I let my head fall back against the headboard. “I was sleeping, obviously.”
His lips thinned as his arms crossed his chest. He was not having any of my attitude. I, on the other hand, was still reeling from the feeling of Giorgio’s arm across my neck. I wasn’t sure why, but I still hadn’t told Savio about it. He was the only person in the world I trusted with my secrets. It had just seemed like too much, and I wasn’t interested in having him judge me. I also feared the repercussions of what he would do to Giorgio once he found out.
I should have. Savio finding out that Giorgio considered killing me and deciding to go and kill Giorgio instead shouldn’t have been more than a blip in my mind. Hedidplan to kill me, but I’d put him in an unfair situation. Additionally, there was something about Giorgio that I couldn’t wash off. He was like the air in the sky, whether it was cold or hot, it was going to brush against my skin regardless. The thought of Savio killing Giorgio left a knot in my stomach, and I couldn’t figure out why.
Savio sat down on my bed and reclined so he was laying on his back on the foot of my bed. “I just got out of a meeting.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What about?”
He looked over at me through a half-lidded gaze. “You know I can’t tell you that.” He turned his head back to staring at the ceiling. “It’s better that you don’t know anyway.”
I didn’t like those words coming out of Savio’s mouth so naturally. The death of my Nonna was the only difference between him being caught up in this disgusting, mafia lifestyle and him not. In most circumstances, Savio wouldn’t hesitate to tell me something, just like I wouldn’t, but he was trying his hardest to keep me out of it. I wished I had the same power. Savio wasn’t like the rest of them, but with my father and brothers leaning on him more and more lately, he was starting to fall in line a little more than was comfortable for me.
“What have you been up to lately?” he asked. “I’ve noticed the weird mood you’ve been in for the past few weeks.”
Once again, my throat throbbed remembering Giorgio’s arm, but I kept it myself. “Oh, you know, just your run of the mill surviving prison. Being left totally out of the loop and never knowing what’s going on in a world I live in.”
“Nat…”
“Just give me something at least,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me everything, but…”
“I don’t know what you want,” he replied. “Dad… He lined up all the Bonifacios men. Everyone who didn’t fall in line was shot on sight.”
What a monster. The people who were working for the Bonifacios were no more committed to them than they were any other thing. There would have been nothing wrong with just letting them go. Why would we want men hanging around who had previously served a different family anyway? It didn’t make any sense to me.
“What about the rest of the Bonifacios?” I asked.
Savio hesitated for a minute. Something was crossing his brain, another secret he was keeping from me, but I was in no position to judge him for it, so I didn’t ask. Finally, he just shook his head. “Nothing new yet. The torture is supposed to continue as far as I know. The twins… I don’t know.”
“Is he going to…”
My voice faded away. Putting his hands on young women against their will wasn’t something my father was a stranger to. He’d even tried to get me when I was still a minor, but I’d fought him off. Even Savio didn’t know that, none of the boys did. I was afraid of what might happen if they did. Ever since the Bonafacios came to our estate, I’d been wondering how long it would be before my dad would skulk down there looking to take them.
Maybe he already had.
Savio’s hands balled into fists at his side. “He hasn’t said. He’s pretty attached to the torture right now. Romeo and Lucia will be getting married soon and… well he’s probably not just gonna sit around and watch someone else sleep with a beautiful woman.”
That truth hung in the air between us, and neither of us said anything. Things were fine right now, but if I’d learned anything from being a daughter of Angelo, it was that he thrived on finding new, sick ways to hurt the people around him. It was a sick perversion he had that came from causing others misery. I’d seen Romeo with Lucia, and I knew all too well how that relationship was developing into something real. If my dad thought Romeo really loved Lucia, he would get in between them any way he could.
And if the twins managed to steal the hearts of my brothers, they wouldn’t be an exception to the rule.
Giorgio snuck into my mind as I thought about it. If my father wanted to leverage something against Lucia, it would be her siblings. It reminded me of just how dire a situation he was in, and if I were in his position and someone had risked opening my cell door and walking in, I probably would have reacted similarly. At the end of the day, though I was standing there with his cell door wide open and keys to nearly the entire home just outside dangling from the lock, he let me go, and he was still down there being tortured to this day.
“What?” Savio said.
“Nothing.”
He gave my leg still buried under the blanket a playful smack. “I can see it. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
I looked back at him, holding his eye contact to communicate without truly saying the words. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
We looked back at one another for long enough for us to both realize, at least on some level, we understood what the other one was hiding.
Savio turned his head in the complete opposite direction from me. “Fine, we won’t talk about it.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back against the headboard. “Fine.”
I’d begun losing track of how many days it had been since I went down to visit Giorgio, but with each new day that passed, I felt that much more compelled to return. I was his only regular source of food, so who knew how long it had been since he’d eaten or drank anything, and if my father was earning any sort of rage from dealing with Romeo and Lucia, the brutalization was probably getting worse. Was it dumb for me to consider going back down? If I did, what would Giorgio say or do? It was weird that I found myself wondering ifhe’dforgivemeeven though he was the one who attempted to kill me.
