Page 52 of The Last Vendetta

After Renzo left, I let the idea of running away sink in fully.

Could I do it?

All I’d ever known was this Mafia life. I was born and raised under the expectations of being a pawn to be married off. I grew up without having any goals for myself because there never would have been a point to carving out my own purpose. Everything was dictated, and until Mother told me that I would be expected to become Nickolas’s wife, I’d done my best to tolerate this existence. To just get through it, day by day. Being a support system for my younger sisters filled a hole in my heart. For them, I could smile and be the dutiful elder daughter I was expected to be.

But as I lay in bed that night, I came to the honest conclusion that I could not do this.

I couldn’t marry that man, not under any circumstances or self-sacrifices.

I wasn’t sure if it was because I knew what and who I wanted. Renzo. I yearned for him even though he was off-limits as my Family’s enemy. And I missed his touch, even though he was rough and took liberties that shouldn’t have been his to begin with.

Knowing how much I wanted Renzo turned me off from being able to surrender to Nickolas.

But I wasn’t sure what other options I could follow.

If I ran, how would I bring my sisters along? I would never abandon them. I couldn’t.

And how could I plan to stay away and hidden? I had wealth. I was sure Uncle Dario would help me access it somehow. My uncle had always seemed to care about my well-being more than Father had. I knew Mother didn’t care about me at all. She couldn’t if she was considering marrying me off to Nickolas Romano, of all people.

She was the one I wasn’t sure how to escape. If I ran, she’d track me down. If I tried to leave this confining life, she’d hunt me and do everything she could to get me right back where she wanted me.

But Cecilia did it.

I stuck with that thought. Cecilia was out there hiding somewhere. If I had to guess, she simply wanted peace and privacy to get over the trauma of Luka being killed at their wedding. That was a horrendous event to recover from. I doubted she cared about him. Like me, she was just another daughter to be brokered like an item. She couldn’t have loved him, but she did have a gentle, skittish demeanor.

I recalled the screams she let out at finding her husband slumping over, dead. While violence and death were staples of this Mafia life, she likely had been sheltered from witnessing it up close and personal like that.

If a newlywed wanted to break away and rest in privacy for a while, I supposed she had an excuse.

But if she was trying to run, if she was trying to shed this identity of a Mafia wife…

How’d she pull it off?

Maybe she could give me pointers.

The next morning, I woke with that same current of determination that I’d fallen asleep to. If Cecilia could run and hide, then I damn well could try to as well. If she could take off after Luka’s wedding and do so without her father knowing where she was, that was saying something. Marcus Romano was wealthier than my Family, and if someone could deceive him, that meant she was really lying low.

After I tended to my sisters, checking that they were fine with their tutors, I felt better about checking that task off my to-do list. With our chaotic and unstable family structure, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t slacking in being present in their lives. They were too young, still innocent, and I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could.

Because no one ever did that for me.

I was nine years older than Marianna, but that gap of siblings wasn’t intended. Mother tried constantly to get pregnant after she had me, but it just wasn’t feasible. When she grew convinced that her difficult labor with me had rendered her infertile, she held a grudge against me, sometimes never even seeing me and letting the team of nannies make sure I was alive and well. Then when she miscarried a couple of times, she blamed Father for her inability to give him a baby. She never, ever let herself believe it was her fault. It was mine. Or his. Science was a finicky thing. Fertility and conception weren’t to be faulted to any one person, but she’d warped us all to never mention the chance that she was the reason they didn’t have more children sooner.

What made it infinitely worse was that all her pregnancies, both viable and not, were all daughters. Men ruled this world, and Mother only worsened her attitude and treatment of us when she failed to not only get pregnant and confirm that she carried a son, but also in her inability to never give Father an heir.

And if I become Nickolas’s wife, I’ll be expected to give him a son.

I placed my hand over my stomach, fighting back the worry that Renzo could have knocked me up the other night. He hadn’t used protection. It hadn’t even crossed my mind, so mad, scared, and aroused all at once.

If I were carrying Renzo’s son, a Bernardi heir…

No. Just don’t even think about it.

I would definitely have to run far and fast if he’d impregnated me. Yet, the idea of having Renzo’s child didn’t sicken me. It didn’t bother me. If I allowed myself to really think about it, I felt… triumphant. Happy. My so-called enemy was the sort of hard man who’d take care of his own, and now that I’d had a few glimpses of the softie he could be beneath the hard surface, I felt even closer to the risk of falling in love with him.

Francis met me in the solarium like I’d requested last night. Before I went to bed, I sought out the loyal guard and asked him to look into Cecilia’s whereabouts. He had connections. I had no doubt all these guards did. Just like the Mafia lords and ladies maintained their circle of acquaintances, I was sure the soldiers, capos, and guards did, even across enemy lines.

I considered asking Uncle Dario, but then I worried that would somehow implicate him. This “investigation” that Renzo and I had teamed up on was a secret, private partnership, and asking Francis for help was a safer option than asking Uncle Dario.

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