I’ve never thought about sex with a specific person before, but looking at him now, dark and predatory and devastatingly handsome in the shadows of my room, I can’t think about anything else.
His smirk as he glances at my nipples tells me he knows exactly what I’m thinking.
My jaw works silently, mouth opening and closing, until I finally find my voice.
“I’ll scream,” I threaten in a shaking voice as I back away until my spine hits the cold glass of the balcony doors. “There are soldiers outside my door. If I call for help, they’ll all rush in here and kill you.”
His eyebrows lift in amusement. “Will they?” He tilts his head, and his eyes flash with malice in the moonlight. “Or will I kill them? If you scream for help, their deaths will be because of you. Isn’t there enough blood on your hands already, doe?”
The nickname drips with mockery.
I bite back a whimper. Vincenzo isn’t holding a weapon, and I can’t see one concealed beneath his black assassin clothing, but he no doubt has several. Not that he needs a weapon to kill. I stare at his large, veined hands, and I feel nauseated as I remember how he snapped the Dervishi’s neck with a sickening crunch. I’ve dreamed of those hands around my throat, squeezing the life out of me. My vision blurs at the edges as I struggle to breathe.
Vincenzo takes a slow step toward me, his face menacing in the silver moonlight. He moves like a predator, deliberate and unhurried, because he knows I have nowhere to run.
“Let’s see,” he says, with deadly calm. “There are the four Dervishis, all dead because you took foolish pity on a man they warned you was a killer. There’s your father’s capo, whom you gruesomely stabbed to death.”
He comes to a stop right in front of me, so close I can feel the heat radiating from his body. My back presses harder against the glass, but there’s nowhere left to go.
“Then there’s my family, all dead because of you. Slaughtered at a party.” His voice drops and becomes jagged and broken. “My mother, Lucia. My father, Elio. My sister, Valentina. My brother, Marco. My cousin, Dante. Everyone knows the Vicis have two sons. You mistook my cousin for me, didn’t you? Instead of wiping out the entire Vici family in one go, you left one alive. A fatal mistake.”
Each name feels like the stab of a knife. In my mind’s eyes, I see Mrs. Vici’s kind smile, the girl’s nervous fidgeting, the brother trying to protect his mother. All dead. Because of me.
Vincenzo’s closeness is making my skin prickle with fear, but I fight not to show it. What’s Vincenzo hoping for, that I’ll burst into tears and collapse at his feet? I’d dearly like to lose myself in a bout of hysterical crying, but he will not make me crumple up in fear.
After taking a steadying breath that doesn’t quite calm my nerves, I say with forced coolness, “Youkilled the Dervishis. Not me. You admitted that you didn’t need my help, or that knife. As for Pietro, he…”
Pain washes over me, sharp and sudden. I see Pietro’s gloating expression as he confessed to orchestrating Mom’s death. I feel the knife in my hand, the terrible resistance of his flesh as I stabbed him.
“He wasn’t a good man,” I finish.
“And my family?” Vincenzo demands through clenched teeth, and I can hear his barely leashed rage. “Did they deserve to be slaughtered at aparty?”
In my mind’s eye I see the elegant Mrs. Vici bestowing me with a smile, with all her beautiful family gathered around her. Almost all her family. I think I would have liked her.
My throat thickens with grief for the woman I never got to know, and who was going to be my mother-in-law. I could have shared happy milestones with her, like my wedding to her son. A housewarming party when Vincenzo and I moved in together after our honeymoon. Happy news about a pregnancy, if Vincenzo and I were blessed with a baby. It would almost be like sharing the news with my own mother.
The future I’ll never have unfolds in my mind like a cruel dream. Sunday dinners, holidays, her teaching me family recipes, seeing her playing with her grandchildren. All the things I lost when Mom died, I could have found again with Lucia Vici.
Tears prickle my eyes, burning hot, and I struggle to hold them back so they’re not visible to the tightly-wound man looming over me. The happiness that might have been mine to share with Mrs. Vici was taken from me in a hail of bullets, but I have no right to weep for Vincenzo’s mother when I’m the reason she’s dead.
“Nothing to say, doe?” he growls. “No trite words to explain why it’s not your fault my whole family was slaughtered?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. What could I possibly say that would make any of this better? The four walls are pressing in on me from all sides. The blood is rushing in my ears, a roar that drowns out everything else. I’m trapped in this room with a man who hates me. His hostility rolls off him in waves, hot and suffocating and inescapable, but it can’t compare to how much I hate myself right now.
Vincenzo steps away from me abruptly, and I discover I can finally take a ragged breath, and then another. My legs are shaking so badly I’m not sure they’ll hold me up.
I watch him walk slowly around my room, picking up my things and putting them carelessly down again. The elegant gold calligraphy pen that was a present from my mother on the last Christmas she was alive. He turns it over in his fingers like it’s worthless. A snow globe with a carousel horse that Nonna gave me for my ninth birthday. He shakes it once, watches the glitter swirl, and then sets it down with a heavy thunk. A silver brush with pale bristles and a long, shining handle that I bought for myself when I was eleven, because I saw beautiful women using them in old black-and-white movies, and I wanted to feel sophisticated and grown up. He picks it up, and for a terrible moment I think he’s going to break it. Frivolous, girlish, and useless items that look even more frivolous, girlish, and useless in Vincenzo’s big, scarred hands. Killer’s hands. He puts each one down with a carelessness that tells me how ridiculous he thinks they are, and by extension, how ridiculous I am.
You thought you could be a Vici bride, he seems to say, his whole manner a sneer.You thought you could fit into my world?
His gaze lands on a photograph that’s resting on my dresser, and he goes completely still. He stares at it as if he’s been turned to stone mid-step.
I move around him cautiously, like he’s a wild animal, to see which photograph has caught his attention.
It’s a family portrait. Mom, Dad, Nonna, Cristiano, and me. All together. All smiling. The last Christmas we spent as a family before Nonna passed away suddenly the following March.
Mom is at the center with Nonna close to her left side. Her arm is around thirteen-year-old me on her right, and she’s beaming. A huge, gorgeous smile that makes her eyes lightup. I’m smiling too, pressed against her side, safe and loved. Everyone’s always said I have my mom’s smile.
