Page 197 of Dark Romeo

The last moments of his life thundered through my mind. “My son!” My father screamed, rising like an avenging demon from behind a crate. “You shot my boy, you fucking bastards.”

He had died avenging me. Despite his brutal lessons, despite his hard, cruel ways, my father loved me.

He loved me.

Twenty-six years of searching for a sign of his love. He handed it to me, right before he was taken from me. His actions, his behaviors, however harsh, were suddenly colored with another light. The light of a father who loved his sons enough to want to make them kings. Who revered them enough to want to build an empire for them, however bloody. He forced men to their knees around him so that his sons would never have to bow down. He inspired a fear that reached out like Zeus’s hands so his sons could be gods on earth.

Something inside me dissolved and blew away. Grief swirled into my body, hitting me like a tsunami. My father was not a monster. He was just a man. Mortal. As breakable and fragile as all of us. Perhaps even more so.

I never understood his ways. I never would. But he was my father and I loved him.

“I forgive you,” I whispered.

Family is most important, he’d always told me. I never really appreciated that until now. He had been the last link to family that I had left here. Now he was gone.

I was alone.

I sucked in a shaky breath as Father Laurence finished up the ceremony below. There were only a few scattered heads in the pews. Hardly anybody had shown up. All of my father’s family were either dead or exiled. His colleagues either in jail awaiting trial or refusing to show any connection with him. All my father’s wealth, his power, his empire…it all came down to nothing, reduced to rubble upon his death. Oh, Father. If you were alive to see this now, it’d break your heart.

Alberto Veronesi, his enemy and one-time friend, made his way down the aisle, dressed in a long black overcoat, a single white rose on his lapel.

He placed a heavy gloved hand on the coffin. “Goodbye, old friend, dear enemy. You’ll be with Maria now.”

My mother.

My father’s admission crashed into me, knocking into me from the other side.

He’d had my mother killed. He loved her and he still killed her.

“She was going to leave me, leave us. She was going to run off with that bitch prosecutor and leave us all behind. But I fixed it.”

My mother had been about to leave us. Leave me.

Everything I thought about her was wrong. She didn’t love me. She didn’t care. What mother leaves her children behind in the hands of a cruel father? She was selfish and…and…I hated her. Bitterness spread throughout my body, gripping me in its clutches like a poison.

Below, my father’s coffin was carried out towards the burial site. I stood frozen, white knuckles gripping the balcony, as a silent storm tore me apart from the inside.

When the door closed, leaving the church empty, I slumped over myself. I was tired. So damn tired. I felt like I could sleep for an eternity.

The side door of the church opened. It wasn’t so much the sound of the door or the soft foot treads that had me lifting my head, but the sense of who had entered.

“Jules…” I whispered.

She was so beautiful. Even with her face pale, wisps of hair escaping from her ponytail, whiskey eyes rimmed with red. Even with her feminine body cloaked in light-swallowing and shapeless black.

I spotted the stairs leading down and started forward. Everything faded except for her. My promises, my deal, my immunity, all forgotten.

Two firm hands wrapped around my upper arms yanked me back. “Don’t you dare,” the chief hissed in my ear.

“If I could just say goodbye…?” If I could just touch her face one more time. Smell her hair. Feel her heart beating against mine.

“She thinks you’re dead. You need to stay that way. If you don’t, the deal’s off. It’s life in prison and I swear to God I will make it a living hell.”

How do you say goodbye when you are forced into silence?

When I had made the deal with Chief Capulet, I had been desperate and half mad with the knowledge that my father had Jules. I would have said yes to anything to save her. Even if it meant I had to give her up. As long as she was safe. Alive. That’s all that mattered to me.

I gave up my life for hers. I’d do it a hundred times if I had to. It was my sacrifice. It was all I had to give her. Perhaps now I could be…good. Perhaps now I had redeemed myself. I had proven myself worthy of her… I only had to give her up.

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