Page 72 of Unravel Me

A moment later Emilio walks in carrying a tray loaded with food.

He raises an eyebrow when he sees us so close, with my hands on Mauro’s face, and then he notices the nesting kit beside the bed. Mauro immediately gets to his feet, takes the tray from him, walks over to me, and sits on the edge of the mattress.

My gaze drops to the tray, and I spot all kinds of delicious food: arancini, pieces of focaccia, panini stuffed with prosciutto, a bowl of olives, fresh mozzarella, fruit, and even a couple of cannoli. I know this kind of food pretty well. I spent years eating at upscale restaurants, including plenty of Italian ones.

Mauro hands me a small plate with a warm arancino, a few slices of prosciutto, a wedge of focaccia, and a couple of olives, and I dig in right away.

In the meantime, Emilio pulls something out of his pocket, and I recognize my phone.

"This alpha, Veyron, fixed it. He's an electronics engineer, as he admitted. Dried something out, and voilà, it works." The omega smiles, adjusting his gold wire-frame glasses.

"Oh, tha… thanks," I mumble, throwing a glance at Mauro, who remains silent but doesn’t seem displeased.

I check my notifications. Of course, there's a long list of missed calls from Alex, so I quickly turn off the screen.

I'll deal with the guilt trip later…

Emilio lingers for a moment, and I catch him staring at the large package beside the bed. I can almost see the question sitting on the tip of his tongue, but the unspoken taboo surrounding nesting in ABO society seems to stop him from asking.

Finally, he lets out a small breath and says,

"Mauro, Renato said the second shipment of flitches just arrived. He needs your help. There's a discrepancy in the invoices."

Mauro nods and rises to his feet. But before leaving, he turns toward me and gives me a small, almost formal bow, a silent gesture of respect from an alpha to an omega. Only then does he walk out of the room. Emilio sees it, and his eyebrows rise even higher.

After the door closes, he tilts his head and speaks again.

"So… when's Tommy coming?"

A faint smile tugs at the corner of his lips.

I just stare at him with my mouth hanging open for a few seconds before I finally manage to pull myself together.

"Why does everyone in this house seem to know things about me and my situation?"

Emilio lets out a quiet chuckle.

"That's just how things work in this house."

Then he turns around and walks out, as though he has no intention of lifting the veil on any of its mysteries.

CHAPTER 13: MAURO

6 years ago

I've been sitting beneath the windows of Mark Ferguson's mansion for days now. Well, ‘beneath the windows’ is a bit of an exaggeration. To be precise, I'm perched high in the crown of a tree, hidden so completely that no one in the house could ever see or hear me. When I decide to disappear into the trees, they never find me, that much is certain.

Mark brought Jared here that very day, but as far as I can tell, nothing has happened between them yet. That surprises me because Mark doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who enjoys waiting, yet with Jared he’s showing an almost unbelievable amount of patience. I can’t help wondering if he has some long-term strategy, if this is all part of a game designed to draw Jared in before he closes the trap around him.

I watch them through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden. Mark never tries to force himself on Jared. They spend hours talking, sitting together on the living room couch, and every now and then they leave the house to have dinner somewhere in the city. The worst part is that I have no chance to approach Jared. Mark takes him everywhere and never leaves his side.

Today, though, something feels different.

Mark has arranged a candlelit dinner for Jared, straight out of a romance movie, and it’s almost unbearable to watch. I can’t shake the feeling that the ground is crumbling beneath my feet, that the faint chance I had is fading away with every passing minute.

Compared to Mark, I have nothing worth offering Jared. I'm a mute, a barely twenty-year-old low-ranking member of a mafia family who handles surveillance at the mafia stronghold and during operations. I'm a relatively new fighter competing in illegal underground MMA matches, only beginning to climb the rankings and make decent money. Everything about my life is dirty, shady, touched by the criminal world… the very world that brought Jared so much pain.

So why do I obsess over him when the odds are stacked so completely against me? I don’t even know if what I feel is real or just a fantasy, some desperate illusion that he’s my True Mate because I wanted it badly enough to convince myself.