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“Why am I like what?”
“I have racked my brain, Krav. And one thing I do know. You never shared yourself with me. The night of your mother’s funeral is the closest that I got to knowing anything about you. But I don’t even know... I don’t know your story. Your parents. How did they meet? I don’t know who raised you I don’t know...”
“I didn’t know my mother,” he said, deciding now to simply tell it. It did not have to touch him to explain the truth of it all. “Not really. My father was on vacation in Cambodia, he had an affair. With a beautiful woman who worked at a bar he went to. He was much older than she. He had no children. And he needed them. Some years later, he discovered that she had given birth. To a boy. He wanted me. Not because he cared about anyone or anything but himself. He took me from her, and left in my place a sum of money. But she had no choice. She had no choice. I was taken away from everything I had ever known. My home. My language. My mother. Taken to Italy and raised by a man who inflicted nothing but pain upon me. You’re right, I have not held Soriya. I’d rather never touch her than do to her what my father did to me. I can protect her without... Without being him.”
“What makes you think you would be like him?”
“It is a chance I would rather not take. When you spent your life raised by a monster, it is bound to seep into your blood.”
“Krav... He took you from your mother?”
“Yes. I had spare little time with her before her death.”
“But you kept a home in Cambodia...”
“Yes, my father always had a hotel there, it was why he was there in the first place all those years ago. I went to visit my mother as soon as I became an adult and began to form an uneasy... I don’t know. We would see one another sometimes. Eventually I decided to have a personal residence there to...to reconnect. With the food, the language. My people. I was raised Italian. That will always be the biggest part of me, and there is no going back and rewriting that. It was the place I spent most of my life. But Cambodia was my foundation. And... I felt an impulse to try and go back to that.”
“It’s as much a part of you as Italy.”
“I suppose. Though, not in practice.”
And now he had told her. Dispassionately, the truth of things.
And she seemed... She seemed as if she didn’t know how to react.
“You never told me any of this.”
“I don’t speak of it.”
“You nearly did. That first night we met.”
“I was not myself. I was not here.”
And obviously he did not mean on the plane. He meant in his father’s world. In his father’s world, there were rules. And they had to be followed. Otherwise, there were grave consequences.
And yes, it had been different. In his homeland, the land of his mother, grieving her loss.
“What did your father do to you?” She asked. The pressure in the cabin began to change. “We have begun our descent,” he said. “There is no time to get into what my father did to me. But suffice it to say, whatever monster you think I am, you’re not wrong. I was made to be this way. I was made to be able to run the Valenti empire with no weaknesses standing in my way. No attachments. He succeeded in making me into his...his creation. Perfectly cold and capable of doing whatever needed to be done. I’m sorry that you were brought into this.”
It was the truth. The most honest thing he’d ever said. It felt...freeing to admit it.
“Are you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then you can’t be entirely without feeling.”
“My feelings are ghosts. I might know they’re there, but I can’t grab hold of them. And the minute I try...they vanish.”
The plane landed then, and they got in a car that carried them back to the estate.
“We will live separate lives,” she said, when they got back to the estate. As they stood in the vast entryway. And suddenly, he remembered standing there as a boy. And how large and imposing everything had been. How large and imposing his father had been.
“As long as that life is contained here.”
“Why do you feel the need to control it if you don’t care?”
“It is...it’s the only thing I know.”
