I nodded, more tears coming.
“You loved him that much?” He wasn’t asking, the bitterness in his voice an exclamation.
“Yes,” I hissed.
“Why?”
“Love doesn’t need a reason. You could be extremely different, incompatible, even toxic for each other, yet…it happens.”
He grunted. “But you resisted him for so long. He terrorized the entire state to keep you a virgin for his claim, and you still wouldn’t go out with him. And when he forced you into that one date, you broke up with him at the end of it. You broke his heart so bad he gave up on a twelve-year-old obsession and kicked you out, giving you your long-sought freedom.
“If you loved him that much, why did you resist him so hard in the beginning? And after you left, why did you return?”
My mind leafed through the memories. “The night he kicked me out of his restaurant, I was attacked.” I met his eyes. “He came back for me and saved me.”
“So you fell in love with the man who saved you?”
I just looked down.
“There’s so much you don’t know about that night,” he muttered.
“I do.” My chin lifted. “I know everything.”
His eyes squinted in suspicion. “What do you think you know, Bianca?”
“The men who attacked me that night… they were Cosimo’s,” I blurted, and his eyes narrowed tighter. “I fought with him that night because I didn’t want to be with him as a mobster.” It was the first time I’d asked him to step down to Enzio and be with me. He’d strongly refused, but I didn’t understand why until two weeks ago. “I begged him to let me go. I even offered myself to him, to have me once so he’d have ended his obsession, so he’d have given me my freedom…but he flipped and kicked me out. Only because he was never gonna let me go.
“As if he’d known I’d have done that, he’d ordered his men to kidnap me.”
“She can’t live with herself if she chooses to be with me. Like that, she’ll have no choice.” Enzio’s jaw flexed. “That’s what he’d said to me in the car when he was waiting it over.”
My heart fluttered. “He understood me better than my own self.”
“You mean you’d have liked that arrangement?”
It seemed I was too fucked up for Il Tagliatore himself. “Don’t kinkshame me.”
He raised a hand in surrender. “If you were okay with it, why did you fight the men so hard?”
“I didn’t know they were his at the time of the attack. I should have just let them take me, but you know me. My stupid, reckless and impulsive has to kick in, especially when my life is at stake. So I fought back and tried to run away. That’s when they started to hit me to knock me down.”
“He’d only told them to scare you into coming with them, but never to hurt you. He couldn’t stand watching you get hurt. He had to go in and save you even if he was the one kidnapping you.”
“That’s…what I told myself when I woke up at the hospital. That’s what I liked to believe.”
His face of steel twitched. Then he blinked, shifting in his seat. “All these years you knew?”
“Have you forgotten that I could always tell you apart?”
“You were barely conscious, and you said his name…”
“It was a question. I wanted to ask you where he was, but I fainted before I could make myself clear.”
He chuckled. “Bianca Zanetti.”
“Lanza,” I reminded him.
He nodded in agreement. “So why did you do it, Signora Lanza?”
