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“I thought I was your family too.” Those words shut me up, and Salvatore looked at me with his green eyes intensely. “Even before I married Mia. Weren’t we always family?”
I nodded. “We were, and we are.” Something glimmered in his eyes, but I didn’t want to end it like that. He needed to understand. “But now Priscilla is my family too. I won’t let anyone disrespect her.”
“I know.” His throat moved up and down. “That’s why I wanted to tell you myself. I know you are sensitive about family. I didn’t want Priscilla to use my words against me.”
Use it against him? My sweet Priscilla, who hid her pain just so she didn’t hurt anyone else with it? My Priscilla, who always tried to be the sun on every dark day?
He was being so very unreasonable.
“She would never do that,” I said with a hard voice. Even the idea of him thinking of Priscilla as a woman who would turn me against my family made me angry. I didn’t understand how one would not be mesmerized by her light and instead see her as a sneaky fox.
“Are you sure?” he asked with a skeptical expression.
My hands twitched. “Do you have a problem with my wife?” I understood why he was angry at her today, even though it didn’t justify his threat. I didn’t know how Priscilla made Mia cry, but it would anger Salvatore anyway. The topic was rather unimportant.
I wanted to know if it went deeper than that.
“After today? Yes,” he said easily. Then his face hardened. “Before today?”
I nodded for him to go on. Looking at his face, I could tell the answer was not no, and it boiled my blood.
“A little bit.”
My throat burned. My best friend against my wife. “Why the fuck? What did she do to you?”
“Not to me!” he got out and shook his head to calm his very easily burning anger. “To you. I hate the things she is doing to you?”
I still didn’t understand a thing. Everything Priscilla did to me was amazing. She was my sunshine in this dark, ugly world. “What do you mean? What is she doing to me?” This time my voice came more like me. It was calculated. My anger was suppressed by my curiosity. Because Salvatore was wrong, and I wanted to see what was the reason for it.
“You could be the smartest person I have ever known, but somehow she outsmarted you. She is playing you, Antonio.” He swallowed a lump. “She is ruining you.”
I was stunned by his words. The idea of Priscilla ruining me was so absurd. She was the only good thing in my life. “She is not.”
Salvatore looked too determined. He really did believe Priscilla was bad for me. But more than concerned, he looked annoyed at my denial. “She is playing with your mind, Antonio. She makes you believe she is something to you.”
That made me clench my teeth again. I didn’t like his words one bit. “She is my wife.”
Those words should have been enough.
But they were not for Salvatore.
“And she is using that to manipulate you. She makes you think she can mean something to you.” His eyes turned pleading. “Antonio, I have known you since we were babies. I know you changed after your mother’s death. We all know, and we always accepted you as you are. We never expected more from you. You care about family. I know you will do anything to protect your family, but I also know we all are nothing to you.”
“No,” I cut him off.
He didn’t let me. “On an emotional level, we are nothing to you,” he corrected himself. “We are nothing, and even if it was hard, we accepted that. We have never held that against you because we know it gives you strength. It makes you who you are. She has to accept it too.”
I didn’t want to think of Priscilla as nothing. I was not even capable of doing it. But I told her about my emotions. I warned her. “She knows. She accepted me as I am.” She would never try to change me.
She wanted me and only me.
“No. When you look at her, I can see more than lust in there. She is supposed to be a woman you can fuck and have children with. She was supposed to be nothing to you, but you don’t look at her like she is nothing.”
I clenched my jaw. I didn’t know how could I describe what she was to me. She was my everything. Why it was so bad that she was my everything? “She is my wife.”
Salvatore looked mad but also sad. I couldn’t understand him. It was so hard to read. Why did Priscilla bother him this much?
“I don’t know how she did it, but you have to figure it out. You have to see beyond her manipulations, Antonio, because she is breaking you. She is nothing like the rest of us.”
