Sex.
I’ve never felt disgusted by sex before, yet right now I feel sick to my stomach about the things my drunken mind wants that man to do to me.
Knowing how easily he could use me to take over my family. My life. I toss the glass shard to the side.
“No, that’s not going to h-happen,” I tell myself. A few tears slip over my waterline and I wipe them away furiously.
My father would never want this. He would never want that. The Fiorellis holding some kind of power over us.
He had been willing to work on allyship, but Eivor Fiorelli refused each and every time. The man always wants more than he gives.
I stare at the floor, to the side of the broken bottle and soaked rug.
My father.
Or Eivor?
I realize, maybe both.
I shake my head. I don’t want to think about it.
I can’t. I won’t.
It doesn’t work.
All my mother had wanted for her children was for them to grow up strong and know their place in the world, in our family. That we were here to protect each other.
Protect her. Like she protected us.
Yet, I was alive, in a mess of my own making, while she was dead.
Dead and buried deep in the ground, rotting and decaying, never aging, never getting to see her sons again. Never getting to see them grow up. Never knowing the rest of her family. Even if my other brothers had been born of the other wives while she was still alive, she would have loved them anyway.
She would have loved them like her own.
Not like Tiberi’s, who left when he was only an infant. Or Tommaso and Cassian’s…who left the family and only calls them a couple times a year.
My mother—mine and Alessio’s—she would be here still. Loving us. All of us.
Protecting us.
If only she had been here when…
“No, stop.” I put my head in my hands. “No. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
I curl my fingers in my hair tightly.
“I can’t. No.”
My breath hitches as more tears drip down my face, and I growl in frustration.
I can’t stop hearing those words.
You lie. You always lie.
You deserved it.
You probably wanted it.
