AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What do you think you know about being don, Contessa?” I ask, taking her jaw in my grip.
“Daddy’s little failure. You ran from being the daughter of a don, but now you think you know what I should be doing? Sitting selfishly behind a desk, as my family dies for me? Maybe that’s your family, but that’s not us. Moris’s don’t run, and we don’t hide.”
She pulls away, glaring me down, the hurt flashing in her eyes.
“It’s not about hiding, it’s about leading. How can you talk about trying to get me pregnant, when you don’t even know if you’ll live to come back and be a father? I thought you were making me your wife, not just another widow—”
“That’s enough.”
Silence rips through the room.
I swallow around the angry knot in my throat.
“You think I wouldn’t rather be here, with you—”
“I know you wouldn’t,” she cuts in with cold certainty. “Because you always get what you want.
If you wanted to be with me, you’d be right here with me tomorrow.”
Silence wavers between us. She stares, waiting for me to prove one of us right.
…My eyes lower when I can’t deny it.
She nods at my silence, understanding it too well.
She takes off her engagement ring and places it on the desk. “I’m not the one who isn’t ready to accept this, Sal. You are.”
Tessa turns her back on me, leaving me staring at the diamond on the desk. The office door swings shut as she leaves. I don’t follow her, don’t hound her up the stairs to make sure she goes to her room. I move behind the desk, sinking down into a silence that’s loud with condemnation.
Vera. Noctus. Marcel. Contessa.
I reach for the cigarettes in my pocket and find the box empty. I crush it and throw it onto the desk with Contessa’s ring.
The foundation trembles.
21
Contessa
Salvatore doesn’t come to bed.
I would have gone to my own bed rather than sleep in his, but I don’t want to be locked away while he’s gone. If I get trapped in that room now, with Ava catatonic and Salvatore off playing war, I might just be forgotten about.
Alone in this huge bed, I toss and turn, scowling into the dark. My thoughts reel. I wonder if he’s already gone. Maybe he marched straight to his car and drove off into the night, with just his gun and his temper. I don’t know if that’s something he would do, but I’m angry enough to fantasize that it is.
There’s no chance at sleep.
Dario and Donny slip into my thoughts. Two men freezing down in the dark, just conscious enough to know that they’re suffering. And Remy, the way he screamed in those last moments before Ava—
Closing my eyes doesn’t block any of it out, and they betray me so easily, drifting toward the doorway as if I expect Salvatore to appear there. Some tiny part of me still hopes I wake up next to him in the morning. That he kisses me awake, showers me with affection in the early dawn. I won’t even go so far as to imagine him apologizing. Just staying with me, here, where he belongs.
As if.
I roll over and put my back to the doorway. Salvatore made his choice, and it wasn’t me.
My hand feels heavier without the engagement ring than it did during those brief hours that I wore it. For just one day, I thought I saw what I could be next to him. The two of us complimenting each other in our own ways. A unit. I saw our future so, so plainly.
A mirage.
