Page 221 of Vicious Intentions
“Right now, we do absolutely nothing,” I state evenly. “Not yet. I need time to think.”
Stella’s eyes sharpen immediately.
“Hate to break it to you, Mar, but time isn’t exactly on our side. Soon, everyone’s going to know we have the Boss of the Cosa Nostra locked up. We’ve got a few hours at best before this blows up in our faces.”
“I’m aware,” I grunt. “Just give me an hour. Two tops.”
“That’s pushing it, brother,” she sighs. “But okay. I’ll see if I can keep the soldiers who were on guard at the club quiet for the time being.”
She pushes herself out of the chair and walks out of the office just as my wife walks in.
Izzie says nothing at first. She simply walks over to me and cups my face in her hands.
“It’s not easy being king, is it?” she murmurs softly, sadness lingering in her eyes.
“Let me guess,” I smirk faintly, brushing my thumb across her lips. “You were eavesdropping on me again?”
“Old habits die hard.” She shrugs with a teasing smile.
“Apparently so.”
I tug gently on her chin and pull her down just enough to kiss her.
“Better. Much better. We needed this,” the voice inside my head whispers, temporarily soothed by my wife’s kiss.
“Yes, we did,”I silently agree before forcing the Devil back into his cage where he belongs.
It’s becoming more natural for me to get my alter to abide by my commands. Dr. Seymour spent years teaching me how to control the darkness inside me. How to keep it chained down until I choose to let it loose.
Most days, I’m the one in control now.
But every once in a while, usually during moments of extreme stress, he still claws his way to the surface just to remind me he never truly disappeared.
And tonight has been one hell of a stressful night.
By the time our kiss breaks apart, I’ve made sure Izzie’s lips are nice and swollen from it.
“Can you ask my father to come to my office?” I murmur against her mouth.
She rewards me with one final sweet kiss before slipping out the door to retrieve my predecessor.
My father, Vincent, walks into my office a minute later and sits on the couch, as far away from what used to be his desk as possible.
I get up from my seat, fold my arms over my chest, and lean against the desk’s edge.
“How can I be of use, son?”
“I need your advice,” I state before telling him all that Stella had told me not a few minutes ago, paired with my own interactions with Matteo.
I can tell the revelation of Matteo’s love for my sister shocks him to his core by the way his expression pales with each word I utter.
“I wish I had known at the time,” he whispers under his breath. “Though your sister did try to tell me once. I was too worried about her safety and well-being to truly believe her. I wish I had.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t kept their marriage a secret from us, we might have figured this out beforehand.”
“The gift of foresight is a wonderful thing, but something I do not possess,” he laments. “As I’ve said a million times before, I thought I was doing right by our family. I knew all of my children were already suffering, imagining the worst being done to our Anna. I didn’t want to plant an even darker nightmare in your minds. Who knows what kind of reckless choices you all would’ve made out of desperation? Instead of losing one daughter to the Cosa Nostra, I ran the very real risk of losing all of you to it. And that, Marcello, was not a risk I was willing to take.”
I press my lips into a thin line because I see the logic in his assumption. We already feared what Anna could be going through, but being locked away in some cell and sharing our enemy’s bed are two very different things. We might have made terrible mistakes that could’ve cost us our lives just to get to her sooner if we thought Matteo was forcing himself on her.
