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I go quiet. I think she can probably fill in the rest of the story. The darkest days were still ahead after that, and I don’t want to tell her what comes next, but I have to do it.
“The excitement of our aggressive expansion into the suburbs and beyond turned sour as the paranoia in the house ratcheted up and up. We kept searching for the mole, interrogating staff, doing all sorts of crazy shit to uncover who was leaking, until finally, one afternoon, my life changed. It was all chance, just a random fucking circumstance. But I found Sonia in Casso’s office going through his desk.” I smile slightly, head tilted. Jeanie’s not moving, her skin pale. “A lot like I found you.”
“It was her,” she says, fingers gripping her mug tighter, knuckles white. “She was the one.”
I throw the rock off the cliff and watch it tumble down below. “She was a traitor from the start. She tried to give me some bullshit about looking for a pair of glasses, but I knew. I didn’t want to know, but it was too obvious. Casso and Nico did the hard work on her and she cracked that night and told them everything. It was all a setup from the start, from the bar on down. She was paid by one of our biggest enemies at the time, this Russian bratva that’d been moving into our territory. Turns out, she was a cousin to their pakhan and was willing to do the hard, dirty work of lying and seducing me to get into our good graces. I don’t know what her cousin offered her and I never asked. I don’t want to know what breaking my heart into pieces beneath her heels was worth to her.”
I stop there and let the silence of the landscape fill the gaps. There’s more I’m leaving out, but it’s nothing she needs to hear. Begging and pleading. Fighting and screaming. Blood and tears. Sonia maintained she loved me until the bitter end, even if she was a traitor and a spy sent by our enemies. She swore she could be both, and still to this day I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t.
It doesn’t matter. When she died, parts of me went with her.
“What happened to her?” Jeanie’s trembling slightly.
“We killed her. We buried her out there.” I gesture toward the desert in front of us. “I dug the grave myself. I dumped her in and filled it back up with dirt. It took me hours, working late into the night. But I couldn’t let anyone help.”
“God, Gavino, I’m so sorry.” She turns toward me, face drained of color and twisted by pain. “That’s horrible.”
“The look on your face right now is the reason I didn’t want to tell you. Sonia broke something in me, and ever since then I’ve found it hard to trust anyone. I brought a spy into my family, and it’s been eating me up. Someone could’ve died because of me.” I bend over, grab another rock, and throw it. “I could’ve hurt my nieces and nephews or my brothers and sister. I could’ve ruined everything, all for a woman. I was a bastard, a stupid bastard, and I’ve been trying to repay the debt I owe to the ones I love ever since, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to.”
Another silence. Wind blows her hair and she smooths it back. I want to touch her, but I also want to throw myself down into that valley and disappear into a hole, like Sonia. I’ve hated myself for years for my stupid mistake, and hated myself even more for letting her die. I haven’t been able to love because of that loss, and it’s like a hole in my chest.
Jeanie’s the first woman I’ve brought back into my life, and while the hole is still there, the ice still frozen around my ribs, she’s beginning to fill it in and chip it away.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says and looks at me, forcing herself to smile. “I can’t imagine what it must feel like.”
“It fucked me up for a very long time. It still fucks me up.”
“If it helps, I don’t think anyone in your family blames you.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but you don’t know my family. It’s not just the people in the villa house, it’s everyone that I work with, all my capos and lieutenants and their families. I could’ve gotten some of them killed. Hell, I did get them killed, one soldier died in that dry cleaner attack. That never would’ve happened if it weren’t for me. I appreciate you saying it, but I owe everyone a debt I’ll never be able to repay.”
“That’s why you work so hard. That’s why you still run a crew when nobody else does anymore.”
I shrug and turn away. “There’s a lot of reasons for it, but that’s a big one.”
“Gavino—”
“It’s okay. I wanted you to know why I am the way I am. Sonia’s been gone for ten years and I’m ready to move on, but she left scars in me, deep scars. I don’t miss her, and I don’t love her anymore, but she’ll always have a piece of herself in me. It fucked me up, Jeanie. And now you know.”
She sips her coffee and puts a hand on my arm. We remain standing there for another minute before I turn away and head back toward the villa. She follows, keeping pace, and we reach the bottom of the hill in half the time it took to climb it. We pause in the shade of a large boulder, catching out breath.
Once there, she turns to me, still pale, still trembling, and presses herself close.
I’m surprised, but my hands find her hips. My coffee mug drops to the ground. She loses her own, the coffee spilling into the dirt. I kiss her hard, burying her lips with my own, trying to forget about that horrible story I told, trying to live in the present, and press her back toward the rock wall.
“What made you change your mind?” I whisper as I kiss her neck and hold her wrists up above her head.
“What do you mean, change my mind?”
“You were afraid. You ran away in the club.”
“I just—” She stops herself, biting her lip, and looks into my eyes. “This is stupid. It’s complicated and messy, and we’ve both got our scars and our secrets. We shouldn’t do this, right?”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
“But I want to. I still want you.”
I kiss her again, and don’t stop until she moans.
