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“I honestly just think you need to take your own safety into account once in a while. Being selfless and killing bad men is a good thing, obviously, but you have people here who need you,” he says with a somber tone.
I sit at my desk, wondering if this plan is something I should leave out in the open for the police as a final show of disrespect. “Leonardo, you have been my best friend for fifteen years. I have entrusted you with everything I have ever valued in my life. You know me better than anyone, but I need you to just fucking listen to me once in a while. Getting rid of Vitale will make everyone’s lives better.”
He looks at me with weary, disbelieving eyes. “What do you mean? How?”
“Think of how much time we’ve spent trying to clean up after him. All the dead girls, all the accusations, they’re just a mechanism that he uses to keep us bogged down. We’re losing tons of progress because of his bullshit,” I reply.
Leonardo sighs heavily, putting his empty coffee mug down on my desk without a coaster.
“Fine. I’ll stick by you, but I can’t lie for you if the cops get you. I have a family, Matteo. I can’t put them all on the line for you. That’s my compromise. Don’t get caught and it doesn’t have to be an issue.”
I knew I could wear him down. I always can.
“I’m going to get a fleet together, something twice the size of the numbers we used to save Iris. We’re going to have this motherfucker so outnumbered that he’s going to shit his pants as soon as he sees us,” I say.
“I’m really not trying to be a buzzkill, but we have to find him first. We thought we had him a couple of times, but he keeps bouncing around. Right now we think he might be in the farmland fifty miles north of here. He could be in a bunker there for now,” Leonardo replies, suddenly showing far more interest in the mission than I expected him to.
I turn to him for a moment, studying his expression again. He thinks I’m totally full of shit. “Okay, so I’ll get a task force together specifically for the job of finding him. He isn’t that smart. If you guys can find him multiple times in a row, you can find him one last time. I believe in you.”
He looks me in the eyes, finally ready to relent to my commands like he’s supposed to.
“Fine.”
31
Iris
Now that he’s gone, I keep remembering the way Matteo looked at my body when we were having sex. He knew that I was trying to hide something from him, but he might have thought that I was just embarrassed about gaining weight. I’m really hoping that’s all he was thinking, because I’d hate for him to know that I was pregnant and resent me for not telling him.
Even though he was a complete asshole to me when he was here, I still feel awful about the fact that he could go to prison, or even be killed, without knowing that he has a baby. It seems cruel. It’s the kind of thing that a woman would do if she was trying to really hurt someone. Sure, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, but I could be keeping a significant amount of joy from him just by choosing to withhold such information.
My apartment is dark as the sun sets completely. I haven’t turned any lights on since Matteo and I had our fight. It feels wrong to move on so quickly, and even illuminating my apartment conflicts with the dense feelings of uncertainty and darkness that I feel.
I feel the compulsion to go for a walk, but it’s too dark out now. I would feel so unsafe by myself. If I had Matteo here with me, I would be able to venture out into the night with confidence. I know he would never let anything bad happen to me, not even if he was mad at me.
But he is mad at me.
And he might always be.
Something about the idea of any person disliking me has always made me wildly insecure. Even if it’s someone that I don’t even like, I’ll feel personally attacked if they feel the same way about me. For Matteo of all people to be angry at me forever makes my heart hurt. He and I shared such a strong connection when we were always together. Where would all those feelings go?
Where does all this love go?
It’s breaking me into pieces. I just want closure, for everything to feel balanced again. I’ve been out of equilibrium ever since I left Matteo’s mansion. Maybe I had just gotten used to the finer things in life and am having trouble acclimating back to the world I once knew. I might just be spoiled now, misinterpreting my feelings as a loss of a person rather than a comfortable life.
I mean, Matteo would be an excellent provider for the baby and me. We would never have to go without, not for one second. Our child would have everything they ever wanted, even if Matteo and I ended up fighting about whether or not we were spoiling them.
But would we be safe?
It would be extremely difficult to make a choice between roughing it on my own as a single mom and allowing my child to grow up in the mafia. I would do the best I could to protect them from the dangers that the lifestyle brings, but only Matteo would be able to keep them at bay. I would be powerless against them. If anything happened to our baby because Matteo pissed off one of his enemies, I would be broken. I would never recover.
But what kind of life would I be able to provide for our child by myself? I already work a lot, and while I do alright for myself, supporting a baby would cause tons of issues for me financially. I’m in a place in life where I have a little bit of money saved up for emergencies, like car issues or Urgent Care visits. I don’t have enough to absorb the insane amount of new expenses that comes with having a baby. And even worse, having to pay for their school clothes, activities, and supplies would bankrupt me right now.
Maybe I should apologize to him.
I’m still on the fence about it.
I sit on my couch, listening to my neighbors finally begin their make-up sex session. I’m happy for them, at least in a kind of weird sideways sort of way. At least they like each other enough to fuck after a fight. I never understood the idea of hate-fucking, but it must be a unique kind of feeling to be so intimate and vulnerable with someone you were angry at just an hour ago. I don’t know if I would like it.
