He doesn’t flinch.
He settles back behind his desk with the calm, predatory focus of a man who already knows why I’m there and has decided, long before I arrived, exactly how this conversation will end.
“Paid implies remuneration for a task. Is that what they told you?”
“Don’t play word games with me, Giovanni. You loaned my uncles money,” I amend, my voice shaking despite my effort to keep it steady. “You didn’t ask. You didn’t warn me. You just did it. And we both know there are poisonous little strings tied all over your supposed magnanimity.”
“Yes,” Giovanni replies evenly. Simply.
“You used them,” I snap. “You used their desperation as leverage over me.”
His gaze sharpens, but he doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t soften it.
“Yes,” he says again, quieter this time. “I did.”
The betrayal lands harder because of that honesty. Something fractures inside my chest, sharp and hot and humiliating.
“Just when I was beginning to trust you,” I say hoarsely. “When I was starting to think…” I stop myself, breath hitching. “I was starting to think maybe I was wrong about you.”
Giovanni stands.
The chair slides back smoothly, deliberately, as he rounds the desk, every step measured. When he stops in front of me, his presence fills the room, eclipses everything else.
“I keep telling you, Lucia, that this is not a game,” he says. “And now is not the time for half-truths or gentler versions of myself.”
“And you know why this pains me. You know my father died because of…” I pause. “Because of debts. Because of loans that ‘helped’ until they destroyed everything.”
“And your uncles would have followed him,” Giovanni says flatly, “if I hadn’t stepped in.”
My fists bunch on the smooth polish.
“You don’t get to rewrite my trauma to suit your narrative.”
“No,” he agrees. “But I get to make sure it doesn’t repeat.”
I laugh once, broken and disbelieving.
“At what cost? Tell me what this leverage is going to cost me.”
He studies me for a long moment, something dark and unyielding settling into his expression.
“Cost you? Nothing. But for them? Loyalty,” he says. “That is the cost.”
“And if someone doesn’t pay it? If they don’t toe your line when the time comes?”
“That will depend entirely on the crime. I’m not without mercy,amuri. But the only unforgivable crime is betrayal. That will be paid for in blood,” Giovanni replies without hesitation. “No exceptions.”
The starkness of it steals the air from my lungs.
I stare at him, horrified by the savagery of his words, by how brutally clean the lines are in his world, how little room there is for fear, or mercy, or nuance.
And worst of all, by how recently I’d been thinking he was kind.
“I can’t believe you,” I whisper. “An hour ago I was standing in my uncle’s kitchen wondering if I’d been wrong to run. Wondering if I’d built this wall around myself for nothing.”
Giovanni’s jaw tightens.
“You left because you were afraid,” he says. “Not of me. Of what being with me would cost. You ran without pausing to consider that I might be better equipped than most to protect you. I think you know this now, that you’re simply refusing to accept it.”
