Page 1 of The Sicilian Billionaire’s Neglected Wife (A Painful Kind of Love #14)

M IGUEL CANNIZZARO HAD built an empire on reading men’s souls through their eyes, and right now his eldest son’s eyes were dead as winter stone.

“No.”

One word. Flat. Final. The same tone Aivan had used since Paulette’s funeral twenty-three years ago, when a five-year-old boy watched his mother’s casket disappear into Sicilian earth and decided feelings were for people who could afford to break.

Miguel traced the rim of his espresso cup. Selena’s blend was bitter-dark with notes of chocolate she swore came from prayers, not beans. He noticed but was not surprised that his son hadn’t touched his. The boy never accepted anything he hadn’t earned himself. Even coffee.

“You misunderstand.” Business voice. The one that had negotiated peace between warring families and million-euro property deals with equal ease. “This isn’t a request.”

From the doorway, Selena watched. His wife had a gift for stillness that made most people forget she was there. But Miguel always knew. Fifteen years of marriage had taught him to feel her presence like a change in atmospheric pressure.

Tell him about the list, her eyes urged. Tell him why.

But Miguel knew his son. Push too hard, too fast, and Aivan would walk out that door and never return. Just like he’d done at eighteen when Miguel tried to bring him into the family business.

“Olivio sends his regards from Toronto.” Miguel shifted tactics, watching for any crack in his son’s facade. “Closed another high-rise deal. Twenty million profit.”

“Good for him.”

Three words this time. Progress.

“Your brother understands loyalty to family.”

Aivan’s jaw tightened, a movement so small most would miss it, but Miguel had been reading his son’s tells since the boy learned to hide them.

“Olivio’s loyalty comes with a real estate license and a talent for making money grow like weeds.

Mine comes with staying out of the family business.

I thought we agreed on that when I turned eighteen. ”

“We agreed you could race.” Miguel set down his cup. The clink against saucer rang like a judge’s gavel. “I’ve honored that for ten years. Watched you risk your life every weekend for glory that turns to smoke. Now I’m collecting on my patience.”

“I’m not taking over the—”

“Who said anything about taking over?” Miguel’s accent was thick by the time he finished speaking. Twenty years in Monaco, a lifetime of legitimate business, and still the old language surfaced when frustrated. “Your brother has that well in hand, thank God. What I want is simpler.”

He slid a piece of cream-colored paper across the rosewood desk. Selena’s handwriting, neat as a schoolteacher’s, which she’d been, once upon a time, before she’d saved Miguel’s soul by agreeing to marry him.

“Eight names.” Miguel watched his son’s face as those cold dark eyes scanned the list. “Good families. Strong alliances. Women who understand our world.”

The temperature in the room dropped like God himself had walked in and found them all wanting.

“You’re serious.”

“As a heart attack.” Which Miguel had survived two years ago, though he hadn’t told his sons. Only Selena knew how close they’d come to losing him. How it had crystallized his fears about leaving Aivan alone in the world, frozen in his self-imposed isolation.

Aivan’s laugh held no humor. “I’m twenty-eight, not some virgin principe who needs his father arranging playdates.”

“No, you’re worse.” The words escaped before Miguel could temper them. “You’re a man so afraid of feeling that you’d rather die alone than risk what happened to me happening to you.”

Silence. Even Selena’s breathing paused.

Then: “Don’t.”

One word, but it carried twenty-three years of weight. Don’t talk about her. Don’t compare us. Don’t pretend you understand.

Miguel understood too well. Understood the particular paralysis that came from losing someone who took all your softness with them when they left.

He’d been that man for ten years after Paulette, until a twenty-three-year-old English teacher with gentle hands and steel backbone had walked into a parent conference and told him his younger son needed more attention at home.

He’d hired her to tutor Olivio. Fallen in love over discussions of Shakespeare and proper grammar. Learned that a heart could be rebuilt if you had the right architect.

“Choose one,” Miguel said quietly, “or find your racing sponsors elsewhere.”

Aivan went absolutely still. The kind of stillness that preceded violence in their bloodline, though his son had channeled that genetic gift into reaction times that made him untouchable on the track.

“Olivio would fund me.”

“Olivio does what I tell him regarding family matters. And I’ve already told him not to.” Miguel had covered every angle. Had to, with a son who thought ten moves ahead like a chess grandmaster. “Choose, Aivan. Choose a wife, or choose to see if your pride can pay for tires and jet fuel.”

His son’s eyes dropped to the list again. Miguel caught it: the way they snagged on one name, the furrow between dark brows that meant his formidable brain was calculating variables.

Sienah Posada.

It was the only name on the list without a pedigree stretching back generations, without Swiss bank accounts or international business connections.

Just a nineteen-year-old girl who’d grown up in their house, quiet as church bells at midnight, pretty as spilled wine on white linen, and desperately in love with a man who’d never noticed her beyond casual politeness.

