AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He is, isn’t he?” I whispered. “You all are,” I exclaimed.
I had doubted Mrs Capizzi’s words the whole time, except every action after that just confirmed what she had told me.
“Whatever she said, you should listen to Antonio first,” Marco urged, coming closer. “He is a good man, Divya.”
A good man? A good man who wanted to fuck me in front of his mother? A good man who apparently killed people for a living? He kills men, women and, yes, even babies. Maria’s taunting words assaulted my memory. Even babies. While he had one of his own.
I drew myself straight and looked him in the eye, wanting him to tell me the truth, but my heart pleaded not to hear it out. “Does he kill people?”
His lips drew into a tight line. Of course, he wasn’t going to answer. I sighed. “That’s what I thought.” I brushed past him to go to my room.
“Divya, let me call Antonio—”
“No!” The words came out as a shout. “Don’t bother,” I whispered brokenly. Damn my voice. I was tired of it breaking all because of him.
What a fucking idiot I had been. Falling for another lie by another man again. Different lie, different man. The same shit, yet different. Far worse. It seemed instead of learning from my mistakes, I just dug my holes deeper. I might as well bury myself now in the one I had dug up. Served me right. For looking through this sham of a marriage through rose-tinted glasses.
Had he thought, given our arrangement, it was better to keep me in the dark? Good enough for a fuck, but not enough to inform me of an important detail.
Was he ever going to tell me? Or were they going to have a laugh, all of them, at my expense, about the idiot that I was?
What else could I call myself other than that, when everything had been clearly in front of my eyes, but I had refused to see it?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ANTONIO
Fuck!
I should have listened to Carlo.
I raced home to put out the fire that my mother had ignited. All this time I had thought I had pushed her back, but the joke was on me. She came back in full force. I was a breath away from pulling the trigger. Only my father’s name held me back. Barely.
I should have fucking known. Isabella had put a call through from my mother, only to be greeted by a dead line. But in the impending chaos of a possible fed investigation, I had pushed it to the back of my mind. Now, in hindsight, I knew she had called to check I was not at home. Just like she had arranged for Rosa to be out.
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
The moment I got that message from Marco, I dumped all the shit in my hands to dash home.
Fucking Carlo was right. I should have told Divya before we got married. But she was so naïve, so innocent. I hadn’t wanted to bring her into my dirty world. And it was that. Dirty.
How do you even go about telling something like that? I trusted few people, and the ones I did had been around me for ages. There was no need to tell anything. The ones I didn’t trust. There was no need to inform.
But with Divya, it was all so strange, so new. Our relationship was unconventional from the start. I should have, in my correct mind, never even hired a stranger outside Cosa Nostra to look after my child. I didn’t have any strict guidelines I could follow with her. Or rather, I did but chose not to follow them, anyway. I made my own rules up, and this was the fucking result.
I wanted to rewind my life back to this morning. When she didn’t know. When she believed in the good in me. Because that just ended with the words of my mother.
I could argue that the current Cosa Nostra was not like in some absurd, Hollywood movie. We did good things too. Many good things. And my grandfather, father, and now I had put in so many more rules of strict ethics and morals.
Ah, who was I kidding?
I was what I was. A ruthless man who wouldn’t think twice about putting a hole in any man’s head. But it didn’t stop me from landing on my feet even before the car came to a halt, racing up the steps and through the door held open by Armando. Rosa rushed over to me, guilt written all over her face, another consequence of my mother’s malicious manipulation.
Cazzo! I had to calm her first before I tackled my wife.
“Mi dispiace, Antonio.”
“It isn’t your fault. What is there to be sorry about?”
