Page 76 of Wicked Mafia Mistake
Fuck that. I'm keeping both of mine. And I'm walking straight into the fire with my own agenda.
Twenty-One
Massimo
The penthouse is dark when I walk in.
The kitchen lights are off. No laptop glow from the sofa, no Patsy Cline spinning on the record player she brought from her apartment. The air is still and cool and carries the faint scent of lavender from the bathroom where the bottle she uses sits on the edge of the tub with the cap left off the way she always leaves it.
She's not here.
I knew she wouldn't be. When she walked out of the restaurant after telling each of us off, she walked out of my life too.
After she left, I sat at the table across from Lorenzo Ferraro's satisfied smile and Harrison Whitmore's cowardice and I didn't follow her because I didn't have the right. Not after what I'd done.
The only reason I didn't end both of those men right there is because it would make me a hypocrite. I am a lot of things, but I’m not a fucking hypocrite.
I prop myself up against the kitchen island and toss my keys to the side. The sound echoes throughout the penthouse, highlighting just how empty it is without her bubbliness filling the space with happiness and laughter. Her chipped mug sits in the dish rack, washed and turned upside down, the way she always leaves it. My black mug sits beside it. Two mugs. Two toothbrushes. Two pillows on a bed she's not coming back to tonight.
I pour a whiskey. The bottle is lighter than it should be because I've been drinking more in the past ten days than I have in the past ten months. The amber liquid splashes into the glass and I bring it to my lips and the burn hits the back of my throat and does nothing for the cold sitting in my chest.
I carry the glass to the living room. The throw blanket she brought from her apartment is folded on the sofa, the fabric still holding the shape of where she curled up yesterday with her legs tucked under her and her chin on my shoulder while I read a brief I can't remember the contents of now.
The bathroom plants sit on the windowsill, their leaves catching the faint city light, and I stare at them because I watered them this morning. I watered her plants this morning. Kissed her forehead. Went to work. Lied to her face. Then I brought her to a dinner where a man I despise tore her world apart while I sat beside her with my mouth shut.
My mother's photo sits on the bookshelf in its tarnished silver frame. The lamplight from the kitchen catches the edge of the glass and Gianna Santoro's face glows warm against the dark shelf. Dark hair. My eyes. A smile that holds sadness I didn't understand when I was eleven but understand now with a clarity that makes my ribs ache.
I pick up the frame. Hold it in both hands. My thumbs rest on the tarnished edges, the metal worn smooth from years of this exact gesture, holding her face when I need to remember what silence costs.
My mother was trapped by silence. She signed a contract she never agreed to and the man she married used that paper to cage her until there was nothing left of the woman my grandmother described. I built my career on making sure that never happened to anyone I loved.
I learned to read contracts because of her. I built my entire career on the principle that words matter, that fine print saves lives, that the difference between freedom and a cage is buried in the clauses most people skip.
And then I went and did the same damn thing.
Kon's voice echoes in my skull, low and steady and carrying the weight of a man who has earned the right to speak this truth.
You took her choice away. That's what her father did.
I set my mother's photo back on the shelf and my hand stays on the frame, my fingers pressing against the tarnished silver until the metal bites into my skin.
Sloane is not my mother's story. My mother was trapped by a man who used silence as a weapon. Sloane is braver than my mother ever had the chance to be. She sat on my sofa and told me the ugliest truth she carries and watched my face and didn't look away. She stripped the armor she spent eleven years building and handed me every vulnerable piece of herself because she trusted me with the wound no one else has ever touched.
She was brave enough to speak. I'm the one who went silent. I'm the one who trapped us both.
I convinced myself that saving her meant protecting her from the truth.
But she never needed saving. Not from me. She needed a partner. Someone who trusted her enough to hand her the ugly facts and let her decide what to do with them. Not a man who filters the world for her. An equal.
I had that woman. I had her trust and her body and her heart and she told me she loved me since she was sixteen years old and I repaid all of it with silence.
I drink the whiskey. It burns going down and settles into my empty stomach and I welcome the discomfort because it's less than I deserve.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I pull the phone out of my pocket and check the screen.
Luca.
"Talk to me."
