“We have had a visitor. Signor Clint Herndonfrom America. He wears a patch over one eye.”
“I do not know of a man who wears a patch,” I whispered.
“LIES!” he roared in Italian. “It seems you have been busy backstabbing me, daughter.” Then he went on a tangent about how the Fausti family had stolen me from him. From the family business! He did not approve of this. For Capri, yes, but for me, no!
My sister’s name seemed like a trigger, and heat swelled up in me, as dangerous as a bunch of angry wasps.
“This is not your decision to make,” I said. “I will love who I love.”
He stopped his rant cold.
“Love?” he scoffed. “Love is nothing! This is a business we run. A business that has been going strong since before you were born, little girl. You are a top designer. Creator! What lives inside of you comes from me. I gave it to you. There is a rule. The Fausti family knows this. They are infamous for following the rules their family sets. We happen to have a law we share. You know the one.”
“I do. However?—”
“However, if Mariano Leone Fausti believes he can just steal the other Capello daughter and behave as he wishes, he is not upholding his end of the law. There are punishments for those who do not.”
“You can veto this law,” I whispered.
“I can, but I will not! I told him no. No, no,no! He does not listen. Mariano Leone Fausti is aplainthief.”
“Call him or his family and say this to their faces.”
He grew quiet, and it was a deathly quiet, as if he was attempting to stop his heart from attacking him before he spoke again.
“I will speak to Signor Luca Fausti about this,” he said, and I knew when he did, he would not call Luca’s grandson a thief to Nonno’s face. He would become proper in the face of the family that had employed ours for hundreds of years. “In the meantime, youwillcome home.”
“Will I?” Even to my own ears, I heard the musing in that question.
Yes, I might have been prodding him, but for good reason. He was not willing to allow me to marry Mariano, but he would allow my sister to marry him. All because she wanted to. If my father told her no, she might flinghimoff her porch and into the canal. All because I was talented, and she was not. I was useful to the family, whereas she was usually a problem.
“Youwill,” he said. The confidence in those two words almost made me hang up on him, but the stickiness of the apple made it feel like the phone had been glued to my hand, and I could not disconnect from it.
Perhaps because I knew. I knew he had found a way to hurt me. He had designed my buttons. He knew how to push them.
“Youwill, because if you do not, and I find he married you, I have every right to kill him, and there is nothing any of the Fausti family can do about it. You will arrive in Italy by tomorrow, or it will be done. Understand me, Sistine?”
I took a shaky breath. Two.Three. Then. “Sì.”
He hung up on me, and in the darkness of the house, I still could not set the phone down. Mariano had not told me that. Hehad not lied to me, but he had omitted. He was keeping the truth close to his heart. As close as he kept me. I was a part of that truth.
Of course, my husband had known this. He had married me to prove to the world that his name, Mariano Leone Fausti, would be connected to mine, even if from the grave.
A scent that my nose and lungs rejoiced at smelling—him—drifted in the cool air. He was close. In the shadows. Perhaps listening to my side of the conversation. I finally found the strength to set the phone down.
“Sis?” Atta’s soft voice floated toward me.
Slowly, I turned toward my cousin and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I must get back to Italy.”
This was when my husband stepped out of the shadows as the camouflaged hunter he was.
“Fuck if you will,” he breathed out. The tone of his voice was so cold, it made me shiver. The air felt chilled. Thick with it instead of thin. I was frozen in that moment with him.
“I will do whatIwant to do,” I said, and although the fire was there, it was not touching his iciness. I was shivering from the clash—his coolness and my hotness—and I attempted to hide it by crossing my arms over my chest and sticking my chin up at him.
His eyes almost glowed in the dimness, a fire behind them making them seem clear against his darkness.
Atta looked between us and stepped out of the room.
