AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Sit.” She pats the sofa cushion beside her, and I take a seat.
“Your eye looks better too,” I say.
She traces her fingertips over it softly. “Dante wouldn’t let me come with you to the hospital because of my black eye. He said it would look bad and people would ask too many questions.”
“Well, he’s right. It does look bad,” I say with a frown. “Did he do that to you because you helped me?”
“No. I told you that already, but you were kind of out of it.”
“So, who?”
“It’s nothing,” she says with a shake of her head.
“Clearly not. Somebody hit you. Who? Maximo?”
“Oh my God, no.” She laughs loudly. “Maximo would never. He’s a big teddy bear really. He wanted to kill him, but Dante handled it.”
“Kill who and handled what, Joey?”
“It was our dad, okay? He found out what I did and he hit me. But Dante stopped him and he’s not allowed back in the house for a while, so…” She shrugs.
“But why? What does me trying to escape have to do with your dad?”
“Nothing, I guess, maybe he didn’t like that I tried to undermine the chosen one, you know?” She rolls her eyes. “Anyway, he was furious with Dante and he’d never hit him, so I think I got it instead.”
“He’s furious with Dante?”
“Yeah. Like sooo mad.” She shudders dramatically. “He’s even making Lorenzo come home.”
“Lorenzo? Your older brother?”
“Yep.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Bad for Lorenzo, yeah,” she says. “But Anya, his wife, will be coming too, so that will be nice.” She smiles, and I figure they share a close relationship. I know how hard it is to lose your mom so young and need some positive female energy in your life.
Chapter29
Dante
“Ijust saw Kat. She looks much better,” Maximo says as he takes the seat on the opposite side of my desk.
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh that shakes my bones. Even the mention of her name makes the guilt surge in my chest as though it’s going to crush me.
“You did what you had to,compagno.”
“The baby could have died, Max. She could have died. I just left her there.”
“You didn’t just leave her. You had Maria taking her food and keeping an eye on her.”
“She tried to tell me Kat was sick, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought it was some ploy to get my attention. If Joey hadn’t…”
“But she did and Kat and the baby are both fine. You had your reasons, D. She tried to run out on you with your kid. What if she’d made it?”
I grind my teeth and my jaw aches in protest. I don’t want to think about what might have happened if she’d managed to get away from me, so I change the subject. “We saw the baby, you know? They did an internal ultrasound and we saw it on a screen. I mean, you could hardly see anything but a tiny blob, but its heart was beating strong.”
“That must have been something.”
