“Shut the fuck up before I put my fist in your mouth.”
“So protective.” The one with the long hair hummed. “Wonder if you would have reacted this way with the eldest Di Matteo girl?”
Eldest Di Matteo girl?
“What the fuck is wrong with you? You been watching a mushy movie or something?”
The other man just shook his head playfully before taking off to the house. The second one followed after a minute, far less enthusiastically.
So Carlo’s bastard child was fucking the bodyguard? Her hatred of the spawn who’d robbed her of her future intensified. The groom looked more undressed than any groom she’d ever seen, but there was no doubt he was a man of standing. She’d let that pass for a fucking bodyguard. A mere soldier when she could have married whomever the other man was?
A different movement on her periphery made her eyes dart to the side. One of the black-clad ants had unclustered from the group and was moving towards her at a rapid speed. She was already backtracking when he yelled out. “Get the fuck out of here, old hag. No fucking beggars here.”
She flipped around and walked out hurriedly. So maybe she’d picked the wrong day, but she wasn’t wasting it. If she couldn’t get to the main house, she’d wait for the spawn she’d birthed. When she’d first gotten her address from her source, who had been keeping an eye out for her, she hadn’t thought of confronting her. She’d wanted to go to the one with the deepest wallet. But suddenly she was worried that the wealth might already be split, now that the don was no more. Maybe the new don had all of it. Or maybe some of it was handed over to the bastard child. She wasn’t wasting time, that was for sure. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. It was better than nothing, anyway. And maybe she could talk some sense into her bastard child. Tell her the secret of the world because clearly the Di Matteo widow hadn’t. The size of a man’s dick didn’t matter. How deep his wallet was, did.
Her disappointment grew as she left the grand house behind. The closer she came to her destination, the tinier and shabbierthe houses became. An hour later, she was in a narrow, cobbled lane with a row of houses on either side and barely enough space for a small car to pass in between. The front door was freshly painted, but in her eyes, it might as well have been falling apart on its hinges. She’d sacrificed her body, her youth, her future to birth the bastard, and this was where she lived? In a fucking nobody’s street? It was barely three times the size of her own house. She wanted to rewind three decades and have a do-over because this was a crude fucking joke. Peeping through the window only emphasised it. A shoddy, dark room filled with dull furniture that had seen better days. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing that reeked of the don’s money. If the bastard child didn’t have anything of value to give her, she was killing her herself. A wave of frustration rushed over her. It pushed her down to her ass on the warm front step.
The hours crawled by, giving her time to stew in her anger, yapping to herself, scaring off anyone who dared to pass by in the narrow street.
“What?” she sneered at the two girls who walked by. She grabbed a loose stone and threw it at their departing backs. It hit the spine of one of the girls, and they shrieked before running faster. “Don’t let a man fuck you before you get paid for it,” she yelled after them.
At first, she had only been disappointed. That’s what she had thought. But it had twisted into resentment and then inflamed into open rage. She wasn’t moving from there until her bastard child came home. Fucking the bodyguard? While she could have been the bride at that party? Then she could have walked in and made her claim as the mother of the bride. Everyone would have put her in her right place. Instead, she had to sit on this filthy doorstep and wait in the meager street in the wrong part of town for her highness to turn up at her next-to-nothing, stingy house. Assunta thought no one would blame her for soiling the frontstep with her piss. If her highness wanted her to act nice, she should have proven herself. Packed up a nice bank account for her true mamma. Assunta had only one intention in her mind. She was fucking getting something for the effort she had gone through. Fucking the don, losing her beauty, which she’d never recovered. She’d been ruined for another man. No one wanted her anymore. That man in the garden hadn’t even thought the groom could be fucking her. She was done with everything. It was time the bastard child acted like what she was meant to be. Her fucking meal ticket.
The sun went down, and the moon swelled. Sometime after, the church bells donged eight times. What was she fucking partying for? Her sister marrying some important man?
She was sick of waiting. It should have felt like nothing compared to all the years she’d wasted on the Di Matteofamiglia.Yet she felt every minute grating away. Every minute that she could be living. Having a party of her own. It was her time to reap the benefits. The church bells donged again. Nine times.
She’d never seen her spawn. It hadn’t interested her enough to seek her out, but when she saw the woman who turned the corner, walking with her head down and red heels in her hand, she didn’t need to. It was déjà vu, showing how she had been when she was young and her body untainted by carrying a wretched child. Her spawn was the spitting image of her. Long black hair flowing down her back, skin as white as porcelain, big breasts, and a tiny waist. Except this one wore a rich dress in a rich colour, and she was about to make her rich.
