Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
“Shh, shh,” she hushed.
Soft like a mother would. He knew she had that in her, even if she didn’t think so.
“What was I going to do?” Salvatore repeated. “She was sick. She was sick and he was d—”
His words cut off in a choke. He still couldn’t even say it.
Her fingernails eased up a bit.
Only then did a tear track down his cheek. The wet trickle made his jaw twitch from the force he pressed into his teeth.
“Mom and Dad, murdered in a home burglary gone wrong a week later. He killed Christopher when I tried to get my brothers the hell out of the city. Got Andre two months later, in a fucking drive-by just outside the graveyard. Delilah’s parents...”
“You don’t have to go through all this with me.”
Sal did need to, though. “I need to say it for me. The only goddamn one he didn’t take from me was her, because that was the deal.”
Made with the devil. Salvatore’s entire life from his mid-twenties had been owned by a man who used the tragedy of illness and loss to access anything he could ever want or need between Salvatore’s family’s connections and Delilah’s unlimited wealth. Control. Power. Access to names, people, places, and things.
Salvatore became the personal fixer and middleman to a monster who never once, in his entire life, stopped being one.
“What was I gonna do?” he asked, jaw quivering now as Carina quickly wiped his second and third tear away. “She was sick. He was...It was me and a bullet. Every damn day.”
Blood on his hands. Owned by a man.
“I basically killed my father,” he mumbled. “And everyone else. Just for God to take them from me anyway.”
“Hey, hey,” Carina crooned.
When he didn’t respond to that, she turned quickly to shut the windows. She spun back to face him, getting up close and personal where all he could see were those green eyes of hers as she spoke.
“That’s not them down there,” she told him.
“What about when he finds out you’re pregnant? Jesus Christ, he can’t even smell you in a room without staring at you. The baby, one in. Those kids, another. All I’ve done to make us safe, for what?” Sal shook his head, a sad sound escaping him. “Unless what? I do it again. Turn myself back into that person I never wanted to be in the first place. Sink lower into the monster he turned me in—”
“Baby, three decades ago you were scared and broken, and he had you in that place.”
“It’s really the only option, isn’t it? At some point, I’ll have to kill him.”
Which meant so much more than just the action of ending Giorgio’s life.
“Jesus. I wanted to be a fucking defense attorney.”
It never mattered how many times he said it. It always came back to that for him. He’d wanted to be a lawyer and would’ve been if he hadn’t fallen in love with a girl and her paint-stained Birkin.
“I didn’t even want to be a made man,” he admitted.
“We’re gonna do what we have to fucking do,” Carina assured him. “Just like you had to do what you did thirty years ago. It’s not going to be like that this time around.”
He chose to believe her. He made himself believe it because the alternative wasn’t fathomable. He settled back into the present wishing his chest didn’t hurt from the way his muscles had been frozen. It took so much energy just to hold himself together when the sky felt like it started falling.
“Are you okay?” Carina asked him.
“No. Better.”
It was the best he could do.
“Well, the baby wants ice cream,” she said.
That earned her a chuckle. “The baby,” he returned playfully, “is the size of a cherry.”
Or some such size. He couldn’t remember exactly what she told him that morning as she woke him up with the best head he’d had. She didn’t do that very often, and he knew why, so when she gave herself over to him in that way...it did something wild to him.
“Well, the baby wants ice cream,” Carina repeated seriously.
“Ice cream for Carina, it is.”
Her laughter chased him out of the office, and all the way downstairs into the kitchen. She leaned in the kitchen entryway as he showed her the different options from the two-door freezer. She settled on a chocolate coated waffle cone with vanilla ice cream topped with caramel and peanuts. His phone started to ring as she suggested, “I bet someone outside might like ice cream, too,” she said over her shoulder as he picked up his phone without looking at the ID. “Olive branch, baby.”
“Caio,” Salvatore greeted the caller, winking goodbye to his wife.
“Guess what your fucking golden boy did for me today?” asked Big Mike on the other end of the line.
Sal didn’t have the first clue what the man could possibly be talking about, except Nico. “Is this a good call or a bad one?”