Selena had insisted on adding her name. “The girl has loved him for years,” she’d argued last night, her small hands fierce on Miguel’s shoulders. “What Aivan needs isn’t another cold arrangement but someone who already sees past his walls.”

Miguel had his doubts. Love without reciprocation was just delayed heartbreak. But Selena rarely asked for anything, and she’d never steered him wrong about matters of the heart.

“Do I get time to consider?” Aivan’s voice stayed flat, but Miguel noticed the way his thumb traced that one name. Once. Twice.

“One month. Then you bring me a name, or you find another way to fund your season.”

His son stood, every movement controlled. The same way he’d moved since five years old, when showing pain meant admitting you could be broken.

“Fine.”

He turned to leave, and Miguel couldn’t help himself: “Aivan.”

His son paused without turning.

“Your mother would have wanted—”

“We’ll never know what she wanted.” Still that flat, dead tone. “She’s not here to ask.”

The door closed with a quiet click that sounded like a gunshot in the silence.

Selena materialized at Miguel’s shoulder, her hand warm against his neck. “You did what you had to.”

“Did I?” Miguel caught her hand, pressed it to his cheek. This woman who’d taught him that love wasn’t weakness but the greatest strength a man could possess. “Sometimes I think I failed him the moment I let him build those walls.”

“He was five. He was surviving.”

“He’s twenty-eight. He’s drowning.” Miguel turned to study the list his son had left behind. A smudge marked where Aivan’s thumb had touched one name. Again and again and again. “Think the Posada girl has a chance?”

Selena’s smile held secrets. The same smile that had undone Miguel fifteen years ago when she’d looked at him over Olivio’s homework and said, “Your son needs more than a tutor, Mr. Cannizzaro. He needs a family.”

“I think,” she said, measuring each word like ingredients in a recipe, “that sometimes the heart chooses when the mind isn’t looking. And our son has been not-looking at that girl for years.”

From somewhere in the house came the sound of quick footsteps on marble. Too light for the guards, too hurried for the older staff.

Sienah Posada. Had to be. The girl moved through their home like a benevolent ghost, always finding things that needed doing, always disappearing before anyone could thank her.

Miguel had watched her watch his son, those tragic brown eyes following Aivan’s every move while trying desperately not to be caught looking.

“One month,” Miguel murmured. “Think that’s enough time for a miracle?”

Selena kissed his temple, her lips soft against his graying hair. “I fell in love with you in one evening, didn’t I?”

“That was different. You were saving me.”

“Maybe,” his wife said, gliding toward the door with that dancer’s grace that still made his chest tight after all these years. “Or maybe every love story is about two people saving each other. They just don’t always realize it at the time.”

The door whispered shut, leaving Miguel alone with his cold espresso and the weight of decades.

Through the window, he caught movement in the garden.

Aivan’s silhouette against the dying sun, standing motionless by his mother’s rose bushes.

The ones Paulette had planted the year before she died, now wild and overgrown because no one had the heart to prune them.

Thorns everywhere. Beautiful and dangerous and impossible to tend without bleeding.

His son stood there for several minutes before turning to walk back toward the garage. Same measured steps. Same rigid control. Same walls that had kept him safe and slowly suffocating for twenty-three years.

Choose well, my son, Miguel thought. May you have the courage to choose the one who already sees you drowning...before it’s too late.

In the distance, an engine roared to life, Aivan driving away from another confrontation he couldn’t win with logic alone.

Miguel picked up the list, smoothing out the smudge where his son’s thumb had betrayed him. Eight names. Seven strategic alliances.

One wild hope.

He reached for his phone to text Olivio. Your brother needs us united on this. No funding outside official channels.

Olivio: The Posada girl?

Even from Toronto, his younger son saw everything. Always had.

Miguel: Maybe. Selena thinks so.

Olivio: Then it’s already decided. That woman could convince water to flow uphill.

Miguel smiled despite the ache in his chest. His boys. So different, yet both shaped by loss in their own ways. Olivio had turned outward, charming the world into submission. Aivan had turned inward, building walls so high even the wings of angels might not be strong enough to soar past it.

But Selena was right. She usually was.

Sometimes love crept in through cracks you didn’t know existed.

Sometimes it had been there all along, waiting for the right pressure to make itself known.

And sometimes a father had to play the villain to save his son from a lifetime of the very coldness that had nearly destroyed them both.

The list lay on his desk like a declaration of war. Or maybe, if they were lucky, a white flag of surrender to the one force even a Cannizzaro couldn’t control.

Outside, the roses bloomed wild in the dying light. Thorns and beauty and twenty-three years of untended growth. And somewhere in Monaco, his eldest son was about to discover that the heart he’d buried at five years old had never stopped beating.

It had just been waiting.

Waiting for someone who already knew how to tend wild gardens.

Someone who understood that the most beautiful things often grew in the spaces between order and chaos.

Someone who’d been there all along, invisible as heartbreak, patient as prayer.