Page 137 of Bitter Poetry

She tries to buck me off, growling when I don’t budge. “Then give me the truth! Show me I can trust you!”

Her eyes glitter with fury and tears. Just seeing her in pain eats into me like acid in my gut. I want to kiss her so badly, to take away all the hurt, to wrap her up in me, and remove her from any and all sources of pain.

I want her trust.

Her love.

For her to be even half as obsessed with me as I am with her.

The feel of her body beneath me, pokes at the primitive center of my brain, making me want to claim her fire. Not to gain her submission, nor to break her, but because I crave her surrender.

Because only through her surrender can I take her to a place where she can forget these troubles, if only for a time. To possess her so thoroughly, there is no room for anything else but the feeling of our bodies joining together.

But she’s right. I need to give her something. Only that opens up questions about my motivations. The desire to protect her is at war with both the desire to give her the truth and yet another desire, this one entirely selfish, to tell my side of events.

I don’t want her to hate me for telling her the truth, nor for being complicit in the way her life has played out over the last year.

But I know I can’t have it both ways. She wants honesty. No, she demands it. In this world, men rarely treat women as equals. They shield them for a myriad of reasons, only some of which are good.

I feel my pulse beating in my throat. Her eyes are wounded. I can’t think about what Cosmo did to her without losing my damn mind. She’s still fighting, demanding, prepared to go toe to toe with me, the man who just instigated her capture.

My reasons behind my actions are good.

The execution wasn’t ideal. And yes, I need to take responsibility for unleashing Christian. If nothing else, I know my brother, and I should have expected his heavy-handed implementation of the plan.

“The day of your mother’s funeral, Cedro called me to see him. He said he was stepping down as don, and that the family needed a strong leader with backing from the capos, and that leader was Ettore. He said that I was too young and inexperienced to protect you—that our engagement had never been announced, and in light of these changes, and for your safety, he was giving your hand to Ettore. I told him I understood his reasoning but that I believed it was faulty. I said I didn’t trust Ettore, and neither should he.”

Fresh tears begin to spill from her eyes.

“Your father was right about me. I had no one to back me save for Christian. My father was dead, my uncle, too; but that’s another story. My role as consigliere was still in its infancy. My position and influence were solid, but the capos, two of whom were Ettore’s brothers, would not have backed me—a barely-out-of-college consigliere—becoming don, even with Cedro’s approval. Ettore would have undermined me had he stayed as underboss. Cedro had to pick someone to succeed him and that someone was never going to be me. At the time, we had no evidence to the contrary about Ettore.”

“But you do now?”

I nod. “Your father hired an investigator. Not long after you…” I refuse to call that travesty a wedding. “It wasn’t the Russians. Not only them, at least.”

“Ettore?”

I’m about to tell her the man she’s married to, whom she has shared her body with, played an integral part in her mother’s death and her father’s disability. “Yes.”

I feel her pain even before it manifests in a sob. She wrenches one hand free and slaps it against my chest as she tries to twist away. “No. Not Mama. If Papa knew something about this, he would have said.”

Her pain arrests me.

Her tear-ravaged eyes stare up at me, begging for understanding.

Nothing I can offer her will soften this blow.

“He killed my mother, and you left me with him, let him touch me… Get off me, I’m going to be sick.”

I release her immediately. She darts for the bathroom, slamming the door. I follow, pushing it open just as she heaves over the toilet.

“Fuck, baby. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

I gather her hair out of the way and try to soothe her. She’s crying, hiccupping, and heaving—I’ve never felt more impotent, more worthless, for my part in this than I do right now.

She’s not got anything in her stomach and all she does is heave up bile. Then the tears win out over her urge to vomit, and she slumps on her knees with her head in her hands, sobbing and shaking.

“Come on, you can’t stay there. Why don’t you brush your teeth and come back to bed?”