She didn’t budge from where she sat. Fixated on the one thing that had ruined her entire life. With her shoulders slumped, she looked miserable. Good.
She was almost on her before she noticed Assunta. Then she stopped. Her eyes climbed up wearily from the cobblestones, upher stained front steps to the woman blocking her front door, and every muscle in her body froze. Assunta thought it was almost like watching a beautiful sculpture crack and fall apart right before her. Horror and doubt tormented her eyes before they finally gave up and sank into a deep, black despair.
Carlo Di Matteo’s wife may not have told her children, but she’d definitely told her. Because her eyes spoke the truth she’d known all along. She knew she was the dirty secret in the Di Matteofamiglia.
CHAPTER ONE
THREE MONTHS LATER
ORIETTA
Was it really a secret when I’d known all along? The sinking feeling buried deep inside me that I’d carried all my life was the evidence of it. Hidden within the contemptuous look of my father when his gaze fell on me. The one that said, even with no words between us, that he didn’t want me. Near him. Near his wife, his children, his house.
Worse than not being seen is not being wanted. I was nothing to him. Even if Mamma had treated me like any of her other children, I’d known. Because sometimes even Mamma’s gaze held turmoil. As if she’d like nothing more than to forget the memory that was linked to my presence. I was the soil in their clean home. The speck that tarnished the perfect picture of the Di Matteofamiglia. The black sheep that hid in the darkness and peeped into their picture-perfect lives.
I was made out of lust, born into hate, and brought up with regrets and disdain. Was it even a wonder then that I hated them all with a vengeance that ate me alive? My two little sisters, because they were perfect, and they weren’t me. They belonged.My brother, because he had a path lined for him from his birth. His end goal to confirm his birthright by becoming the future don and ruling. I even hated Mamma because she had never wanted to leave her marriage with a worthless dick.
Which is why I didn’t fathom this need to see them when I didn’t even want to be a part of their lives. Yet ripping the black stone caged in my chest cavity would have been an easier task. The longest I’d gone without them was a week. Otherwise, again and again, I found myself hidden within the trees looking into the kitchen that had been my home for twenty-nine years, hoping to see a glimpse of one person at least who tied me to this God-forsaken family.
And we were tied to each other by the venomous snake of a man whore who had called himself our father. No matter how much I hated my family, it was nothing compared to the poisonous rage I carried for the man who had fucked every single pussy that entered the house and was careless enough to put his seed in one of them. Carlo Di Matteo was the devil incarnate. A terror of a man, who commanded a clan but was a shitshow of a father and a hell of a husband. He was the cause of all our nightmares. The only thing he ever did was ruin us. He tainted our image of men by what he did to Mamma with his inability to keep his dick tucked in his pants. Flaunting his affairs in front of his children and his wife. For being the cause of Daria’s nightmares and Lia’s temper tantrums. I couldn’t have helped them even if I had wanted to. When I’d tried, I’d failed, so I preferred to forget that I had ever tried. The only thing I could do was cope. And I did it, ironically, like my father. I fucked.
I seduced Carlo’s trusted men and fucked them. Just because it would piss him off if he ever caught me. I yearned to see his eyes shift from disdain to recognition. And until that day came, I had derived my pleasure from the act itself. It was the one thing that stirred my heart to beat. The only thing I could control. Thereaction of a man’s dick. They called women the weaker sex, but they forgot that a woman ruled the best when she was down on her knees. They all fell for it. Married or not. Young or old. One by one. Even the untouchable Luigi Santone.
I didn’t know when he’d started working for my father, but I hadn’t noticed him until he’d been appointed as Daria’s bodyguard. For a heartbeat, my vision inside the kitchen window changed. Instead of Mamma tirelessly rolling and shaping the tubes to make her Pasta Penne, I was at a different moment in the kitchen, taking me back eleven months.
“I don’t even know him, Papà.” Daria had whined when she’d caught him in a rare good mood and had cornered him while he was getting his espresso.
His good mood had sunk faster than bricks in the Alcantara. “Know him?” He’d laughed his cruel, demeaning laugh. “You’re a girl. What’s there to know? He’s your bodyguard, and you’ll do as he says.” He’d brushed her aside and stormed out. That was that then. The very next second, he was there. A mere stranger who had no ties to the family, a constant shadow in the house, guarding the favourite daughter of the don.
