The Wolf is making his move and he’s going punish my father for his lack of response. I pretty much expected he would, but I’m shocked that firstly, he’s asking me for a method, and secondly, that my instant response is that I don’t want my father to die.
He’s a terrible father, but I won’t stoop to his level. He left me to die without any apparent qualms, but I’m not the same as he is. The Wolf told me I wasn’t a killer, and he’s right, I’m not. I won’t sacrifice a life for pettiness’ sake, even the life of a man who doesn’t deserve the chance I’m giving him.
I pick up the piece of paper, find a pen in the bedside table drawer, and scrawl on the back:Don’t you dare kill him. I’m not stooping to his level and letting him be murdered because I don’t like him. He can live and be alone for the rest of his life.
Then I shove the piece of paper back under the door.
Chapter Fourteen
Vincenzo
I’M IN Aterrible mood the next morning. I slept badly after Caterina left me standing by the pool, which is not helping, but mainly I’m furious with myself for letting a beautiful, green-eyed banshee get under my skin so badly.
My terrible sleep is her fault entirely. I kept dreaming of diving into pools and reaching for her, only to feel her slippery-smooth body slide out of my hands, over and over again.
That’s not her fault. That’s yours.
It’s a truth that I don’t want to acknowledge, yet it burns a hole in my brain all the same. I’d dismissed the conversation because I didn’t like the direction it was going, and besides, I was getting hard for her again and wanted her in my bed.
But, of course, my beautiful, oppositional little wife wasn’t having a bar of that. She didn’t explain when she got to her feet and walked proudly past my outstretched hand. Then again, she didn’t need to. I could see the flames in her eyes.
She had a right to be angry.
I didn’t handle announcing my intentions to her very well, that’s true. I could have worded my statements slightly differently, to make them sound less like proclamations and more like suggestions. An offer of a discussion would have probably been more welcome. After all, I’m trying not to be like my father. Yes, ‘trying’ being the operative word.
Still, what I’m asking of her wouldn’t have been any different to what the Bianchi boy would have asked, so why she got so furious is anyone’s guess.
Your dismissal of love, then of the whole conversation, might have had something to do with it.
That particular thought is an uncomfortable one, particularly when I remember what she said about being unloved and unwanted. That had been an unexpected confession and there’d been pain in her eyes when she’d said it, which had made me angry. I’d tried not to be, but in retrospect, I failed badly and been dismissive instead.
She didn’t need your anger. She needed your understanding.
I stalk grimly into my office with an espresso, the whispers of my long-dead conscience needling at me. I’m not used to considering other people or even understanding them, because neither consideration nor understanding affects my decisions. Their feelings don’t matter in the greater scheme of things, so why I keep thinking about Caterina Salvatore’s is anyone’s guess.
I down my espresso in one go then sit down at my desk. I have work to do and many things to arrange, and I can’t afford to be sitting here thinking about my new wife for hours on end. Yet on the desk in front of me lies the piece of paper she wrote her angry reply on, and it’s impossible to think of anything else.
She’s relentless in her opposition, even demanding I not issue a hit on her father, because she wants him to live. However, while I understand her qualms and have long let go wanting to avenge my mother’s death, I’m still furious at him for his treatment of her. Everything in me is telling me that I need to make an example of him, yet I can’t stop reading the words on her note.
I’m not stooping to his level…
She might not stoop, but I’ve done so many times, and while I see the irony of fighting violence with violence, as I’ve always believed, the ends justifies the means.
She’s not thinking that, though, and now she’s got me second-guessing. She doesn’t want to be her father—that’s what she said in the note—and like her, I don’t want to be mine. Yet if I kill Giovanni Salvatore, how am I any different?
Stefano ordered the death of the Salvatore family because of the offence against our family’s honour when my mother died. And in killing Giovanni, I’ll be doing the same thing. I always thought that allowable, because I’d be taking out our last enemy, and besides it would end with me. Yet…
What if you didn’t? What if it ended with Giovanni instead?
No, I can’t start thinking like her. I have to take him out or get his loyalty, that’s vital to my plans of unification, and there can be no middle ground. There never is in the families.
So why am I still hesitating? Why am I thinking about letting him live? Just because she wants me to?
I’m in the middle of puzzling through this when my door bursts open and Caterina enters the room. She’s in a flowing dress the colour of sunflowers and she looks like a ray of sunshine come streaming into my office. But not her eyes. They’re sharp chips of emerald mined from the dark side of the moon.
‘If you’ve ordered his death,’ she announces without preamble, ‘I’ll kill you myself.’
The kick of heat that goes through me at the sight of her is a drug and I can’t get enough. I want to leap straight over my desk and grab her, devour her, but I can’t allow that. I lost control badly last night and it’s not going to happen again, so I lean back in my chair and let her fury wash over me instead.
