not the right time.”
“I understand. But please, keep in mind, if you don’t find the time to tell the truth, the truth will find that time for you.”
“When did you get so wise?”
He tossed his hair over his shoulder and flipped the ball up with his foot again, bouncing it into the air with his knee. “I’ve always been wise, sciocca. I just had to pretend not to be because I’m so handsome. It’s unfair to be both.”
“And humble too,” I said after a sharp bark of laughter.
“Demure even. A virtuoso in many regards.”
“Right, well, I’ll leave you to all your excellence while I go find Keith. Don’t forget to drink water between those glasses of wine. We may be shifters, but we can still get dehydrated.”
He smirked. As I walked off, I heard him mutter something about me being a big sister through and through.