“I’m so sorry, mi amore,” she crooned into my ear.
“Help me, Vittoria. I can’t bear this!”
Brushing my hair out of my face, Vittoria shook her head. “More than anything in the world, I wish I could. But I can’t–no one can. Just like Raphael, you’re trapped.”
“That’s your words of comfort?” I angrily demanded.
She gave me a sad smile. “There is no comfort in our world, especially for women. We get sold and bought and abused and raped. Then the only happiness in our world, our children, go through the same vicious cycles. Our sons get planted in the ground before they even get to live.”
By the time she’d come to work for our family, Vittoria’s children were in their twenties. She’d had a son she rarely talked about who had been killed during one of the wars with the Bratva when I was a little girl.
And then she’d lost Marco.
“Life is never easy. You have to take the broken pieces and try to make something from them.”
With a mirthless laugh, I countered, “I’m in love with my fiancé’s brother and pregnant with a bastard. My pieces aren’t broken–they’re shattered.”
“You have more strength than you realize, Andrea.”
More than anything in the world, I wanted to believe that.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: LEO
When we were younger and life got complicated, Talia always offered us some Sicilian wisdom. Wrapping us in her warm embrace, she would whisper in one of our ears, “Chiù scuru di mezzanotti non po' fari, mi amore”, whichmeant that it could not get darker than midnight.
As we got older and faced hurt or disappointment, she’d say, “Ogni mali nun veni pri nòciri."--not every pain comes to harm you.
But my favorite–the one I’d gotten tattooed on my back when I was nineteen–was,Di guerra, caccia e amuri, pri un gustu milli duluri. Since it meant that “in war, hunting, and love, you suffer a thousand pains for one pleasure.” I felt it really encapsulated the mafia life.
In the last three weeks since Maeve and Rafe’s breakup and Drea slipping further away from me, I’d thought heavily of those proverbs. I’d especially thought of them tonight after we’d checked into our hotel in Philadelphia. Tomorrow was the rehearsal and then Edoardo was throwing a belated engagement party disguised as the rehearsal dinner.
The moment our plane had taken off from New York, Rafe started drinking. He didn’t stop during the short flight or theride from the airport. He could barely hold his head up during dinner with Gianni and Caterina. Considering Callum’s previous reaction to Rafe and Maeve’s relationship, he’d skipped out on dinner.
While Gianni escorted Caterina to her and Callum’s suite, I wrangled Rafe. Even with help from our bodyguards, it wasn’t easy. As independent as he was, he did not appreciate the help and grew more and more agitated.
Once we got him inside, he headed straight to his suitcase. He pulled out two bottles of whiskey before popping the top off one of them. With an exasperated sigh, I said, “Why don’t we try to get you sobered up a bit in the shower?”
“Fuck off.”
“Jesus, Rafe, I can’t leave you like this.”
His response was to shoot me the bird while sucking down three huge gulps of whiskey.
“If you arrive fucked up tomorrow, Edoardo will lose his shit. After everything, you don’t want to give him any more ammunition, do you?”
“How else am I supposed to survive losing Maeve and being a fucking puppet on Edoardo’s strings?” With a mirthless laugh, he said, “I can’t even take the fucker out because we’re too weak from murdering Father.”
“We didn’t have a choice, Rafe. The man kidnapped Caterina and was going to let that slimy bastard, Carmine, force a miscarriage and rape her,” I argued.
He shook his head. “It was our pride. As her husband, it was Callum’s right to take him out, but I demanded it be us.”
Christ. He really was losing it if he was lamenting killing our father.
Desperate to reach him, I said, “Remember when we were kids, and Talia would try to talk us down from the ledge?”
“What about it?”
“I was just thinking aboutchiù scuru di mezzanotti non po' fari.”When he stared blankly at me, I sighed. “I know it seems as dark as midnight for you right now, brother. But like the proverb says, it can’t get darker.”
