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No.
God, no.
But the fact of the matter was, the nightmares were getting worse. Night by night. The past two, Silvano had needed to wake me up because, apparently, I was screaming out in my sleep.
I’d been actively just trying to bank the memories and worries down, to try to take my grief and put a future date on it.
Clearly, it didn’t work that way.
“Mills,” Silvano said, head ducked, his dark gaze on me. “It’s time,” he said, voice coaxing.
He wasn’t wrong.
I’d been in his house for two weeks already.
We’d both been careful to sidestep the topic of how he’d found me, why I’d been there.
It got easier as time went on, both of us just falling into a rhythm.
In the early mornings, he took Storm out, coming back with breakfast.
In the afternoons, we both went for a walk since my ribs were mostly feeling better. I knew from experience that I still had to be really careful with turning too fast, or trying to lift much, but other than that, I was doing alright enough to start to get out of the apartment.
We often caught lunch on the way to bring Storm home.
In the evenings, Silvano would show me around to his favorite spots in the city. Then let me drag him to see some of the things I’d always wanted to experience. The Museum of Natural History. The Met. The usual tourist attractions.
And we just… actively didn’t talk about my recent past. Though I did tell him details about my childhood, about how my father raised me, and my mom just… never wanted to be a mom, so she never even took me home from the hospital.
We laughed about the stories I told that my father had relayed to me about how he used to bathe me in five-gallon buckets because he didn’t know any better. Or how he kept my hair boy-short until I was almost in middle school because he didn’t know how to take care of anything more complicated than that.
And in turn he told me about how he’d always been made to feel—by his step-father—like he wasn’t part of his family because he wasn’t related by blood. I filled in the blanks there, figuring that had more to do with the whole… mafia thing than just a normal family dynamic.
I could tell by the tension in his jaw, by the tightness in his voice, that it had really taken a toll on him.
And from what he said, it seemed like it had really screwed his relationship with his step-brother too. Until recent times, when it seemed like they’d been working on repairing their relationship.
I learned about his cousins and their wives. Even the kids. And how one of the family members, Brio, would sometimes show up at someone’s door with a new pet for their family.
But we never, ever talked about the woods.
Not before or during my attack.
It seemed like maybe it was time.
Even if I didn’t want to confront it, clearly my subconscious needed me to purge it.
Besides, I owed him the truth after how much he’d done for me.
I mean, the man had taken Storm to a vet for me under his name because he knew how paranoid I was about having my name anywhere on anyone’s files.
It was time.
“I don’t even know where to start,” I admitted. “You know how… I told you my dad did odd jobs?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, placing his hand on Storm’s back as he jumped up to rest his head on Silvano’s thigh.
“He wasn’t exactly doing… legal jobs,” I told him. “I mean, as a kid, I didn’t really know any better,” I said. “He said he was going to work, and that was that. It never occurred to me that it was weird that he sometimes went to work at night, leaving me alone. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I started to suspect what was going on.”
