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“Carla…” The frustration in my chest was building. It made me angry that she gave someone like Caleb the benefit of the doubt, but she would punish me for making a deal with my own father before I even knew her.
“No,” she said, pressing her finger into my chest. There were tears in her eyes, and I wanted to grab her and press her to me. I wanted to kiss her until she remembered who she belonged to. But I knew that that wouldn’t work. Carla felt betrayed. “I’m not even angry with you about the deal that you made with your father.”
“You seem pretty angry.” There was no emotion in my voice as I spoke. It was taking everything in me not to explode. I knew if I did, I might lose Carla forever. And I didn’t want that. Despite what I’d said last night, I didn’t regret what happened between the two of us.
Carla exhaled loudly. “I get why you did it. I really do.” She shrugged. “My entire life, I’ve wanted what you wanted.”
We’d come closer to one another. “What do you think I want?”
“To be away from all of this. To just live a normal life.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out and rubbing it away. She allowed me, leaning into my cheek.
“We can have a normal life.” I spoke before I could stop myself. “We could leave New York. Go to Boston or London. My grandfather left me a trust. We wouldn’t need to rely on my father or yours.”
For a moment, I thought Carla might agree with me. For years I’d thought about just leaving. It was why I’d helped Luca run the fight club. The money I’d made from there was enough to tide me over for a few years if I lived modestly. I wouldn’t need my father.
Never before had I considered telling anyone else about my plans, let alone asking them to come with me, not even Luca or Matteo knew.
Carla pulled away from me. She reached up and wiped the tears from her face. The moment she did, I saw the mask that she wore slam down over her features. “I can’t do that,” she told me, her voice empty. “Until I find out who killed my family, I can’t escape this life.”
I wanted to tell Carla that that wasn’t true. But I knew that it would do nothing. If someone killed my mother and Matteo, I would hunt them down to the end of the earth, and they would never be able to escape me.
The vulnerability I displayed to Carla evaporated the moment she pulled away from me.
“You’re right. We should focus our attention on trying to find what happened to your family.”
Carla opened her mouth, likely to argue with me, when the front door swung open. My mother stuck her face out, her wide smile faltered the moment she looked at me and Carla.
“There you two are.” Her voice was high pitched with fake happiness. My mother was no moron, and she knew that there was something between Carla and me. Her eyes went back and forth in a way that might have been comical in other circumstances. “I thought that I saw you on the camera.”
Carla moved away from me even further, and I knew she was worried about what my mother saw.
I didn’t have it in me to care who saw what on the camera.
“What’s going on?”
My parents were involved in our lives, but as we got older, they pulled back. She wouldn’t be looking for me and Carla to come home in the middle of the afternoon if there wasn’t something she wanted.
“There’s a surprise in the living room.” She looked at Carla as she spoke, a wide smile on her lips, but a concern in her eyes that caused a tension in my stomach.
“A surprise?” Carla blinked several times as she processed my mother’s words. She looked back at me. I shrugged, signaling that I didn’t know what she was talking about. But my mother would never put Carla in any harm, so while this might not be a good surprise in Carla’s eyes, there was no danger.
Carla must have realized this as well because she plastered on a fake smile and followed my mother into the house.
As I trailed behind the two of them, I could hear my father laughing. The sound was big and boisterous, and I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d heard him like this. It made me even more curious as to what was going on.
Before we got to the living room, my mother stopped and turned abruptly toward Carla. “I want you to know that you are welcome here for as long as you want. I know that you might be eager to return home, but you don’t have to. I’ll make sure that you can do whatever you think is best foryou.”
The stress that she put on the last you made me nervous. Carla might not be in physical danger, but something told me that whoever was in the living room had the power to take Carla out of this house.
Carla walked past my mother, coming to the living room with a gasp.
“Papa?”
I came behind her, surprised to see my father sitting across from a man who was a darker version of Carla.
Her father had come to New York, and I didn’t like what that meant.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-SEVEN
