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Chapter ten

I Forgive You

Gia

“ M amma!” I called, like a little girl that was lost in a mall. Crying for my mother like a pathetic, weak little thing. “Mamma!”

“I’m coming, Bella!”

My mother was hard on our heels.

“Where are you taking him?” I pulled against Cillian, but it was no use.

That witch, Randa, had a gun to Marco’s head, as she marched him through a black door. A dark room, covered in white subway tiles. The floor bowed in the middle to a drain, and manacles hung from the ceiling.

I knew what this was.

“No,” I whimpered. “Please, don’t do this. Cillian.”

I fell to my knees, as the tall redhead bound Marco to the ceiling, my husband let me go as he rolled up his sleeves.

He ignored me. He wouldn’t even look at me, as he flashed that cursed blade in his hand.

“Marco Rossini.” Cillian just saying the name placed the threat in the air. Like an executioner, before he declared the crime. “Where were you the night my wife was stabbed?”

Marco wasn’t looking at him, though. He was looking at me.

“He rescued me!” I screamed, throwing my arm out towards him from my place on the floor, but a single glare from Cillian kept me from running to my friend. My only friend.

My mother fell beside me, holding me back by the shoulders.

Her common sense hadn’t died like mine. She knew that we could not fight what was about to happen.

“I found her! I got her out of there!” Marco stammered his confession. “I saved her.”

“And what about before?” Cillian waved the iron blade in his hand, and I shuddered like it was the scythe of death itself.

Before? What was he talking about?

“Why were you in the area less than forty minutes before my wife arrived?”

What was he talking about?

Marco’s eyes widened, as Randa pulled the chain on the manacles until he floundered, the toes of his shoes barely grazing the ground, his shoulder sockets bearing the brunt of his weight.

“I-I-I…” Marco slipped, his weight collapsing beneath him as his shoulder cracked out of place. He screamed, and I screamed with him.

I covered my mouth, holding back the whimpers and cries.

“Gia,” my mother hissed into my ear in Italian. “Do not show them weakness.”

“They’ll kill him,” I grabbed onto her as she held me back. “Stop them, Mamma.”

Mamma looked at my husband, then grabbed my face like she did when I was a child. Holding my attention to her because she had something important to say.

“Don’t waste your breath, Bella ,” she said, the despair laced in her features. “Don’t bother asking anything of a Green.”

“I’m sorry, Giovanna,” Marco’s bellow pulled my attention from my mother. “I was trying to stop them.”

He was pathetic, his hands tied above his head, his toes barely grazing the ground, his calves shaking under the strain of holding him up in the stress position.

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. Forgive me.” His plea broke my heart.

“I do! I do!” I wailed, trying to go to him. “I forgive you!”

I looked around, frantic for anyone to hear.

“What the hell are you forgiving him for?” My husband bellowed; his voice held a level of anger I had never heard before.

“Anything!” I screamed back at Cillian. “Everything! I don’t care!”

Cillian tsked, turning around to look at Marco. “What were you trying to stop?”

“The Italians don’t want this marriage. The Mafia. The old families loyal to Durante. They don’t want—”

Cillian’s hard fist landed in Marco’s stomach, as he grunted in pain.

“You knew they were going to attack her, and you let it happen!” Cillian’s words sent a cold shiver down my spine. “You could have killed her!”

Another punch. All the while, I watched the iron blade in his fist, the blade pointed out, as he punched Marco in the face, the stomach, the chest. Blood dripped down Marco’s face. Blood. Not drawn by the blade, but I knew it would only be a matter of time.

“You should have stopped her from going!” Cillian punched him again, and blood gushed from Marco’s nose.

“Stop!” I screamed.

Marco’s head bowed, and all the while his eyes didn’t leave me. “I’m sorry, Gia. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.”

“Don’t look at her!” Another punch with the fist that held his blade, the tip close to slicing Marco’s face.

“He didn’t mean to do it! I forgive him. Please! Let him go!” I begged.

I wept like a weak prisoner, hoping for a fate that would not happen.

I wanted to embrace him and hold him up, to take the weight of his body onto myself. To take his burden.

“Marco saved me! He still saved me! I’m alive!” I held onto that. I held onto it like it was the only raft on an open, angry sea.

Blood trickled down Marco’s face. Drops of it dotted the white tile beneath us, staining the pristine floor.

“You shouldn’t have needed saving in the first place.” Cillian pointed the blade at me, and my throat went completely dry.

The point of his iron blade was lighter than the rest. It shined from hours of sharpening. Hours of molding it into the most dangerous thing that it could be. A thing that would draw blood. A thing that had killed my father, and grandfather. And soon, it would kill me.

“Please, don’t hurt him,” I said through the desert of my throat.

“Don’t, Gia!” my mother warned, snarling not at me, but at the serpents that surrounded us. “There’s nothing you can do for him.”

“She’s right.” Marco winced, as his foot slipped from beneath him, the harsh binds on his wrist cutting into his flesh. “She’s right, Gia. You… you can’t do anything.”

His head slumped as the defeat of those words weighed us all down.

I knelt in his blood. In Marco’s blood.

My hands were soaked in it. My hands, my dress, my soul was soaked in blood.

But now they were mixed with something else as well. They were mixed with my tears.

Tears that had been dislodged by my own husband. A husband who promised that we could be different. That we could be allies. That we could be more—but that was a lie.

