Page 40 of Princess of the Mafia

“Did he fuck his women in front of his wife?” Di Matteo’s harsh voice cut me off. “You don’t have sisters, so don’t tell me what it’s like. What it does to your sister when she walks into the kitchen to find him humping the new maid.”

“Jesus!”

“Yeah, he wasn’t around to protect her, either. That’s what Daria found. He fucked all women who entered our house. The bastard kept his girls and wife at home while he just…” His voice cracked like glass on a cold winter night. “This is my biggest regret, and I’ll carry it with me to my grave. Mamma just would not leave him. But I didn’t try enough to get my sisters out. He wouldn’t let me, but I should have tried more. I didn’t.”

The sound of harsh disappointment ticked in the silence of the room before my whiskey decanter shattered against the wall and fell to the floor. I didn’t even know that I had done that, yet warm whiskey trickled on the floor, and cut glass glittered like jewels under the sunlight streaming through my windows. A deep desire to scrape up the broken glass and jut it into something, someone, preferably fucking Carlo’s dead body, burned in my veins.

“Should have fucking told me.” My voice scraped like sandpaper. Guilt scratched at me at how I had treated her.

He misunderstood me, of course.

“Don’t take it out on her. I’ll come and pick—”

“Back the fuck off! She’s mine. She stays with me. I’ll protect her because clearly you couldn’t, but you should have fucking told me,” I snapped.

Three heartbeats of a heavy silence. “You’re right. I didn’t, and I should have.” Di Matteo’s defeated voice filled the room like greasy oil slipping underneath the door, but it did nothing to me.

It wasn’t my game to kick a defeated man. But the chill riding my spine, the frustration fueling me like gasoline in my stomach, had to be thrown at something, and, well, he was the only target I had. But just because I didn’t trust myself to not cross the line and light that damn fire and start a fucking war over something he obviously had no control over, I smashed the phone against the wall and watched it mix with whiskey and glass.

There was a constriction on my rib cage. A darkness to my gaze. My pulse throbbed all over, and my organs fought to restart.

The fight first, think later, Martello attitude wouldn’t do shit now. I needed to reverse. Change every damn thing I knew. The shit on the floor needed cleaning up. But first, I had to fire a maid I had only hired a few hours ago. Because there was no fucking way I was having my wife wake up to see her again. After that, I was going to fill my lungs with nicotine so I could calm the fuck down before she woke up because the way I was feeling, I was ready to burn down the whole damn world, and that included myself, because fuck if I wasn’t made of the same material of all the jackasses who fucked around with perfect wives sitting at home asking perhaps for just one thing. For the faithfulness of their spouse.

I thumped a lump sum in the maid’s hand and kicked her out in a matter of minutes. When I came back to my office, my phone was vibrating and sliding around in whiskey and glass. What a mess. Literally and figuratively. I dipped and read Di Matteo’s messages coming in.

Give her time.

She just needs time to trust you.

Sometimes she has nightmares.

She misses him.

Jesus. He pissed me off. His fucking messages filled me with blind rage. I’d planned to sit in our room till she woke up. Now I wasn’t in a state to do that, because venom like I’d never known before was slithering inside my body, looking for a fucking spark to light the world up.

So I crunched the glass and strode to my chair. On a normal day, the stains it was going to leave would have annoyed me enough to get a cleaning crew in from the lobby. But I just couldn’t get myself to care. Instead, I sat in my chair and clogged my lungs with enough nicotine for a week. Each puff I sent out to the room was supposed to calm me down. All it did was create dark clouds in my office and make my furniture reek of addiction and the air hang tight with tension.

That boy between her legs in that cheap hotel.

I didn’t want you to own me, ran in a loop over and over again like an old LP dying on me.

Is that what you think? That all men cheat?

Her answer when she’d looked me in the eye with deep-set conviction. “All made men do.”

“Did you fuck her?”

When she’d asked that in the plane, I’d thought it was because she was young and naïve and didn’t know the world of the made men. Now I knew she knew every sordid detail of our world.

“Let’s see how long it takes for you to fuck the next one then.”

Fuck! No wonder she’d been triggered by the damn maid in the kitchen. A trigger that bridged an old memory.

The chair I sat on sliced me with guilt that spread all through me. This is what I had planned to do. Find a Sicilian doll to play house while I fucked around at will.

Her eerie scream still echoed in the walls of my ribcage. The image of her wailing, with her eyes squeezed shut, etched itself into my brain cells like a fucking laser beam.

For a millisecond, the idea filtered into my mind that she was too much to handle. I should have given her back like a fucking machine with a malfunction. Di Matteo would have taken her back, and I wouldn’t have toothpaste lining my sink, clothes piled on the floor, and especially, especially, no stricken looks of despair. I could have gone back to fucking black-haired stewardesses, and I wouldn’t have to account for anyone, least of all a brown-haired, blue-eyed, plum-lipped siren, just waiting for me to step out of line. Because that was what she’d do. She’d watch my every step, go through every phone call, sniff all my shirts till she found evidence, and honestly, was I even going to be faithful to her?

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