Then again.
“While all the time you were head of the Dragoni Crime Family,” I spit, the words searing a path of fire, dread, and betrayal through my body. “Not, as you let me believe, just a man, a businessman, who happened to share the same last name as the most deadly mafia family in Europe and North America.”
He exhales slowly, like he’s gathering the fraying edges of his patience. And Christ, my fingers itch to slap his hot face, shake that titanium confidence.
“I am a Dragoni,” Giovanni says evenly. “I was born one. I will die one. And I did nothing different after meeting you than I did before. I am in every sense of the word a businessman. But I am also… more.”
“That’s supposed to make this better?” I scoff.
“It’s the simple truth,” he replies coolly. “Men like me deal in the unspoken as comfortably as we do the spoken. Tell me,cara, did you truly expect me to introduce myself as Cosa Nostra the first time we met on the street?”
My jaw tightens.
“Or the second,” he continues. “Or the third. Discretion is paramount in my world. Necessary. Until it is not.”
Cold creeps up my spine as alarm pings through me.
Because the very fact that we’re having this conversation, that Giovanni isn’t rushing to deny anything, means he’s here to drag me into the very thing that terrifies me. The world that erased my father, horribly and mercilessly, without a shred of remorse.
A world I vowed to stay away from as I stood over his casket that freezing January morning.
“And when exactly did you decide it was no longer necessary?” I snap. “When you held a meeting with your men during our wedding reception? Or when your lieutenants lined up to kiss the ring right after we said our vows?”
His gaze sharpens, but his voice remains maddeningly calm.
“I decided it when my enemies already knew you were my wife and had the protection of my name,” he says. “When pretending otherwise became more dangerous than truth.”
“You humiliated me,” I fire back. “You turned my wedding into a performance I didn’t understand until it was too late.”
“I turned it into a shield,” Giovanni counters. “A very visible one.”
I shake my head, breath coming faster. “You don’t get to rewrite this as protection just because you don’t like how it sounds.”
“Protection doesn’t care how it sounds,” he replies flatly. “Only that it’s effective.”
“I didn’t ask to be protected,” I snap. “I asked… thought I was marrying a man I understood. A man I knew.”
Silence stretches between us, thick and volatile. Finally, he steps closer. “You married the man you chose,” he replies coldly. “Not the one you decided to imagine.”
“And what about him?” I demand. “The man I imagined? Was he just a story you told so I’d say yes?”
“No.” His voice is sharp now. “He is me. But not all of me. Not a single-dimensional man blinded by beauty and lust,” he says, and a flash of heat in his eyes reaches across the space between us, forcefully attempting to thaw the cold desolation. “Although that was certainly a state of being that held me wholly and willingly captive… blue balls aside.”
I curse the heat that climbs faster, deeper, taking over my bloodstream. I shake my head, desperate to dispel the sorcery this man has perfected in weaving over me.
I’m no longer gullible, damn it. “You let me believe you were just… powerful,” I say. “Not dangerous.”
“Power is danger,” Giovanni replies evenly. “You cannot separate the two and survive.”
I stare at him, another uncomfortable truth dawning. “You don’t regret it,” I whisper. “You wouldn’t change a single thing, would you?”
“No.”
My breath strangles in my lungs. “You don’t regret lying?”
His head tilts, that sardonic look back in his eyes. “I regret that you left. I colossally regret that I was deprived of the wedding night we’d been waiting months for.”
He closes the gap between us, captures my chin in his hand to hold me steady while he pins me with his hot, merciless eyes. “A wedding night I still intend to claim, by the way.”
