“No.” She remembered him removing her hand from his… Fresh colour burned through her skin. Dear heaven, she really had been wanton. His for the taking…
He’d refused to take advantage of her in her drunken state. Oh, God, did this mean that somewhere deep down in his black heart lived a speck of conscience? Or did he just prefer her to be unwilling, but even thinking that brought more heat careering through her. Her body had never been unwilling.
His eyes were watching her with an intensity she felt all the way to her core. “You don’t really believe it, do you?”
Her bowl now empty, she put her fork in it and pushed it away, glad to feel a little more human. “It’s not a question of belief, it’s a question of fact.”
His features darkened. “Bullshit.”
Disbelief washed through her. “How can you not know? There were no secrets between you three boys and your father.” It was something Siena had often complained about, how her brothers were raised to be Lorenzo’s generals while Siena had to fight tooth and claw to be taken seriously and allowed into the shadows. She’d got her way and stepped fully into the Espositos underworld, but Gabriella had long been certain that Lorenzo had kept Siena in ignorance of the truth about her father’s death. For his sons, though, Fabio Romano’s death was a lesson he would have wanted them to learn from…
Or so she’d spent the last nine years believing.
Black eyes glittering with danger, Tommaso’s words were delivered as tightly as his jawline. “Your father was killed in a hit by a rival gang targeting my father’s closest associates in a turf war.”
She didn’t break the hold of their stares. “It was cold-blooded murder. My father had a baby on the way and wanted out of the life – he wanted to go straight.”
“This is bullshit,” he repeated in the same taut, barely contained tone. “He loved your father. Fabio was his oldest friend.”
She shook her head. “My mother saw him. She’d finished work early. She saw your father leave the alleyway at the back of our apartment block and get into his car. The only reason your father didn’t see her is because he turned left instead of right. She found my father dead in a pool of his own blood.”
His lips barely moved. “If any of this is true, why didn’t she go to the authorities?”
“And give your father a reason to kill her, too? She was eight months pregnant with me.”
“Yes, she was pregnant with you, my father’s goddaughter.” The dangerous glare in his eyes deepened. “You expect me to believe your mother made my father your godparent when she thought he’d murdered your father?”
“She was protecting me as my father told her to do – your father had been acting weird around him since he’d told him he wanted out. He told her that if anything happened to him, she was to protect herself and me. The only way she could do that was by pretending ignorance.”
Tommaso was shaking his head, his features a contortion of barely concealed fury and cynicism.
“It’s the truth,” she said, striving to keep her tone matter-of-fact when her heart had swollen, its beat accelerated. This was the first time she’d ever spoken of this, and while she’d fully expected that Tommaso would at some point raise the subject, she’d never imagined he would be ignorant of the facts. “She had the presence of mind to call your father before she called the police, and when he came to her, she comforted him in his ‘grief’, and even told him to find who’d done it and get vengeance for her. She did everything she could to protect me, because if he’d suspected what she knew or had seen, he would have killedus both. She spent sixteen years letting your father play father to me and letting him play the benevolent, heartbroken friend, making sure to only speak about him in loving and grateful tones, all the while nursing grief and hatred in her heart that she was completely unable to let out in case he was spying on us and had bugged our home and devices. Which he had, because I found them. She kept everything bottled up so tightly that it festered inside her and became cancerous, so as far as I’m concerned, your father didn’t just kill my father, he killed my mother too.”
He was still shaking his head, his jawline now so tight she half-expected it to snap. “Your mother told you all this in the days before she died?”
“Yes.”
“After the cancer had spread to her brain?”
“She never lost her faculties.” Right to the very end, her mother had remained Gabriella’s loving protector.
He brought his face down to hers. His eyes rang with an antipathy that made her shiver. “She did, because what you have just described are the ravings of a mad woman.”
Trembling, Gabriella jutted her chin and held her ground. “She waited sixteen years to tell me the truth. She knew exactly what she was saying.”
“It was the ravings of a lunatic.” Tommaso’s watch beeped. He glanced at it and straightened. “The staff are back.” Climbing off the stool, he brought his face back to hers and flared his nostrils. “I’m going out, so you can amuse yourself. Just know this – if you repeat any of this to anyone, you will spend the rest of your miserable life in a cage.”
Tommaso drove his Ferrari aimlessly for an hour before heading back to the villa. By rights, the Ferrari belonged to Rico. Months ago, Tommaso and Mattia had made a bet with their younger brother. Rico had undisputably won, but his refusal to cash in meant Tommaso’s favourite car and the Patek Phillipe on his wrist were still his. Whenever he looked at the watch, it reminded him of how Rico had walked away from the family business for a woman. He would never understand how he’d done that. Or why. He didn’t dispute that Marisa was beautiful and that she had an aura about her that suggested she moved with angels rather than the devils the Espositos tended to mix with, but to walk away from everything as Rico had done to spend his life fixing up old cars? To Tommaso’s mind, those were the actions of a madman; just as Gabriella’s story had been the retelling of words first told by a madwoman.
What he did not doubt was that she believed it, and the longer and faster he drove, the more doubts crept in.
But he couldn’t believe it. His father had been as far from an angel as it had been possible to be, but he’d never lied to his family. He’d never whitewashed his past to them, never spared his sons the details of the brutal life he’d once lived. It was a brutality that had lessened as his wealth had mushroomed, the past buried with rigid enforcement, the shadowed world policed by trusted enforcers, any violence so many steps removed it could never come back to him.
Fabio Romano’s death was the one death his father had never got over. His vengeance against the Ranieri family, which had turned the walls of Naples red for months, was the stuff of legend.
Sickened with himself for allowing Gabriella’s story to put doubt in his mind about his father, Tommaso returned to the villa in a worse mood than when he’d left.
He found her in the living room, curled on a sofa, fast asleep.
