His silence is answer enough.
I laugh again, but there’s no humor in it now. Just pain sharpened into something ugly. “That’s what I thought.”
He shifts in his seat, and the movement alone fills the cabin with threat. “You think I came unprepared?”
“I think you came enraged.” I point toward the front of the plane. “There’s a difference.”
His voice drops. “Careful.”
“Or what?” I snap. “You’ll point another gun at an old woman? Fire into another church? Rip another ring off my hand because the sight of it hurts your feelings?”
That hits. I see it in the brutal flicker of his face, in the way his shoulders go rigid. So I twist the knife.
“You know what I think?” I say, quieter now. “I think you couldn’t stand the idea that I was moving on. Not because you love me. Because your pride couldn’t take it.”
His eyes narrow. “You don’t know a damn thing about what I feel.”
“Then what do you feel?” I shoot back. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks a lot like entitlement.”
For a moment, he just stares at me.
Then, very softly, “You were about to marry him.”
“Yes.” The word comes out like a slap. “I was.”
His jaw flexes.
“And do you know why?” I don’t wait for him to answer. “Because he actually offered me something besides obsession. Protection. Respect. A choice. He asked me what I wanted, Lorenzo. Imagine that.”
He rises so suddenly I flinch before I can stop myself.
His face turns to stone when he sees it.
Good, I think wildly. Let him see what he’s done.
But he only comes as far as the table between us, planting both hands on it and leaning down, his voice low and lethal. “Do not sit there and pretend that man was some saint.”
“I never said he was.” I lift my chin. “I said he thought farther ahead than one hour at a time.”
A muscle jumps in his cheek.
“There it is,” I whisper. “That look right there. Because you know I’m right.”
He stares at me like he wants to shake the words out of my mouth.
Instead, he says, “The plan was to stop that wedding.”
I let the silence stretch just long enough to be cruel.
“And after that?”
His mouth shuts.
My heart pounds harder. “That’s what I thought.”
I stand too, ignoring the sudden rush of dizziness, and point at him with a shaking hand. “You didn’t come for me with a future, Lorenzo. You came for me with rage. You saw something you couldn’t bear, and instead of thinking, instead of talking, instead of acting like a man with an actual strategy, you did what you always do.”
His eyes darken. “And what’s that?”
