Page 51 of Protected By the Mafia

Her throat constricted. She closed the distance between them and raised her hands to his chest. “Cristiano, babe, what’s wrong?”

He looked at her again, a shadow of a smile lifting his lips. “Babe, huh?” He settled his hands at her hips and bent forward, kissing her forehead.

She flushed. She hadn’t even heard herself say that. But she rolled with it. “You said I could call you whatever felt right.”

“So I did.”

She stretched her arms around his torso, flattening herself against him. “So? What’s wrong?”

He curled his arms around her, hands splaying over her back, and his chest inflated with a deep breath. “I took care of your landlord, and your neighbor,” he said. “You were right about Chuck having a connection to Tristán, but it was worse than that.”

She tipped her head back to look up at him, ignoring the way the movement caused a stream of water to slide down the side of her face. “Worse?”

“You aren’t going to like this story, baby.”

Felicity frowned. “I haven’t liked stories that involve that family for most of my life. I still want you to tell me.” Especially if it explained his strange, concerning behavior.

Cristiano bent forward, pressing his lips to her forehead, and quietly told her all the ways in which her bastard half-brother and his gang friends had been spying on her. Invading her every attempt at privacy, since almost the day she’d moved back to Newark. He told her that she’d been right to be uncomfortable around Matt, in particular, because the dirtbag had confessed to violating her space when she wasn’t home.

She definitely hadn’t liked that story. She also didn’t like how none of it, upsetting though it was for her, explained his strange response. So, when he was done explaining all that, she stretched her arms up to catch his jaw and pulled him down for a slow, lingering kiss. “Cris, thank you. Thank you for protecting me from them. Now, please, let me be there for you. You said you were going to trust me, that has to mean trusting me with what’s inside, as much as what’s going on around us, too.”

He settled a hand at the small of her back, holding her close, and reached beyond her with his other hand to turn off the water. “You’re right. And you’ll need to know.” He dragged in a breath, but made no move to step from the shower. “We’ve known for a while the Ink Blots have someone behind the scenes, someone with money and possibly influence, but when I had him locked up Tristán never copped to it. Turns out, Matt knew the name. He thought he could use it to scare me off.”

Felicity wound her arms around him again, sensing the tension returning to him. She never would have expected either her landlord or her neighbor to have such deep connections to the De Salvo’s enemies. Not even when Chuck had inadvertently revealed his ties to her half-brother.

Cristiano pulled in another deep breath. “The man backing the Ink Blots today is Brendan Coughlan,” he said, nearly growling the name. “He’s the last survivor of an Irish mob family that used to pretty much dominate Pennsylvania. I’ve never met Brendan, or any Coughlan, but twenty-six years ago the Coughlan Mob tried to push its way into Jersey. The way I heard it, they wanted to take over already established territory rather than claim their own, and they liked our family’s position opposite New York. I didn’t understand most of that as a kid, I just knew my parents suddenly got a lot more paranoid. One day I was being sent to school with bodyguards, the next I was pulled out of classes altogether.”

She stayed silent when he paused, recognizing that he wasn’t done and fearing what was about to follow. This story … goes that far back? He never talked about his parents. All she knew was that he’d lost them as a boy. Her throat swelled as concern mounted. Twenty-six years ago, Cristiano would have been about eleven years old. He would have been a boy just shy of puberty.

“After a couple weeks of … what felt like chaos,” he said, speaking slowly, “I was at Aunt Eleonora’s, skipping school with my cousins, and my uncle—who was Boss at the time—came barging in. It was the most disheveled I ever saw him, and for a second, I thought we were in trouble somehow. I would have preferred that, in hindsight, but instead he dropped to his knees and grabbed me to him … and that was how I learned that my parents were gone.”

It was the strain in his voice that pulled the tears from her eyes. Or maybe the visible tightness in his jaw. She’d suspected where his story was leading, but hearing how hard it was for him to repeat out loud, close to three decades after the fact, made her want to sob with him. For him. For that little boy who lost his parents so suddenly, so unexpectedly, so undoubtedly violently. All she could do, however, was tug his head to her shoulder and hold him for as long as he could endure the position.

He tangled his hand in her hair and said nothing for a long minute.

Then he straightened, exhaling with the movement, and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Come on, let’s dry off before we get cold.”

She wanted to ask questions. Obviously, there was more to that story. But she also didn’t want to push. So she followed him from the shower and didn’t fight when he insisted on toweling her off, his large and always sturdy hands scrubbing studiously down her legs and arms as well as dipping the fabric beneath her breasts to catch the moisture there. She redressed while he then toweled himself off, and opted to wait for him to rejoin her in the bedroom.

He didn’t keep her waiting. Cristiano stepped out barely a minute later in another pair of dark gray sweats and practically pointless T-shirt, and he lifted her up before settling them both on the mattress. “The Coughlans had been attacking our family for weeks,” he said, speaking barely above a whisper. “A bunch of their men had pinned my parents down in broad fucking daylight and opened fire. My parents had thought they were smart, driving an unassuming sedan and sending a decoy car with an escort, but they got caught. Something like eight other people died, all civilians who had no goddamn clue what was happening.”

Felicity sucked in a breath at the thought. What he described was horrifying, on so many levels. She burrowed closer to him, tucking her head beneath his jaw and wedging her legs between his.

His arms tightened around her. “My aunt and uncle took me in, she pretty much handled everything for the funerals, and on the day we put my parents’ caskets in the ground, my uncle wrapped me in another hug and promised me it was over. He said there wasn’t another Coughlan by name or blood old enough to drive, and if I wasn’t satisfied with that, he’d find men willing to take care of their son, too.” Cristiano’s arms tensed, his voice darkening. “I should have insisted. But only one, barely older than me, I thought was good enough. I thought about my mother, and how she tried so hard to protect me from my father’s world—only to die in it. So I asked to have him left alone.”

Felicity reached up to rub her fingers along his jaw. “You were a child,” she whispered. “You’re hardly to blame for having a sense of mercy, or even compassion. It was enough, or it should have been.” She pushed herself up enough to find his eyes, hating the way they pinched at the corners with the strain of the memories he was reliving. “What’s happening now is not your fault, Cris.”

He blew out a rough breath and cupped her cheek with one hand. “I let him live, and now his resources are giving power to the men that are hurting you.”

She smiled, tipping her head into his palm. “My family’s been hurting me my entire life. Honestly, using other people to spy on me is invasive and creepy, but not nearly as bad as the violence.” She poked his cheek. “Besides, eleven-year-old you couldn’t have seen the future. If you did see this all unfolding, I’ll be more mad you didn’t show up to sweep me away the day I turned eighteen.”

He finally grinned and the next thing she knew, he’d flipped them over, pinning her to the mattress. His lips replaced his hand on her cheek, kissing along her jaw and up to her ear. “Baby, I’d have been there the night that fucker tried to force himself on you if I had that kind of magic.” He trailed his kisses down her neck. “I know you’re right. But the idea of you being hurt by the same bastard whose family already took nearly everything from me—”

Felicity dragged his head up, catching him off-guard enough that he only blinked at her in surprise. “No one’s taking me away, Cristiano. I’m yours. I choose to be yours.”

He groaned and kissed her, hard and demanding, crushing her beneath him as if he needed to consume her entire body. And she was happy to let him.

Eventually, he rolled them over again, pulling her into his lap without withdrawing from her and stretching out his arm for the phone he’d left on the side table. His other arm remained anchored around her, in case she might have the crazy idea of climbing off. “This is information I have to share with the family,” he said after a few seconds.

---