CHAPTER 11
Tino
Angel was playing with Nicco when I came in today. A sight I could watch for hours with an endless sated smile. Not now, though. I needed my alone time with her.
I sat and gestured for Arancia to take him, and misery dulled Angel’s face in an instant. Nicco cried in protest simultaneously.
“Can you leave him a little longer?” she asked me. “I barely see him, Tino.”
“If you behave today, I’ll bring him back.”
Her shoulders slumped in resignation, and she nodded. Her gaze trailed after Nicco as Arancia left with him. “He’s growing so fast. It’s been months since you put me here with minimum interaction with my son. I’m worried he won’t recognize me anymore, not as his mother.”
“He knows who you are.”
“But I’m not the one raising him. It’s your sister .” She spat the last word as an insult.
“Arancia helps, but I am raising our boy. Nicole helps, too.”
“She still comes here?”
“A few times a week.”
“How is she?”
“Healthy.” I knocked on the wood of the side table next to me twice. “So is her baby. It’s a boy, by the way.”
She grinned and nodded multiple times in succession. Then she covered her mouth as she began crying. “I miss her so much. It hurts that I can’t be with her during that time in her life.”
“I know, my Angel.”
“Please, Tino. Let me be there for her, not for me, but for her sake. My sister needs me.”
“She has the best medical team and midwives at her disposal. She’s more than fine. I made sure of it.”
“She needs a female family member with her through this. Someone who has been through the same thing. Our mother is dead. I’m her only sister. Even if it is for emotional support. You don’t know how scary these things are.”
I grunted. “ She was the one there for you during your pregnancy, birth and entry to motherhood.”
“Yes, Tino, which means I should be there for her, too. She needs me. Don’t punish her for my mistakes.”
I leaned forward, cupped her chin and smirked. “You should have thought about that when you stabbed us both in the back, my little Angel. I’m not punishing Nicole. It’s the consequences of your betrayal that are.”
She shut her eyes with a whimper and looked away, hiding her tears from me. I forced her face back to mine, and she flinched. “Don’t. Hide. Your. Tears. From. Me. Ever.” I caressed her wet cheek. “I love to see you cry.”
Her lips trembled as more tears stained her face. “How much more?”
“Scusi?”
“How much more do I need to cry for you?” she whispered. “How much longer? You can’t keep me here forever. You’re not gonna divorce me either. You’re never gonna let me go. You’re too possessive to do so. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to make a choice. To let me out of here when you’ve had enough, as your wife, your queen…or as your late one.”
I kept stroking her face. “I’m not gonna kill you, Angel. That’s not an option. You were right about my being too possessive to let you go. You’re mine.”
“Then how much longer do I have to cry before you let me walk by your side again?”
I leaned back in my seat and crossed my legs. “That has always depended on you. Depended on when you’d finally apologize.”
“Apologize?” she asked incredulously. “I’ve said I was sorry a million times.”
“Yes, but for what?”
“For hurting you. For lying to you.”
“That’s not what you need to apologize for.”
“Then tell me. Guide me. Save me like you always do.”
“That’s the only lesson you need to learn by yourself, my sweet Angel. You have to figure it out on your own.”
She searched for the answer on my face, but when she didn’t find it, she glowered down, puckering her lips. “Until then, can you please let me see my sister, even for once before she gives birth?”
“I’ll think about it. I’ll also consider taking you out of here every now and then to allow you more time with Nicco. This room isn’t healthy for babies to stay in for a long time.”
Her gaze wandered to the lonely crib, but she didn’t mention it. We never talked about Leo’s mamma or the murder or my unborn baby girl. “Thank you, Tino. That’s very generous.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. I won’t be visiting as regularly as I’d like in the coming weeks.”
She blanched. “Why?”
“A cold war has started, but soon it will be blazing. I need to take care of business.”
“A war with the Lanzas? Because of what happened?”
“It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it?”
She stared at me like I’d just stabbed her. “You blame me for this war, don’t you? All I wanted to do was save you from a man who tried to kill you right in front of me, but you don’t see that. You twist things in the name of retaliation, to have your revenge on them and on me, to end up in a war where you’d be in danger the whole time to torture me, to kill me a hundred times every second you’re out there and I don’t know if you’re gonna come back alive. Why else would you tell me about that war now when you never talked to me about business before?”
I just gazed back at her.
Anger crossed her expression. “I get it now.”
“What is it that you get, Angel?”
“What you want me to apologize for. You want me to be convinced that I betrayed you just like the Lanzas, that I should have never acted behind your back even if it’d been to protect you. You want me to regret my decision, the one I made on my own without you.”
“While that’s not what I want you to apologize for, you did betray me. You lied to my face over and over. You made me look like a fool, inviting traitors into my own home, dining and laughing with them under my roof. I shook hands and made deals with men who looked me in the eye while calling me their friend when they’d been torturing my own blood for months, when they tricked me into giving them my daughter.
“What you’ve done almost cost us everything. I could have lost Leo or Nicole. I could have lost Nicco and you. My whole family, my whole kingdom. Everything. You still think you’ve done nothing wrong in that matter?”
“The only mistake I made was trusting the wrong crowd. This is all the Lanzas’ fault. They betrayed you, not me. If anything, they betrayed my deal with them, too. Doing everything I could to keep you with me safely, though? It’s the one thing that I’d do again and again and again even if it cost me a lifetime in hell, so no, Tino. I won’t apologize for anything I’ve done that might have kept you alive.”
