Page 90 of Urgent Vows
CATALINA
Someone is shaking my shoulder. I try to push the hand away, but it's insistent.
"Catalina, wake up. I need to talk to you."
"Can't it wait for tomorrow?" I mumble.
"No."
His tone forces me awake more than the repeated jiggling of my shoulder. When I open my eyes, he's sitting in a chair beside the bed close to my head. I don't remember it being there before. I blink and then blink again.
"Sit up." He's leaning forward and literally lifting me into a sitting position with his hands under my armpits.
He shoves some pillows behind me so I'm not leaning forward and putting pressure on my ribs. Then he pulls away, sitting back in the chair and crossing his arms over his chest.
Severu's expression is grim, his gaze boring into me without a trace of emotion. I am facing the don again, not my lover, not the man who insisted I take pain medication and get some rest.
This man wants something, but I don't know what and I'm too muzzy headed from sleep and pain meds to even guess at it.
"Would you betray me, Catalina?" he asks with an aura of dark menace.
I can't make sense of the question at first, but then my sluggish mind catches up and I am horrified. "No. You know I wouldn't."
"That's the problem, wife. I don't know. I know I like your pussy, but I barely knowyouat all."
How can he say that? I've revealed more of myself to Severu than any other person in my life.
"Big Sal has been talking to you, hasn't he?" I ask, trying to figure out how my husband went from the concerned man at dinner to this.
"Why do you say that?"
"Earlier today. He suspected me." I rub at my eyes, trying to wake up. Trying to think more clearly.
"He has reason to, don't you think?"
"No." That much I am sure of.
There is no reason to suspect me because I haven't done anything wrong. Though I can't make my mouth form all those words, so I stick with the simple denial.
"You admitted yourself that you spied on your father."
I can't believe he's using what I told him against me. "You know why," I say.
"I know what you told me. Maybe it's even true."
Maybe? And maybe all the remodeled broken bones the doctor saw on the X-rays at the hospital were just shadows on the film.
"Your father's abuse only makes your need to get out of his house more urgent. You had to figure out a way to get the money you needed for your escape from him."
He stares at me like I'm supposed to say something. I keep my lips pressed tightly together.
"Maybe you figured out a way to get money with that information. Maybe it even felt like poetic justice."
"Maybe you're an asshole." Only there's nomaybeabout it. Anger is jump starting the synapses in my brain. "Betraying the mafia's secrets is not poetic justice. It's a death wish."
"I agree, but a woman raised the way you were, sheltered from the brutality of our life, might not really believe that."
"You think I was sheltered from brutality?" I ask, feeling sick and wanting to scream at the same time. "Me?" I emphasize. "The one my father whipped with cruel words? I wassosheltered by his fists and feet. All my bruises and broken bones were my armor?"
