When she spoke, there was no blitheness, only pain. “No, Elio, I don’t want to die, but if you’d let your sister pull that trigger, I would have had nothing left to live for.”
“Dear God, how can you say that?”
“You didn’t need to kill her. You’d already taken your vengeance. Killing her in cold blood like that would have killed your soul and made you no better thanhim.”
“Any soul I had was destroyed by him when I was nine years old,” he said harshly.
“No.” She shook her head and pulled her feet out of the water. “I’ve seen it, Elio, just as you’ve seen mine.” Picking up her shoes, she stood and gazed down at him. “Neither of us is completely ruined, but you’re edging closer to it. You control our city now, and with the Esposito Group yours, you control much of Italy itself. As you’re going to learn, obtaining power is one thing. Keeping it is another. The choices you’re going to have to make are what will determine if you die with even a fragment of your soul left.”
Head bowed, she crossed the patio back into the villa without another word.
His own head bowed and swarming with jumbled thoughts, his guts a churning mess, Elio drank deeply from the bottle before dragging himself back to his feet.
This was how it had to be. He wouldn’t ask her or force her to stay even if he still had a mind to it. The future he’d contemplated for them, with Siena his partner in life as well as his bed, would never happen. Not now.
He wanted her gone from his life.
When she’d produced that gun and put it to her heart…
His own heart had frozen.
The chill from it still resided in his chest. Still snaked through his blood.
He’d taken only two steps when she came flying back out of the villa. Blonde hair streaming behind her, her short legs strode quickly to him.
When she reached him, her chest was heaving. She stared at him for the longest time before her beautiful face twisted in misery. “Why me, Elio? Whyme? Why was I the one singled out for extra punishment? What did I ever do to you to put me through that?”
God help him, he wanted to clasp that beautiful face and kiss all the misery off it.
“You were born,” he answered starkly.
Her head reared as if he’d slapped her.
“My brother had tonsillitis. He needed antibiotics. It’s the only reason she left our apartment. She was ambushed outside the pharmacy. My mother took a bullet to her heart on the same day your parents were celebrating the birth of their precious baby girl.”
All the colour in her face drained away, the soft blue eyes he’d come so close so many times to drowning in filling with tears. “Oh my God. I… I’m so sorry.”
“You were that baby.”
“I know, but Elio…” Her voice was pleading. “I didn’t choose to be born.”
“No, but you chose to force your father into making you a part of his shadowed world.”
“It’s your world too,” she protested shakily.
“But never my choice to enter it.” And as he spoke those words, the chill in his chest heated with the pain and fury that had driven him all those years and which had brought them to this very point.
“I had no choice, Siena. None,” he said harshly. “My family deserved vengeance, and I was the one chosen to deliver it, and to do that, I had no choice but to embrace this world. You were the only one of Lorenzo’s children with a genuine choice. You could have worked legitimately for the Esposito Group, away from the danger and greed of the shadowed world, but you demanded entry into it. Youdemandedit.”
The solitary tear that fell down her cheek only fed his enmity.
“You were born innocent, but you sold your soul to the same devil who ruled your father and you demanded entry into the world that was built on the blood of the woman who died when you were taking your first breath.” Closing the gap between them, he brought his face down to hers and, with quiet savagery, said, “I never saw your soul, Siena. You sold it before I could save it. Now get out of my home.”
* * *
Siena sat on the small balcony of her room, watching the sun rise over Naples. The early morning air was warm, but she hugged herself closely for protection against the chill that was in her heart.
How could the sun still rise, she wondered despairingly. How could the skyline remain unchanged? Her whole world had collapsed, and yet the world itself continued to turn, uncaring.
