“I thought I could love him once.I thought I was in love with him.And now I’m here, locked up, separated from my family, ruined for all other men.”
I don’t know why I told her all that.Maybe because she’s not his enemy, because she’s the only one who could possibly understand how I can still love him after everything he’s done to me.
As for me being ruined… I went down that path willingly before he showed his true colors and intentions.But it still holds true.No one wanted to marry me before.Now it will be even worse.
“Love is a tricky thing,” she says, looking out at the ocean.“Our hearts choose and sometimes our minds don’t agree.But I always believed the heart knows best.”
She sounds like she’s talking from personal experience now.Like it doesn’t just have to do with me.Even though it’s exactly how I feel too.She turns to me and gives me a sad little smile.
“You’re young and you have a lot of life left to live,” she says.“This is just a bump in the road.If everything works out for Matteo here, then you will have everything you desire again.If it doesn’t, you’ll be free to do whatever you want.”
“So what, your advice is that I forget all he’s done to me and just go with the flow?”
She shrugs.“Like I said, there’s worse things than having the love and affection of a man like Matteo.But you’re right, it’s not the best advice.I shouldn’t have spoken.Being back in this house, it makes me remember the old days.The happier times.Makes me hope they can come again.”
“I think those are gone for good,” I say sternly.
She nods and smiles sadly.“Yes, I expect you’re right.But this family was my family too, for a long time.And I was happy here.We all were.There was laughter and love in this house.For a time.”
She falls silent like it’s painful for her to speak.I have the biggest urge to put my arm around her shoulders and tell her everything will be like it was.That there will be children for her to help raise again.And laughter.And love.And the part of me that loves it here, that knows I could be happy here, wants to do that.But the sad, hateful girl inside me won’t let me fall into that fantasy.Because it is just a fantasy.Nothing good can come of the carnage and pain that caused all of this and led us here.
“Come on,” she says.“I brought you some spaghetti.No one can feel bad after eating spaghetti.And then we can put some of your freshly washed new clothes away.”
“Because no one can feel bad when they have a roomful of expensive new clothes?”I ask sarcastically.
She just smiles wider.“But isn’t that true?”
And she’s not wrong.In my case it is true.I’m ashamed to admit it, even to myself.And I’m certainly not going to admit it to her.So I just go inside.
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling the little pleasures life offers us even in our darkest despair,” she says.“The pleasures are always God’s way of telling us he hasn’t forgotten about us.”
I don’t know about God and all that, but what she said about embracing the pleasure sounds so much like what Matteo advised me to do that I’m sure she was the one who gave him that advice.
And she’s not wrong.There’s already so much darkness in my life.I should hold onto the light.Because it might get a whole lot worse before it gets better.And it might never get better.
Chapter18
MATTEO
The meetingwith all the men who came here to help me fight Dante Moretti went about as well as it could.Codelli sat grim-faced in the front, eyeing me with murder in his eyes, but by the end he had some helpful suggestions too.
I told them what I told Caputo and the rest earlier.That our first step will be figuring out the lay of the land and that I expect it to take at least a week.Find out who Moretti’s allies are, find out who I can count on to be on our side, and hopefully find some of his weaknesses.
I also told them how much they can expect to be paid for their trouble.Two hundred and fifty thousand a head.My army consists of forty men, so that’ll put a huge dent in my current wealth.But I won’t need it where I’m going when all this is done.And if by some miracle ruin doesn’t cut me down when everything is mine again, then I’ll figure it out when the time comes.
Maybe I’ll just sell it all and Goldie and I can go live in a little cottage on some green Italian island somewhere, far away from everything.If her father’s deadly looks tonight are anything to go by, that’s gonna have to happen for us to have any kind of peace anyway.
And I want peace.In her arms.
Probably too early to hope for that since there’s a war to get through first.But there it is.I’m longing for peace.For the end of worry.The end of hate and darkness.Just peace.
After the meeting, I thought I would get to start enjoying some of that peace with Goldie.She was standing on the balcony, looking like a pretty, golden statue in the sunset and all I wanted was to stand beside her, my arm around her shoulders watching that sunset with her.
But things needed to start moving.
So I gave the instructions and then rode with Caputo to Moretti’s mansion.
It’s been such a short time since I escaped it that a part of my mind felt like I was coming home as we neared it—a home in that deranged sense that my mind started seeing his mansion, while I was his slave, because I had no other home.And for a while the blackness of realizing that, of remembering my seven years under his boot, wiped out all other thoughts from my mind.