I rose to my feet. “Looks like, after all this time, you’ve learned nothing yet. When I come home, I’ll have to make things more interesting .”
She let out an angry scream. “You know what? Fuck you, Don Bellomo.”
I fought the urge to choke her while I gave her a good old spanking, so I crossed my arms over my chest. “I thought about your request to see your sister and spend more time with Nicco. The answer is no.”
Her fists clenched, and she screamed again. I turned to leave. I was done with her bratty behavior for the day. She disappointed me to the point that I lost the will to punish her. There was no amount of punishment, no matter how hard, would satisfy me now, when all this time she failed to understand the damage she’d done, what she broke between us.
“You’re such a hypocrite,” she mumbled.
“I’m sick of your cries for attention. Stop being a fucking child and learn when to shut up or my belt will teach you.”
“I will not shut up. You are a hypocrite. You allow yourself to do whatever you want, take, hurt, burn, steal, kill, anything is justified because you’re protecting what’s yours, but when anybody else does it, it’s betrayal. When I do nothing but what you taught me to protect what’s mine, you punish me.”
“What I taught you?”
“Yes! What did I even know before you? I was twelve. I was a child until you…”
“Until I what, Angel?”
Her chest heaved, and her gaze darted around like a maniac.
I walked back toward her and stared her down. “Say it. Until I what?”
“Until you groomed me.”
If she’d betrayed me before, making a deal behind my back with Il Coyote, I was wrong. Now, she did. “Groomed you? You think I groomed you?”
“What else do you call it? A grown man obsessed with a little girl, locking her up in the school he owns so he can come to see her whenever he wants, in the middle of the night like a sick creep, brings her gifts, offers her protection, conditions her to crave him, to love no one but him, and whenever she has a chance to see beyond him, to feel anything that’s not for him, he takes it away so there’s nothing left but him, so she, too, becomes obsessed with him to the point of blindness, so she forgets what’s wrong and what’s right and ignores all the red flags, all the pain, and crawl at his feet, for his sick—”
Both my hands were clasped around her throat, silencing her. I’d never been more enraged my life. I’d never been more hurt in my life. After all I’d done for her, this was how she saw me? How could you? How could you, Angel?
Her eyes bulged. “Ti-n-o.”
I pinned her to the wall, squeezing harder. Her arms and legs flailed as I watched her face, how red it’d become then how blue. “Shhhhh.”
She dug her fingernails in my knuckles, gripping and scratching, drawing blood while gurgling her pleas. I didn’t move. “My name is the last thing you’re gonna say. No more talking. No more anything.” This was not my Angel. My Angel would have never said those nasty words. This insolent, fucked up creature that pissed in my Angel’s skull needed to go. I couldn’t stand a moment in her presence. She had to go. I watched her eyes as they slowly rolled back, as life slipped out of them. “But before you go, ask yourself this, Angel? Who let the window to your room in your old house open that night I killed Baldi?”
Choking gasps answered.
“That’s right. I didn’t teach you that. It’s all you. When I heard one of my runners was molesting his two little girls, I had to see for myself, to know for sure. I stalked him , but you somehow knew I was there. The darkness inside you heard mine. You left the window open for me so I could come and do exactly what you knew I’d do. The monster you knew was watching in the dark must have been a killer. Capable of taking a life. And so I did. I didn’t need your help. I’d never even spoken to you because why would I ever put that on a little girl’s soul. But you helped anyway. You, Angel, the twelve-year-old girl who had never even met me yet.”
Her tears dropped on my wrists.
“Another question, who went after the man she believed was her stalker and the killer of her father the night of Nicole’s graduation, chasing him in the dark, begging him to show her his face and who knew what else if he let her? Again, it was you. All you. I didn’t teach you any of that. I didn’t condition you to do that. How could I when I hadn’t even talked to you, not once?
“What about the night you brazenly touched yourself knowing beyond doubt I could be watching in order to lure me out? I certainly didn’t teach you that. How could I when I’d never touched you? How could I when I’d been hiding in the dark, keeping my distance, denying myself, protecting you from the desires that took over me only when you were old enough, as old as Leo’s mamma when I married her, but even then I wouldn’t take you, I wouldn’t even make myself known to you, waiting in solitude for you to be mature enough to understand what you really meant to me.”
Her breath rattled in desperation then in sweet surrender. One more squeeze, and it’d be all over.
“Groomers don’t wait, Angel. Groomers don’t fight their sick urges that ruin children to protect their innocence. They just take it. How could you? How could you ruin everything with just one word? I thought you understood. After my wife and baby were murdered, all I wanted was to save someone as innocent as they were. Then I saw you, and I thought…you were my salvation. My road to redemption. If there was one thing I could do that was good, it was saving you.
“All I’ve ever done was protecting your innocence from the darkness of the world but most importantly from the darkness that lurked inside you. And all you’ve ever done is punishing me for it.
“From the day you opened the window for me to kill your father, and the day you agreed to come to Don Bellomo’s mansion only so he could capture your stalker , only to punish him for abandoning you, and the day you sold what I’d done everything in my power to save from your soul to Il Coyote, to that fucking miserable moment when you pushed me to take that soul myself, Angel.”