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“What is it that you get, Angel?”
“What you want me to apologize for. You want me to be convinced that I betrayed you just like the Lanzas, that I should have never acted behind your back even if it’d been to protect you. You want me to regret my decision, the one I made on my own without you.”
“While that’s not what I want you to apologize for, you did betray me. You lied to my face over and over. You made me look like a fool, inviting traitors into my own home, dining and laughing with them under my roof. I shook hands and made deals with men who looked me in the eye while calling me their friend when they’d been torturing my own blood for months, when they tricked me into giving them my daughter.
“What you’ve done almost cost us everything. I could have lost Leo or Nicole. I could have lost Nicco and you. My whole family, my whole kingdom. Everything. You still think you’ve done nothing wrong in that matter?”
“The only mistake I made was trusting the wrong crowd. This is all the Lanzas’ fault. They betrayed you, not me. If anything, they betrayed my deal with them, too. Doing everything I could to keep you with me safely, though? It’s the one thing that I’d do again and again and again even if it cost me a lifetime in hell, so no, Tino. I won’t apologize for anything I’ve done that might have kept you alive.”
I rose to my feet. “Looks like, after all this time, you’ve learned nothing yet. When I come home, I’ll have to make things more interesting.”
She let out an angry scream. “You know what? Fuck you, Don Bellomo.”
I fought the urge to choke her while I gave her a good old spanking, so I crossed my arms over my chest. “I thought about your request to see your sister and spend more time with Nicco. The answer is no.”
Her fists clenched, and she screamed again. I turned to leave. I was done with her bratty behavior for the day. She disappointed me to the point that I lost the will to punish her. There was no amount of punishment, no matter how hard, would satisfy me now, when all this time she failed to understand the damage she’d done, what she broke between us.
“You’re such a hypocrite,” she mumbled.
“I’m sick of your cries for attention. Stop being a fucking child and learn when to shut up or my belt will teach you.”
“I will not shut up. You are a hypocrite. You allow yourself to do whatever you want, take, hurt, burn, steal, kill, anything is justified because you’re protecting what’s yours, but when anybody else does it, it’s betrayal. When I do nothing but what you taught me to protect what’s mine, you punish me.”
“What I taught you?”
“Yes! What did I even know before you? I was twelve. I was a child until you…”
“Until I what, Angel?”
Her chest heaved, and her gaze darted around like a maniac.
I walked back toward her and stared her down. “Say it. Until I what?”
“Until you groomed me.”
If she’d betrayed me before, making a deal behind my back with Il Coyote, I was wrong. Now, she did. “Groomed you? You think I groomed you?”
“What else do you call it? A grown man obsessed with a little girl, locking her up in the school he owns so he can come to see her whenever he wants, in the middle of the night like a sick creep, brings her gifts, offers her protection, conditions her to crave him, to love no one but him, and whenever she has a chance to see beyond him, to feel anything that’s not for him, he takes it away so there’s nothing left but him, so she, too, becomes obsessed with him to the point of blindness, so she forgets what’s wrong and what’s right and ignores all the red flags, all the pain, and crawl at his feet, for his sick—”
Both my hands were clasped around her throat, silencing her. I’d never been more enraged my life. I’d never been more hurt in my life. After all I’d done for her, this was how she saw me? How could you? How could you, Angel?
Her eyes bulged. “Ti-n-o.”
I pinned her to the wall, squeezing harder. Her arms and legs flailed as I watched her face, how red it’d become then how blue. “Shhhhh.”
She dug her fingernails in my knuckles, gripping and scratching, drawing blood while gurgling her pleas. I didn’t move. “My name is the last thing you’re gonna say. No more talking. No more anything.” This was not my Angel. My Angel would have never said those nasty words. This insolent, fucked up creature that pissed in my Angel’s skull needed to go. I couldn’t stand a moment in her presence. She had to go. I watched her eyes as they slowly rolled back, as life slipped out of them. “But before you go, ask yourself this, Angel? Who let the window to your room in your old house open that night I killed Baldi?”
Choking gasps answered.
“That’s right. I didn’t teach you that. It’s all you. When I heard one of my runners was molesting his two little girls, I had to see for myself, to know for sure. I stalked him, but you somehow knew I was there. The darkness inside you heard mine. You left the window open for me so I could come and do exactly what you knew I’d do. The monster you knew was watching in the dark must have been a killer. Capable of taking a life. And so I did. I didn’t need your help. I’d never even spoken to you because why would I ever put that on a little girl’s soul. But you helped anyway. You, Angel, the twelve-year-old girl who had never even met me yet.”
Her tears dropped on my wrists.
“Another question, who went after the man she believed was her stalker and the killer of her father the night of Nicole’s graduation, chasing him in the dark, begging him to show her his face and who knew what else if he let her? Again, it was you. All you. I didn’t teach you any of that. I didn’t condition you to do that. How could I when I hadn’t even talked to you, not once?
“What about the night you brazenly touched yourself knowing beyond doubt I could be watching in order to lure me out? I certainly didn’t teach you that. How could I when I’d never touched you? How could I when I’d been hiding in the dark, keeping my distance, denying myself, protecting you from the desires that took over me only when you were old enough, as old as Leo’s mamma when I married her, but even then I wouldn’t take you, I wouldn’t even make myself known to you, waiting in solitude for you to be mature enough to understand what you really meant to me.”
Her breath rattled in desperation then in sweet surrender. One more squeeze, and it’d be all over.
