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“You needed to see, Gia.”
She nodded, burying her face in my chest.
“You needed to know what I’m capable of.”
“You think I didn’t know?”
Her voice was full of anguish as she turned her emerald eyes to mine.
“Then…I don’t understand. I thought you’d want to see—”
“I do. I owe it to Mateo. I swore it to myself. I just…I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can pull the trigger on Victor. I don’t think I can keep my promise to kill him.”
Something inside me broke open, and I held her tight to me, cradling her head, rocking her as she wept. Her pain, it had this strange impact on me. It made me feel. For the first time in my life, I felt another person’s pain.
“You don’t have to,” I said in a whisper.
“I do. I swore vengeance.”
“You’ll have it, but you don’t have to be the one to do it. You don’t have to have blood on your hands.”
She shook her head and pushed us out of the stream of water. “No matter what, the blood will belong to me.”
“Shh. No.”
“I’m weak,” she said quietly, looking up at me, her hands on my cheeks now.
“Killing doesn’t make you strong, Gia.” I wiped the tears from her eyes and held her sweet face.
“I won’t be weak.”
“Maybe it’s time you let someone take the weight. Maybe it’s time to let go, and let me carry it. Let me carry you.”
She pushed wet hair from my face and looked like she was about to say something, but then stood on tiptoe and covered my mouth with hers, her kiss soft and testing. I liked kissing her like this. Kissing her like we weren’t battling as her hands fumbled with the wet buttons of my shirt until she pushed it off my shoulders, halfway down my arms. We kissed like we couldn’t stand to separate, as if we needed to be touching while I lifted her and carried her into the bedroom, laying her dripping wet on my bed as I tore off the rest of my clothes and climbed between her thighs, her legs and arms wrapping around me, drawing me down to her, her mouth locking on mine again as I thrust into her, never letting her go, not once, not until we lay spent on the bed.
She knew who I was now. What I was capable of. And she didn’t cringe away from me. She didn’t fear me. It was the opposite. She clung to me. We clung to each other as if for life. As if for breath. As if without the other, it would no longer be possible to breathe, to live, to be.22GiaThe following morning, I woke alone in Dominic’s bed. The sight of his uncle kneeling before him, cowering, begging, pleading for his life as Dominic coolly cocked and fired the gun, haunted me. I thought about Mateo. About how he’d died. Dominic wanted me in that room yesterday. He wanted me to see one of the men responsible for Mateo’s murder on his knees, being brought to a different kind of justice—mafia justice—paying back what he owed: a life for a life.
I didn’t feel sorry for his uncle. He deserved what he got, and not only for Mateo, but for all the rest. Dominic had told me the story, the whole story, after we’d made love last night. He told me what the old man, Henderson, had told him. Told me about the reading of the will, of the provision his father had made to have each of the families renew their pledge of allegiance to Dominic as head of the family. He told me of his uncle’s betrayal. Told how his father—and Dominic now called Franco Benedetti father—sealed Roman’s fate and had left it for his sons to mete out justice. And he told me why he wanted me in that room. Not only for Mateo, not only for me to see that Mateo’s death would be avenged, but to see him. To see Dominic step so naturally, so easily, into this new role as head of a bloody family.
Dominic Benedetti now owned the Benedettis.
I touched the scar on my hip.
I guess it fit. He owned me too. Would he let me go once this was over? What we’d discussed that day in the dining room, that day I’d learned the truth of the brand, the truth of who he was, the day he’d fucked me in that bloodsoaked room when I’d been out of my mind. When he’d been out of his. The day he’d promised me he’d make sure my brother was avenged, and I’d promised him I’d kill him once it was over.
But it all had changed now. His father had left him everything in his final act of contrition. Dominic got what he had always wanted.
