Gabe chuckled. “You thought I would let you go into this alone?”
I narrowed my eyes to slits. Gabe was the head of the Falcone family. He was here on his honeymoon—with his pregnant wife.
A wife who cornered me and made me swear I would keep her husband safe.
I hit the countertop. “This is none of your business. Why’re you butting in?”
Gabe stared at me for two seconds before shrugging. “Because ever since Fee’s been gone, you act like a wounded beast with zero sense of self-preservation. You need someone to look after you.”
I growled. “I don’t.”
Gabe chuckled.
Franco next to him ping-ponged from Gabe to me and back to Gabe. “Wait, Fee told me you two were fake-dating…” He petered out.
Gabe scoffed. “That’s what the numbnut told himself. We Falcones are a little slow on the uptick when it comes to love.”
“Love?” Franco said as if he was completely thrown by the idea of me loving Fee.
I loved Fee.
I’d had some time—countless hours in the hospital waiting room—to make my peace with it.
I loved Fee.
As much as a man could love a woman. Now I needed a chance to tell her, to show her, to convince her to take a chance on me.
“Wow, I didn’t think?—”
“It was that serious?” I asked.
He nodded.
Gabe shrugged. “The Falcones fall fast and hard; it’s a family tradition.”
I stared at him, and he met my gaze head-on.
It had become a bit of a game between us. Gabe used every chance he got to mention I was a Falcone. It was as if Gabe thought if he repeated it often enough, he could make it so. And I was truly grateful while working on accepting he truly meant it.
I thought back to Fee’s words: “You’re an idiot. You have no idea what not belonging really feels like. Your family loves you, no matter what. The only one pushing anyone away is you.”
And she was right. I needed to stop pushing people away.
But what I needed even more was for her to come back to me. For her to realize she belonged to me.
We belonged to each other.
“Yes, great, now that we’ve got all the sentimentalities out of the way, can we please come back to business?” I said, in an attempt to pull my thoughts away from Fee and to the very real, very dangerous situation that I would soon find myself in.
Franco nodded. “They’re on their way.” His voice sounded heavy.
There was a decent chance the Moretti family wouldn’t take me in with open arms. But at least they’d agreed to a meeting. Maybe I could at least repair some of the Falcone-Moretti ties and business relationships that had torn and frayed in the past couple of weeks.
“But I think if we stand together, we have a real chance,” Franco said.
I exchanged a glance with Gabe. Doubt was written all over his face, probably mirroring mine.
“Just in case, I’ve doubled security,” Gabe said, pointing behind him where a couple of security guys from Obsydian had started to make themselves familiar with the premises.