Page 82 of Made in Love and Blood

“Okay, now you’re pissing me off.”

“Welcome to the club. You think your daughter needs sex education. What a fucking joke. I think it’s you, asshole!”

Every word she shouted turned louder and louder. The picture frames and artwork on the wall practically rattled. He roared right back. Just like old times. Nothing changed.

“I had a fucking vasectomy, Carina! Months before we married!” he added louder, snapping his palm into hand with every word. “You know this!”

She nodded violently, her hair flying wildly. “Yeah, and I also know they fail, Sal.”

“Not ten-plus years down the goddamn line!”

Carina covered her face with both hands, her head tilting back as she mumbled, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh. My. God. I can’t believe you.”

“Me? Me?” he retorted hotly. “You’re the one who told me—literally again last night—that you haven’t fucked anyone else in over four years, but you’re pregnant.”

Her hands dropped. “I haven’t!”

“Is it him again? Is it his?”

All emotion bled from Carina’s face. Even her eyes went a little blank. Like earlier, he immediately regretted the thing he said, but he couldn’t take it back once it came out. That’s not how words worked.

“How dare you?” she whispered.

Carina stepped backward.

This time, he moved after her.

“Wait, I—”

“How dare you?”

That scream startled him. It came from somewhere else inside her. That wasn’t just anger at him and his bad reaction to her news.

“He raped me! Again, and again, and again. And he took my babies from me, whether I wanted them or not, he just took them. He fucked me when I was sixteen, and his wife slept down the hall. And you know what he did to me; you know all of this! You know what he fucking did to me, and you say that to me!”

“Carina—”

“No, fuck you. Don’t come near me.”

She turned on her heel but stopped instantly. Salvatore realized why almost immediately. There, at the far end of the kitchen where Sissy had left from earlier, stood Frankie. It was the dart of his daughter’s gaze to something, or someone, over his shoulder that made Salvatore’s heart drop to the floor.

Carina spun around, but Salvatore didn’t.

“Nico,” Carina croaked.

Salvatore forgot the order he gave Larkin to send Nico to him immediately if he was on the property.

The squeak of shoes reverberated after Salvatore looked away from the broken boy, unable to swallow the unrelenting tidal wave of guilt. He tracked his wife watch Nico leave but her attention quickly snapped back to Salvatore.

“Great fucking job,” she said, laughing brokenly. “Wow, Sal. Even I couldn’t have done that, and I have done some shit.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied.

It wasn’t enough and he knew it.

Too many minutes later, Frankie departed after Nico and with a comment about going to her penthouse, but Carina and Salvatore had still not spoken or moved. He knew the moment he asked her if the child she carried was her adoptive father’s as if there had ever been a choice to the equation for her that he was wrong to form those words. Worse to let them pass his lips, knowing all that he did. So, he broke the silence with the first words he should.

“I’m sorr—”