Page 64 of A Sinner's Virtue
“He’ll be back in a minute. You can come in. I don’t bite,” he tells me.
I walk into the room and sit on the sofa opposite him. “Santo, right? I’m Zoe.”
“I know who you are,” he says.
Okay, so this is clearly not the friendliest brother out of the lot of them. Where is Vin? I like that one better. I look around the room, trying not to fidget.
“What happened to you?” Santo asks.
My head snaps back to him. “Excuse me?”
“Your skittish as all fuck and you look… Well, broken knows broken. So, like I said, what happened to you?”
Broken knows broken. What the hell does that even mean?
I look at him, really look at him. And for a reason unknown to me, my mouth opens. “My father sold me to repay his debts when I was seventeen. I was auctioned off to the highest bidder and then my body was used against my will over and over again. So if I come across broken, maybe I am. But I have a damn good reason to be.”
“Didn’t say you were broken without reason. Just that you were,” he grunts in reply. “My father beat my fiancée to death, while she was pregnant with our child on the night before we were meant to be married. Guess we’re both the result of shitty fucking fathers.”
“Guess so.” I sigh. “I’m sorry about your fiancée.”
“Yeah, me too.” He frowns. “Do you think it’s possible to know someone your whole life but not really know them at all?”
“Yes, I do,” I tell him. “People only show you what they want you to see.”
“You’re smart,” Santo says. “Probably too smart to be with Marcello.”
“He’s pretty smart too.” I shrug.
“Sometimes. But he went and fell in love. And that’s just plain dumb.”
“Why is it dumb?” I ask him. It’s way too damn early for a deep conversation like this, but looking at Santo, I don’t think it’s early for him. I’d say it’s late. I doubt he’s been to bed yet.
“Because love is the thing that will end you.”
“We’re all dying, Santo. We’re born to die. Love isn’t what ends us. Life is,” I tell him. “Love is what makes us live. Love makes everything better, not worse.”
“That’s because you haven’t lost love. And I hope for your sake you never do.”
“I don’t doubt that you loved her, but have you ever thought it’s possible that maybe there’s another love out there for you?”
Santo glares at me. “No,” he snaps. “I’m not a cheater. I was fucking loyal. I am fucking loyal. Even if she wasn’t.”
Even if she wasn’t? Did his fiancée cheat on him? But that’s not a question I’m going to ask him. I’ll ask Marcel later.
“Moving on isn’t cheating. It’s living. You might not be ready for it yet, but one day you’re going to meet someone, and I hope when that day comes, you’ve healed enough to open yourself up to what could be.”
“That day isn’t going to come. Nice chat, Zoe. Tell Marcel I got tired of waiting for his slow ass.” Santo pushes up from the sofa opposite me and walks out of the room.
There’s a part of me that wonders if the saying it’s better to have loved and lost, then to never have loved at all is all just bullshit. Because looking at Santo, seeing the heartbreak written all over him, yeah, I don’t ever want to experience that kind of pain.
He’s right. I am broken. But even with everything I’ve been through, I’m not as broken as he is. Maybe it’s because I’ve had time to heal. Time to conceal my scars a little better. Or maybe it’s because I found Marcel.
“Hey, I didn’t know you were awake,” Marcel says, walking into the room almost like I conjured him up somehow. He leans down and presses his lips to my forehead. And I melt into him. It’s such a tender gesture. Something so simple, yet it gives me butterflies every time he does it.
“Um, yeah, I was just talking to Santo,” I tell him.
“Santo?”
