Page 140 of When She Tempts (The Fallen)
“Dem, no. Put down the gun.” She tries to take his forearm, but he swipes her arm away and pushes her behind him.
“What is this then?” De Rossi looks like he’s half a wrong word away from putting a bullet in my head.
“We were…” Martina swallows. “We were putting something to rest.”
Is that what she thinks we just did? No, that wasn’t a goodbye.
When it comes to Martina, there will be no more goodbyes.
I made a terrible mistake yesterday. I was so angry at Polo and Sal for putting her in danger again that all I saw was red. The need to make them pay was all-consuming.
I wasn’t thinking straight.
I was looking at the situation through matted glass, and it took De Rossi saying Martina was going to get married for the glass to shatter.
Suddenly, I could see everything clearly.
I’ve been pushing Mari away ever since I saw her, because the feelings she inspires inside of me are terrifying. I’ve never loved a woman before. How can someone who has never truly been loved know how to love another?
Maybe by learning from someone else.
I should have realized Mari was the one for me when she reacted to my story—this thing that’s plagued me my whole life and made me feel so damn worthless. She listened and she reacted with kindness. With compassion. The man who killed her parents is a part of me. That should have been enough reason for her to recoil.
And yet she didn’t.
Even the most broken of things can be mended by the right pair of hands.
Mari is mine. I might be lowborn. I might be too old. My name might not come with factories or an army attached to it. But I’ve spent my life solving impossible problems, and there’s never been a more worthy prize than Martina.
Whatever I have to do to have her, I’ll do it, because I know the truth now.
If she’s not mine, nothing else matters.
“Is this what you’ve been doing with my sister the entire time the two of you have been away?” De Rossi asks, his voice low and deadly.
I run my tongue over my teeth. “Not theentiretime.”
He points the gun to the sky and fires off a shot. “Fuck you, Napoletano.”
“Stop it!” Martina shouts. “Let’s just go inside and talk.”
He lowers the gun, moving his furious glare from me to his sister. “Go to your room.”
“No, Dem, I can explain—”
“I said go to your fucking room, Mari.”
Her eyes widen. I have a feeling he’s never sworn at her before, and hearing him do it now momentarily stuns her. She swallows, her throat bobbing, then she lowers her eyes and nods. “Okay.”
He watches her take the two steps to get to the door, and when she shoots me a look at the last moment, he snaps, “Do not look at him. Inside.Now.”
The door slams shut, and then it’s just the two of us. De Rossi assesses me, his jaw ticking. “This is why you were so insistent on checking Grassi yourself. Let me guess, you would have found something that disqualified him, whether it existed or not.”
“Martina isn’t marrying him.”
“Like hell she isn’t,” De Rossi snaps. “You think it’s up to you?”
“How do you think Grassi will react when I tell him his bride isn’t a virgin?”