Everything was a lie.

It hurt that there was hope. An insipid hope that I could have a marriage that resembled something that looked like happiness. True happiness was out of reach. But I had thought for a fleeting moment that maybe something less than complete despair would be in my future.

I didn’t feel pain for a few days and falling back into the status quo just… hurt .

“Please,” I whispered. “Please…”

I don’t know who I was begging. My husband? Not likely.

For Marco to not leave me? Maybe.

Or maybe I was begging for my father’s strength. The strength where he looked his own death in the eye and stood tall.

No, that wasn’t right. Maybe I was just begging for my hands to not be soaked in blood.

“Gia,” Marco said, his deep brown eyes ready for death. I saw it in their indifference to the pain that must have wracked his entire being. “Vendetta is an Italian word. But not all of our blood is the same.”

“Marco?”

“There are some who think that they can step into the Durantes’ shoes, if they can break all ties to the Irish. They want to go back into the past.” Marco dropped his head. “I’m sorry. I tried to protect you, but… but…”

He let out a long breath. And the last of his resolve left his body.

“I am a dead man, so what does it matter?” Marco chuckled, and it was the most heartbreaking sound I had ever heard.

“Elijah Morelli thinks that he can take the shoes of Eugenio Durante. He wants to rebuild the Italians under his rule and go back to the Mafia wars. It was his men that plunged the knife in you.”

The ache in my ribs from the reminder burned fiery hot.

“He was threatening my sister,” Marco confessed. “Forgive me, Gia. That’s why I wasn’t there. I wasn’t supposed to find you. I was supposed to stay away, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t let them... do that to you. I love you, bella .”

A rumbling growl sent a shiver through me, and my eyes turned to my husband, whose teeth bared, ready to strike his venom.

“Forgive me.” Marco’s heartbreaking laugh of defeat echoed off the walls. “I’m sorry. Your family was always good to us. Forgive me.”

“I forgive you!” And I meant it with every fiber of my being.

But if my husband was jealous, then maybe… jealousy was a sign of passion. And passion was a symptom of… love?

“Please, Cillian,” I whispered, unsure why I thought begging would help. It hadn’t this far.

I knew you could not beg a Green for mercy. But I wasn’t begging a Green. I was begging my husband. He said that meant something.

“Please,” I dipped my palms in the blood, then held them up. “Please, he has spilled enough blood. Please.”

Cillian looked at my hands, and then my face, then back again.

“Please, Husband,” I whispered again. “I am begging you. Let him go. He’s one of the few people I have.”

I would crawl on my hands and knees if he told me to. I’d kiss his feet. I’d do anything to save Marco’s life.

Cillian shut his eyes and looked away. His expression was unmistakable.

It was shame. He was ashamed of me.

But I was beyond pride.

Then the look of disgust crossed his features, and I knew I had lost. That I was nothing.

“No one harms a Green without consequences,” he said.

The fall of the executioner’s axe was on Marco. It was on me.

In a single stroke, the iron blade glinted through the air, as it came down fast. The deep gash opened down the side of Marco’s face from forehead, barely missing his eye, slashing down a nostril, over his top lip, and to his chin.

I wanted Cillian to kill Marco mercifully. I did! But selfishly, I also wanted another moment of being someone’s friend. Of having someone in my world, breathing, and caring for me. Someone who wasn’t my mother.

Just for a minute longer, I wanted the number of people who cared about me to be higher than… one.

Marco bore his new wound with dignity.

“I’m sorry, Marco,” I whispered.

“I’m sorry, Gia,” he whispered back.

Cillian’s growl was low, and frightening. Like the rattle of a hidden snake in the grass.

His knife plunged into Marco’s thigh, and the blood flowed faster, down his leg.

I fell forward, my hands in the blood, and I wailed. For Marco. For my grandfather, Eugenio Durante. For my father, Giovanni Morelli.

I wailed for me.

Goodbye, Marco.

I waited for the pool of blood below me to turn into a flood. But it didn’t. I heard the body fall to the floor, a grunt, and the sound of flesh on concrete.

A bloodless death, then. Maybe that was a mercy.

“Leave New York City.” Was my husband commanding me to leave his side?

I looked up, but far from seeing Marco’s corpse. He wasn’t dead. He was very much alive, staring at my husband in shock.

“You will disappear.” Cillian wiped his bloody blade on his trouser leg. “If you come anywhere near my wife, my family, or my city, I will bleed every Rossini dry and create a canvas so magnificent, it will cover the facade of the Grand Kintyre.”

Cillian took two steps forward, until he blocked Marco from my sight.

“Am I understood?” Cillian’s growl sent a shiver of fear and hope through me. Was this a trick?

Marco nodded his head, before looking at me, unsure of what to do.

“Get up Giovanna.” Cillian strode to my side, offering me his hand.

I looked at my blood-covered palms, and up at my husband. I tried to wipe them off on my velvet dress, but he grew too impatient. He leaned down and roughly pulled me to my feet.

He grabbed my face in his hand, pulling me up for a simple kiss on the lips.

“He betrayed you,” Cillian said, his breath grazing over my mouth. “And yet you beg me to let him live?”

I nodded because I was too stunned to speak.

He traced his lips along my cheek bone until he was at my ear. “Your mercy will get us killed.”