“Like what?” Her eyes implore. “I have to hold this secret for life, Raffael—from friends, from colleagues, and future family—I have to be able to justify my actions, if only to myself.”
Future family?
She means lovers. A potential husband. The father to her children.
Violence builds inside me, the thought of this hypothetical man enough to send me into a rage.
But that’s exactly what she needs. Someone sharing her bed thatisn’tme. Someone who doesn’t have invisible ties to a threatening legacy.
“Raffael?” she whispers.
I’m a fucking slave to her. To the want. To the ghost of her skin beneath my palms.
“Tell me why?” she pleads.
“My fucking father died.”
She winces. “Of course… I wish I could’ve been there for?—”
“Not Giancarlo,” I bite out.
A furrow forms between her brows.
This is a mistake. A risk. Yet everything inside me is drawn to tell her. To explain the darkness I failed to hide. The danger I’d hoped to keep at bay.
“Giancarlo took us in when we were little.” I shift away from her and stare across the deck to the darkened water on the other side. “Our biological father gave us up.”
She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t need to.
I know her well enough to picture the surprise taking over her features.
“Their deaths came within months of each other. Giancarloandour sire.”
I tense at the gentle pad of her approaching footfalls. Brace myself against the predictable contact. But the light press of her hand against my shoulder still punches through me.
“I’m so sorry, Raffael.”
“Don’t be sorry.” I turn back to her. “Be terrified. That day in the boardroom, the reason Michelo interrupted us, was to inform me our biological father had been murdered.”
Her eyes widen. Lips part.
I can practically see her reliving the moment in her mind. The heat we’d created. The hunger that vanished the moment Miko spoke.
“I was angry,” I grate. “Not that someone had killed him—his questionable choices had ensured his brutal end long ago. But that my brother had brought his existence into your life. That anything about that man was anywhere near you, even if only through words spoken in a foreign language.”
She balks. “Why?”
“Because he was a curse. Evidently, he still is.”
She continues to stare, as if trying to find what I’m hiding.
“Despite anticipating his death for years, I was caught off guard. I took it out on you. And maybe I would’ve apologized under different?—”
“It’s in the past.” She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about an apolo?—”
“It’s not in the past. It washislast will and testament that brought us here. He’s the one who made the agreement with Philip.”
Bleakness blinks back at me. Startled shock. “It wasn’t Giancarlo?”
