Her head jerked a nod.
“You had enough to put me behind bars for life.” Forget her insistence that she’d found none of thebig stuff; his wife had doggedly unwound a trail of money laundering. Compound that with the much more serious evidence she’d collated of the laundering being directly linked to organised crime, andTommaso would have been lucky to have seen daylight outside of a prison’s walls again.
She shook her head.
“You did, and you’re far too clever not to have known it. The trails you found directly implicated the others, too. Getting me locked up would have had the domino effect that would have given you what you wanted. It would have brought about my family’s destruction. So I ask you again, why didn’t you hand your files to the authorities?”
Still shaking her head, a tear rolled down her cheek. “I… I don’t know.”
Sinking to his knees before her, Tommaso placed a hand on her trembling cheek. “Shall I tell you what I think?” he asked quietly.
Her “Please don’t” was barely audible.
“I think you couldn’t go through with it. You couldn’t gift wrap me to the authorities any more than I could pull the trigger on you.”
Her shoulders hunched as if she were trying to shrink into herself, her eyes squeezing shut.
“We can shout and insult each other and say all the cruel things, but when it comes down to it, neither of us is capable of doing anything that would cause the other pain. We’ve both tried. God knows how hard I tried. I treated you like dirt. I humiliated and degraded you. My love twisted into something so ugly that I will spend the rest of my life repenting, but all through the madness that caught me, something stopped me from ever crossing the line. You could send my entire family down and take all our wealth from us, and I still wouldn’t let anyone lay a finger on you in retribution. If the world caught fire, I would throw myself into the flames to save you…and I believe you would do the same for me.”
“Masino,stop,” she beseeched, twisting her face away from the cup of his hand. “What you feel, what I feel, none of it matters.”
“It matters more than anything.”
“No!” She shoved at his chest, would have pushed him again if he hadn’t caught her wrists. Her face red with pain and anguish, she tried to jerk herself out of his hold. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t love you, Ihateyou. I hate everything you are and everything you do and…and…” Her face crumpled, a loud sob exploding from her throat. “Oh, why did it have to beyou?” And with that, she burst into tears.
Feeling his heart shatter into a million pieces, Tommaso wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him, holding her tightly as she clung to him.
“I don’t want to love you,” she wept. “But all my life, it’s been you. I built my dreams around you, and then when my mother told me the truth…” Another gut-wrenching wail broke free. “Knowing I had to throw away my dreams of you… That’s what broke me. More than learning what your father had done to mine.”
Fisting her hair, he pressed his mouth tightly into the top of her head. “If I could rewind time to stop him firing that gun, I would.”
She clung tighter to him, her cheek nestling deeper against his chest. “I feel so guilty. Everything I feel for you is just wrong, like I’m turning my back on my father’s memory and my mother’s love.”
“Your mother loved you very much.”
“I know. That’s what makes my betrayal cut so deep.”
“You mean loving me?”
Still clinging to him with all her might, Gabriella slid off the sofa and onto Tommaso’s lap, wrapping her legs around hiswaist and wishing she could burrow into his skin. “Yes,” she admitted in a whisper.
There was no relief in admitting that she loved him, only abject despair. Putting a name to her feelings, admitting how deep they ran, deeper than the deepest parts of the oceans, only made the future that could never be hers harder to bear.
She loved Tommaso more than she’d known it was possible to love someone.
“You were her world, Gabba,” he said quietly. “Her whole world. That’s what I remember most about her. I know you don’t want to believe she was anything but lucid when she asked you to make that promise, but I do want you to ask yourself if the woman who loved and protected you so fiercely would really have wanted you to put yourself in the danger that carrying out your promise put you in.”
“She meant it,” Gabriella whispered dully.
“And do you think she would want you to destroy yourself for it? Because that’s not the woman I remember.” Sliding his hands up her back, he skimmed his fingers over her neck and cupped her chin, gently pulling it until her face was tilted and their eyes locked together. “I remember you were still in single digits, playing football with Rico and his friends in the rain. You slipped over and got mud all down your cheek, but even though you were crying, you got up and carried on…stubborn even then…and then a minute later you were laughing and running laps because you’d whipped the ball past all the big boys into the goal. Your mother stood at our French doors watching you, and I’ll always remember how she looked at my mother and gave the most radiant smile and said, ‘Look how happy she is.’”
Gabriella couldn’t remember the day he was referring to. There had been so many days like that; days spent with the Espositos, always begging Rico to play football with her. NeverTommaso or Mattia. Mattia had been too old, her feelings for Tommaso making her too shy to ask him.
He was the only person she’d ever been shy with.
Rico and his friends had always been happy for her to kick a ball around with them. It had never occurred to her to consider what her mother must have felt, watching her daughter tear around with boys, so determined to be as good as them in everything, climbing the tallest trees, performing the trickiest stunts, never showing fear.
Not once had her mother tried to discourage her. She’d wanted Gabriella to be free to make her own choices, to never feel that there was anything in the world she couldn’t do.
