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Chapter Twenty-Nine
Raven
Dom was alive.
And he loved me.
He’d never forgotten me.
It should have been a dream come true. My father, my brothers, they all missed me. Dom said they would be thrilled to see me, and I believed him because he was my brother.
But a festering wound in my heart refused to close up, heal nicely. Like how I thought it easily would.
My mother was the one who didn’t want me. And she was the one person I couldn’t see. I couldn’t do a thing to prove she’d been wrong about me because she was gone. I thought about going to the Luca estate,myhome, hugging Leo, Dante, feeling my father’s arms tight around me. I thought of Bullet and how his claws would skitter against the floor when he came running the second he heard my voice.
But a gaping hole remained in my chest.
There would always be something missing because my mother wasgone. Even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have wanted to see me.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Nico asked from where he sat next to me in the grass.
He had picked me up a half hour ago. On a whim, it seemed, he drove us across town to a pretty park complete with a pond and half a million ducks. We sat down against the back of an old oak tree, about twenty yards from the water, scattering the ducks and making them quack incessantly.
But neither of us had spoken since.
It was strange how much I wanted to answer him truthfully. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. I’d ignored the warning signs. I’d pretended what was going on between Nico and me was casual. But it wasn’t, not for me. I wanted to tell him all the thoughts whirring in my mind, but I couldn’t do that because he didn’t know who I really was or why I came here. I couldn’t tell him about seeing Dominic or how I couldn’t sort out how I felt about seeing the rest of my family.
I’d well and truly sunk myself in a pile of lies so deep there was no hope of getting out even if I tried to climb out.
“The people you…hurt...”—I couldn’t think of another word—“...what if they were sorry for what they did?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, plucking at the long blades of grass.
“I mean, if you somehow knew the person was truly sorry, would it change your mind about what you felt you had to do?”
I waited with bated breath, suddenly desperate for the answer like a starving woman desperate for sustenance. But the silence stretched for so long I began to grow a little light-headed.
He shook his head. “I think if someone was sorry for what they did, they wouldn’t have done it in the first place. No one can truly ever be forced into doing something, can they? There’s always the option of choosing another path, even if it isn’t a palatable one.”
It felt like a heavy weight had slammed into my chest. There was no way Nico would forgive me if I confessed now, and I couldn’t even fault him for it. He was right; I could have done things differently. I could have asked Vito about my family the night I saw the news about my mother. I could have chosen to confront them like an adult. I could have told Nico the truth from the beginning, or told him nothing at all.
I turned to him. “What made you choose your path?”
He was silent again, but it had to be more that he was deciding whether to tell me, not that he wasn’t sure of the answer. He was too cocksure of a man to not know the reason behind the decisions he made.
“Cowardice,” he answered.
The word seemed to be gibberish coming from his lips. It took me a moment to be sure I heard him correctly.
“I don’t understand. I can’t even imagine you as a—”
“Coward?” He scoffed and drew his knees up closer to his chest while fiddling with a long blade of grass between his fingers. “Someone was threatening my family, hurting them. I had every ability in the world to stop them, but when it came time to following through, I balked. I couldn’t do it. So, when they offered to remove the threat, and all they wanted in return was my soul, I jumped to it gladly,” he said with a shrug.
“Your soul?”
That sounded like no small price.
“What I do, it changes a man. It eats away at his soul a little at a time until what’s left inside isn’t quite human anymore.”
