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“I will keep you and your mamma safe, but we cannot tell him what I told you.” I stepped in close and grabbed his chin, and pretended I didn’t want to stroke my thumb across his soft skin. “We absolutely cannot.”
“Why?” he asked, but he didn’t try to pull away.
“Because people with no hope pull careless stunts I don’t want happening. He has to know the marriage to his daughter isn’t going to happen but still have hope with his son, while I make arrangements to diffuse the Irish.”
“Do I really need to go with you?” His plea was whispered. If I had a heart, it would be affected. Good thing I didn’t.
“Do you want to live? Do you want your mamma to be thrown out of where she is?”
“I wouldn’t be agreeing—”
“No,” I stopped him. “What you don’t understand is that from the second we speak to your father, your life is in real danger. We leave with the clothes you are wearing, and I cannot let you out of my sight for one second.” I brought my phone out of my pocket and started texting. “My guards will be ready to get us out of here in moments. I have already got people in place to move your mamma.”
“My mom?” Alessandro whispered in horror.
“Who isn’t safe either.” I was as always happy to fight my way out, but I couldn’t risk Alessandro’s safety. He was the key to everything.
I looked up at his white face after I had texted Lucio instructions. “One thing I need to make clear.” His arms folded defiantly, and I smothered my grin. Even shocked and outmaneuvered, he still had courage. “This marriage has another rule.”
He gaped. “Are you—” I smothered the rest of his outrage with my lips. Briefly, but it did the trick. And even though I desperately wanted to continue, I had an awful lot of shit to get done.
“One. One final rule,piccolo mio.”
He ground his teeth. “I’m not little, and I’m not yours.” I begged to differ but let it go.
“This marriage is for life.” His eyes widened.
“But that makes no sense,” he whispered furiously.
I stared at him, all humor wiped from my expression. “Sangue dentro, sangue fuori.”
He gazed right back at me, and I knew he’d understood. There was no such thing as leaving the mafia. Divorces didn’t happen in my world.Sangue dentro, sangue fuoritranslated as blood in, blood out.
The only way he was leaving me was in a casket.
4
Alessandro
Iwas completely backed into a corner, but insanely, I was more terrified of this man standing in front of me that I was of my father. Father? It was a joke.
I’d been thirteen when I first knew something was really wrong with Mom. I wasn’t much of a typical teenager, living where we did. The staff apartments were a couple of miles away, and we sometimes even had to show identification to access the house. Mom had been distracted, quiet, for a while, but my teenage self was more wrapped up in the misery that was school, boys, and if I was honest, the one boy-man-I could never have.
Dario had always been a temptation, even as a child, even though a lot of it was more adolescent angst. Forbidden fruit. I wasn’t cool enough, rich enough, or popular enough that anyone with Dario’s charisma would look sideways at me. And I knew I was gay by then anyway, and it never occurred to me Dario might be Bi.
Not that we ever attended the same schools anyway. His was exclusive and private and mine…well, wasn’t. Yanking me out atfourteen hadn't been the punishment Rocco thought it was, as by that time I was barely keeping my head above water with Mom. It hadn’t taken long for me to regret that, though.
Alarm bells finally rang when Mom didn’t turn up to the final of the inter-school science challenge. Yes, being a nerd was a reason for the bullies, but there were many of us targeted. In fact, I was so worried she wasn’t there, instead of staying to accept the trophy with the rest of the team, I had run all the way home and burst through the door only to see her crying because she couldn’t work the microwave and couldn’t even remember what it was called.
Everything went downhill rapidly from that moment, and three months later I was summoned to the main house to find Mom on her hands and knees trying to scrub a floor, and Elisabetta screaming at her that she was fired. I took her home and spent the next week going over our finances, which showed me just how confused Mom had gotten and how in my selfish teenage bubble I had missed all the warning signs. I had absolutely no idea what to do, until the day I found her diary wedged behind a bookcase.
It wasn’t the first time I cried, the misery of Mom's illness had taken care of that, but it had been the last. Elisabetta had insisted on a DNA test, obviously, but within another few months Mom didn’t even recognize me. It all came to a head when Mom went on a walkabout because I had closed my exhausted fourteen-year-old eyes for a few seconds. The cops took her to the main house because my father’s name was all she could remember, and they arrived in the middle of a garden party.
Within a week when the test came back, Mom went to live in the nursing home, and in return, I took over her job.
And between them both, I had been punished every single day.
Dario didn’t seem to need an answer, and dragged me from the room, and I rounded the stairs just as Elisabetta spotted me. “Alessandro.” I hesitated at the demand obvious in Elisabetta’s voice, but then Dario turned back as well, and her eyes widened almost comically.
