Page 51

“Tony!” Celia gasped as the glass tumbler shattered and pinged as it hit the floor.
The room fell into silence.
I couldn’t help a corner of my lips from lifting.
Thank God that fucker was reckless.
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
—Marilyn Monroe
“STUPIDO!” MAMMA REPEATED THE WORD three times, her voice resounding in deaf ears, before muttering in Italian that all of her children were stupido as she left the kitchen.
“Fuck, Elena. Stop.” Tony winced.
I pulled the cotton ball away from the nasty cut on his face. “You can hit Nicolas with your injured hand, but you can’t take a little burn of alcohol?”
And to think that I had waited on him all night when he could throw punches like he was 100 percent. He was regretting it now, with his tight expression and the red seeping through the bandage on his hand.
God, he looked awful.
There was nothing more gruesome than watching two men pummel each other half to death. Especially when you had the odd feeling of not knowing who you wanted to win. Tony . . . right? I swallowed, feeling like a traitor.
After Tony had shattered a glass against his future brother-in-law’s hard head, Nicolas had wrapped an arm around my brother’s neck and slammed him to the floor. The heavy thunk still resonated in my mind.
Nonna had looked up from her game of tic-tac-toe with my sister and sighed. “Finally, some entertainment.”
Adriana had taken a sip of wine, her expression lightening since whatever news she’d received earlier, and, oddly enough, bet my nonna fifty bucks on Tony. Apparently, Nicolas was part of the reason she was upset.
Papà had only sat back in his chair and watched, and so had Nicolas’s uncles. No one was stepping in, and for all I knew they were going to fight to the death. The thought settled unpleasantly in my stomach until I couldn’t watch it any longer. I waited outside, in front of the restaurant, with Dominic.
I wasn’t sure how it had started, but I imagined Tony had found out about the picture, or maybe Jenny had admitted she’d been with Nicolas recently.
And this was the aftermath.
Red marks covered Tony’s bare torso, the beginning of bruises forming on his ribs and back. Blood spilled from a nasty cut on his face, from his nose, his lip, and dripped down his chest.
He leaned back in the island chair, dressed in his shoes and dress pants, texting.
“What’s the cut from?” I was unsure of how such a ragged wound from the corner of his eye to his hairline had been the product of a fistfight. Though, I guessed it was a pretty severe one, as though they’d both been saving all their aggression for it.
“Broken chair leg.”
My eyes widened. “He hit you with a chair leg?”
What a cheat.
“Yeah. After I hit him with it.”
Oh.
Truthfully, I didn’t know why I was even trying to help Tony. He hadn’t exactly been the best brother as of late. It made me feel like a pushover, but for as long as I could remember I’d had this mother-hen gene I couldn’t get rid of. It was an urge to help I couldn’t ignore. I didn’t know where I’d gotten it. It wasn’t from my mamma and, as Nonna used her cane to push open the kitchen door and then thanked Tony for winning her fifty bucks, not from her either.
My skin also danced with an edginess that tonight had left behind. I had to do something to stay busy, otherwise thoughts of him came to the surface, making me feel hot all over. And, to be clear, it was the wrong him I thought of.
I crossed my arms, still wearing my dress and heels. “Well, did you get some hits in? Because it looks like you took the brunt of it.”
A sarcastic gaze flicked to me before he glanced back to his phone. “I got enough.”