She would get over it. She’d got over worse.
But she’d never imagined leaving him would be a pain equal to what she’d suffered when her mother died. A different kind of pain, but a pain she still felt like an unbearable weight in her heart. It didn’t help that everywhere she went, the Esposito name was never far from people’s lips, Naples agog with thenews that Mattia had been anointed into his father’s place. The rumour mill had it that Tommaso had pulled out of the running.
Gabriella couldn’t stop herself from thinking about him. Every day, she roamed the streets of Naples trying to work out what she should do with her life, and found her footsteps taking her in the direction of his villa. Every trip to a grocery store found her remembering how he’d bought all that sanitary wear for her. Every evening, she sat in her little apartment knowing Tommaso or one of his most trusted men had touched every little thing; had gone through her most private and cherished possessions. It would have been easier if they’d trashed the place, but they’d left it all in a tidier state than she kept it, giving her no need to embark on a big clean-up and wipe all their marks away. They’d even left her fake passport and rolls of money she’d stored in her mattress. She thought she’d been so clever hiding them there, might have even smugly told herself they’d missed it if the gun she’d kept with them hadn’t disappeared. If Siena or Mattia or Valeria came for her, she would have nothing to protect herself with.
She almost laughed. Keeping a gun in her apartment had been zero help or protection against Tommaso.
And it would have been zero protection when she unlocked her apartment, dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter and entered her living room to find him sitting on the sofa facing her with a gun in his hand.
Chapter Fifteen
The clatterof Gabriella’s helmet falling to the ground broke the long stretch of silence that followed her entry into the apartment. She had no control of it slipping from her fingers any more than she had control of her legs turning to jelly and her body swaying.
He didn’t move. The pose he’d struck with his arms stretched across the tops of the sofa was the same pose from all those weeks ago… Except it was like looking at one of those spot-the-difference images she’d poured over as a small child. His hair had the same untamed quality, like he’d spent hours pulling at it but his beard was bushier than it had been that day, and she remembered how he’d come into Valeria’s kitchen dressed for the funeral and her heart had flipped over at how damned beautiful he was and how angry she’d been with herself for thinking that and for noticing he’d trimmed his beard.
Looking at him now, she was certain it hadn’t been trimmed in days.
His clothes were different, too. The black he wore wasn’t the funereal black of mourning but looked to be clothes he’d thrown on without thought or care.
There was no wildness in his eyes. In its place, an emotion it hurt to look at. All the wildness from all those weeks ago had drained out of him. Her grizzly bear had had his stuffing knocked out.
“Why have you got my gun?” she whispered. Because that was the other major difference between the two scenes – the gun in Tommaso’s hand was the gun she’d kept in her mattress for six years. “Have you come to kill me?”
His lips twitched. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Do you really believe I could do that?”
Her “No” came out as an exhale.
She didn’t believe it. She didn’t think she ever had. Not deep down.
Now he exhaled, a long, drawn-out breath as if he’d been storing air inside him for a long, long time. He moved his arms, holding the gun out to her, but with the barrel facing away from her. “Take it.”
She took a step back. “Why?”
“Because it belongs to you and because the power of my life is in your hands.”
“What…?”
“If you hate me like you say you do, then shoot me. Take my life like I came here to take yours.” His face contorted. “That’s why I came here all those weeks ago. When Niccolo gave me your name, I wanted to kill you more than I have ever wanted anything. I have never hated anyone more than I hated you.”
Her heart was thumping so hard she had to swallow to speak. “Then why didn’t you?”
“Because to kill you would have been to kill myself.” He closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. When his stare opened back on hers, there was a steadiness to it. “I have done a lot of bad shit through the years, Gabba. Some of it has left its mark in me. Some of it I never think of. Aiming that gunat you and thinking what would have happened if my finger slipped and I’d pulled the trigger is the only thing that’s made me wake in a cold sweat. Remembering the fear in your eyes, knowing it was me who put it there…” He shook his head, his voice tightening. “That is one thing I will never forgive myself for. That and the way I behaved when I brought you home. The way I treated you was unconscionable. I will not ask for your forgiveness. I don’t want or deserve it. I don’t want you to ever forget what a vile bastard I am or what I’m capable of.”
Her legs no longer able to support her weight, she sank onto the same armchair he’d ordered her to sit on all those weeks before.
He stretched forward and put the gun on the small round table beside her.
“Why are you doing all this?” she whispered, cringing away from it. “Saying all this?”
“Because there can be no moving forward for either of us without the truth.” Tommaso gazed at his beautiful wife, taking in the gauntness of her face and the fear that had finally sprung in her eyes.
She didn’t fear him. She feared the truth.
“Why didn’t you take your files to the authorities, Gabba?” he asked gently.
Her chin wobbling, she bit her teeth into her quivering bottom lip. “I didn’t have enough.”
“Really?”
