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“Heredity, my ass.” She sneered. “A child could’ve been raised differently than you. We could’ve—"
“The type of life it would have isn’t the issue.”
“What is the fucking issue then?”
This time, I was the one to stall. I scrubbed my hands down my face, and when I pulled it away from my mouth, I noticed the drop of blood. I hadn’t even realized her fingernail had nicked my top lip when she had struck me until now.
“It’s me. I’m a carrier of certain birth defects. Any child I father might suffer from an enlarged heart and require surgery to live like I had to have.”
“What?” She looked very skeptical, and shook her head as if to discredit what I said.
“I found the documents in my father’s safe. It all happened when I was an infant, so I don’t remember any of it. I do recall the different fights between my parents. There was a reason my father didn’t have another child with my mother, but wanted another heir so badly. His desire for one was the reason he was with you.”
I remembered hearing my mother plead for him not to abort her child, but the very thought of her giving birth to someone like me made him go through with it anyway.
“You’re lying,” she finally said, bringing me back to the present. I suspected she might think that, so I pulled my cellphone out of my pocket and pulled up the screenshots I had taken from it, as well as a few from well renowned medical resources. I handed the phone to her and motioned for her to flip left. She did and I could see her hand shake as she stared down at the page. “This doesn’t mean it would definitely have the same defect. It doesn’t fucking matter anyway. You also took out the only friends I had in this world. Did you kill them all?”
“Yes,” I told her, without even thinking about a response.
“Oh my God. You’re worse than your father. You’re—”
“Keep scrolling,” I told her, and she let out a sob as she did. I knew the moment she came across the photographs from the witnesses’ cellphone video.
“W-what is this?” she asked, then added, “Where did you get it?”
“Do you remember the accident you had when running away? The one that landed you in the hospital?”
“Yes,” she answered, then looked back down at the picture.
“The one that ran you off the road is in that picture. Do you recognize that man?”
“Fuck you! You’re lying. Andrea would never...” she started to say, then paused. I watched her scroll some more, and when she saw the picture of the SUV right behind her as she veered off the road had her dropping my phone onto the cement below.
“The Catalanos had been waiting years for the opportunity to reignite our families’ feud. You came along and they thought they had an inside pawn. They knew how much you hated Stefano and could use that to their advantage. They forgot about me, or assumed you would hate me, too.”
“I do hate you,” she said, and I smirked.
“Let’s save the foreplay for later,” I told her, chuckling at her scoff. I then continued, “When you returned to Palermo after all that time, and with what you thought was a bun in the oven, you presented them with what they needed. The only problem was that you had second thoughts. You returned to me, and that act was a betrayal. You took away their power again, so by killing you and the unborn baby, it would weaken me and my organization. From there, they could swoop in and take everything generations of my family built.”
“But, I...” Again, she stopped, knowing what I was saying was the truth.
“Let’s go,” I finally said, extending my hand out to her.
She slapped it away. “And you continue to take even more from me.”
“What are you talking about now, Viviana?”
“You could’ve let me live the last few minutes of my life believing differently about them. Why did you have to tarnish my memories of them, too? How could you be so fucking cruel?”
“I protect what is mine, even when it means protecting her from herself.”
“I’m not yours. I’m not a toy or possession—”
“We’ve already argued about that,” I told her, then I moved toward her. She instinctively took a few steps back until she hit the brick on the exterior of the hotel. “It doesn’t change the facts between us.”
“There is no us,” she told me as she tried to keep me from fully advancing upon her. I swiped her hands away, then wrapped my hand around her throat.
I leaned in and pressed my forehead to hers. My breath mingled with hers, and before I lost all control and fucked her into submission right here, I needed to get more off of my chest. “I’m not going to let you take your life as I know you want to do. If you want to blame me for everything else, from taking out Stefano and saving your life that day to the fall of Rome in 476 AD, then fucking do it.”
