What’s a little more?
“There was a man on our block. Marco Renpalucci. He was older than me. Much older. He paid attention to me when no one else did. Said things that made me feel seen and wanted. He made me feel like I mattered. I was sixteen and my family had just exploded and I thought—” I laugh, and it sounds like glass breaking. “I thought I was in love. Thought he was in love with me. So one night, when he asked me to come with him to a hotel, I did.”
Slava is very still. His thumb has stopped moving on my neck.
“My father found out. And that was the only time he came out of his drunken stupor. He came with a bottle in hand, broke it on Marco’s face, and dragged me back home. Once we got home, he screamed at me for hours about how I was throwing my lifeaway, how I couldn’t trust men like that, how he was trying to protect me. I hated him for it. Told him I wished he was dead.”
“Then what happened?”
“Three weeks later, I got my wish.” I hiccup. “Marco had dangerous friends. They jumped my father outside of the liquor store, and beat him until his brains were splattered on the sidewalk.”
Slava’s lips press into a thin line, and a muscle twitches in his eye. But his hands on my face remain impossibly gentle despite his rage.
“The police said it was a random act of violence,” I continue. “That my father was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it wasn’t. He died because of me.”
I take a breath.
“After Dad died, Luca stepped up. He was barely an adult himself, and suddenly he was responsible for a traumatized sixteen-year-old sister who had just gotten their father killed. We had no money left. Dad drank through whatever savings we had, and Mom wasn’t sending anything back. So Luca did what he had to do to survive. He found the men who killed our father and he killed them back, and then fled to someone who could offer him protection in exchange for his service.”
“The D’Ambrosio Family,” Slava says quietly.
“Do you understand now? That’s what I mean when I said that I set everything in motion. My father died because of me. Luca became what he became because of that. And everything that followed was all because of me.”
I can’t sayAlessandro. Can’t even let myself think his name too loudly in case Slava somehow hears it in my silence.
“That’s why your heart can’t belong to me, because I was the one who shattered it in the first place,” I finish.
I’m waiting for his expression to change, to curdle into disgust, and for the warmth in his hands to turn cold before he steps back to look at me the way I deserve to be looked at.
But he doesn’t.
“You were a child.” His voice is gentle in a way that breaks something in me.
“I was old enough to?—”
“No, you weren’t.” His hand moves from my neck to cup my jaw, tilting my face up toward his. “What happened to you was not your fault.”
“But my actions had consequences?—”
“Yes. Consequences. But not culpability.” His thumb brushes away a tear I didn’t feel fall. “You were not the one who beat your father to death. You were not the one who pulled the trigger in his vengeance. You were not the one who decided Luca’s path. And you were not the one who betrayed Gia.”
He stops. Something flickers across his face.
“I can’t blame you.” The truth escapes before I can stop it. “And you don’t get to blame yourself either.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“It is now.”
I stare at him. The winter-gray eyes, steady and certain. The jaw tight with something that might be its own pain.
“Do you want my heart, Bella?”
I do. With God as my witness, I fucking do.
I nod.
“Then you’ll have it.” He inches closer. “Because if these past weeks have taught me anything, it’s that holding onto the ghosts of the past hurts no-one but ourselves. That waiting for vengeance is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.”
