Page 78 of Ruthless Daddy
“Me neither,” I said, which was the truth.
She studied me for a second, then snuggled in closer. “I meant what I said, you know.”
I stroked her hair, fingers slow at her scalp. “Which part?”
“That I see you. All the way through. Even the parts you try to hide.”
I didn’t argue. I didn’t try to deflect it. I just let her say it, and let it be.
Night closed in around us, the house quiet except for our breathing. I could have stayed like that forever.
She fell asleep on my chest, the duvet wrapped around us both, her hair a tangle over my heart. Every five minutes or so she’d stir and make a small, happy sound, like a child curling deeper into a favorite blanket. I watched the shadows move on the ceiling, counted the streetlights outside the window, measured each slow exhale from her nose against the heat of her cheek on my skin.
I could have stayed like that all night. I wanted to. But the problem with perfect moments is that they don’t leave space for the things you’ve hidden. They just shine a light on the shape of what’s wrong.
After a while, I felt it. The first prickle of guilt, the sour note at the base of my throat. I tried to ignore it. I told myself I’d tell her in the morning, let her sleep, let her have a few more hours of peace before I ruined everything. She deserved that much.
But it didn’t work. The lie sat in my chest, heavy as a stone. The longer I lay there, the sharper it got. I ran my fingers through her hair, slow, hoping the rhythm would calm me down. It didn’t.
I remembered the line in our contract—her handwriting, all spiky and determined, underlined three times: Must be honest at all times. No games.
And then the thing I’d said to her in the Fern Room, like it was gospel: After Catania, I promised myself I would never lie to someone I loved again.
I looked at her, curled up like a question mark, and knew I couldn’t hold both things in my body—the lie, and her. The body can’t do it. It has to choose.
So I held her a minute longer. I stroked her hair, kissed the crown of her head, listened to her breath even out.
Then, in the dark, I said, “Angela.”
Her body tensed, just a little.
I said, “There is something I have to tell you.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t say a word. But her breathing changed, and her whole self went perfectly, terribly still against my chest.
That was the only answer I needed.
Tomorrow morning. I would tell her everything.
Chapter 14
Angela
Isatinthepassengerseat of his car, hands folded tight in my lap. Last night, I’d slept so hard I left a damp mark on his chest. Woke up to his mouth at my collarbone and thought, for one stupid, chemical moment, that we might spend the whole day in bed, slow, lazy, the way people in movies did when they were in love and not running for their lives. I’d pictured us talking, or not talking, or eating toast in silence. I’d pictured a version of myself that was safe.
Instead, this.
The whiplash was real.
Pietro said, when I rolled over, that he needed to talk to me. But not here, not now. He wanted to take me somewhere. There was a carefulness in the way he said it. Like a doctor with a prognosis he didn’t want to deliver at home.
Now we were two blocks out from his building, eastbound, the streets so empty the stoplights felt like theater. The sidewalks were scored with the blue drag-marks of snowplows. The windraked the last week’s trash into the curb. A salt haze crusted everything above the sidewalk line. The sky over the city was iron: a flat, matte grey, nothing soft about it.
I watched him drive. Both hands at ten and two, not that the roads were icy. He drove like a man with respect for rules, or maybe like a man who’d had to break so many that the ones he could keep had become precious to him.
He hadn’t looked at me since we got in the car. Not once. His face was set to something I didn’t have a word for. Not fear, not anger, not even the blank that came with a hard job. Just the face of a man who’d been awake for hours, replaying every possible version of the conversation he was about to have.
I let it ride for two blocks, maybe more. Each cross street slid past in perfect increments, no pedestrians, no movement in any of the windows. Only pigeons, cold as the bricks, huddled at the steam vent behind a deli.
