Page 29 of Vengeful Mafia Prince

"Hey," she murmurs.

"Hey."

I lean over to kiss her, dropping a peck against her forehead. In this moment, I can almost convince myself that the two of us are just on some sweet, romantic getaway together, taking a break from the rest of the world just to blow off some steam before we go back.

But that's far from the truth, and we both know it. She gazes up at me for a moment, her teeth resting on her lower lip.

"How long do you think we have before someone finds us here?"

I sigh. Not exactly the question I want to consider right now, but she's right to ask.

"I don't know," I admit. "Valentina, she knows about this place, and she knows the code. If she really wants to find me, she'll come here. Today, probably."

"Then we'll need to get out of here."

"Is that what you want?"

She stares at me. There's indecision in her eyes, just like there is in my heart. Much as we both know that being here is all kinds of stupid, there's no way we're going to get up and walk away.

"I... I don't really know," she confesses, finally. "I need time to think. But we don't have time."

"What do you need time to think about?" I ask, shifting closer to her and draping an arm over her stomach. She leans against me for a moment. I wonder if she's forgetting where she's meant to be or what she's supposed to be doing.

"I need... I need time to think about what this means."

"And what are your options?"

"I don't know, Gio." She sighs sharply. "I have no idea. Because... because my father killed your parents. And I knew he might have been involved in some stuff he shouldn't have been, but murder? That's beyond anything I could have thought."

"So, come to me," I murmur, squeezing her closer. "Get away from him. Let me take care of you, let me show you how well I can..."

"But how could you ever really want me, knowing what happened to your parents?" She seems to blurt out the words before she can stop them, and they catch me entirely off guard. I don't know what she expects me to say.

"I told you last night, you really think I could fake all this between us?"

"No, I'm not saying you're faking it," she tells me with another sharp sigh. "I'm saying... I'm saying that you don't know how long you're going to be able to look at me as anything other than my father's daughter, the daughter of the man who took your parents' lives."

There they are, the words I don't want to hear, the reality of the situation, as brutal as it is. No matter how much we might try to push it aside, there's always going to be a part of her that is related to the man who took my family from me.

"I would never make you choose," I tell her. It's the truth, partly because I don't know if I could make a sensible choice, not when it came to her.

"I know you wouldn't," she replies. "That's the problem."

I don't know what the fuck to say to her. I wish I could convince her to just put aside all this bullshit for a little while longer, pretend like none of this really matters, just be together, as we are in this moment, totally and utterly at peace.

I'm never going to ask her to step away from her father. Not seriously. Coming out with it before had been the first time I had really considered it a possibility, but I know I couldn't let her go through with it. Because I know, all too well, what it feels like to lose someone who you thought was going to be there forever. Whether that's watching them die or just stepping awayfrom family for good, it's the same result—you're left without the people who were supposed to be there for the rest of your life, and that's the kind of shit that leaves scars.

She turns away from me, staring out the window.

"You should take me home."

I sigh. "Elena, we don't have to do that—"

"I know we don't have to," she replies, voice hollow. "But I want to. I need to. I have a life to think about, I have college—"

"How can you be thinking about college at a time like this?"

Her head flashes back over to face me. "Because I don't know what's going to happen between my father and me after what went down last night," she shoots back. "And I might need to have something to fall back on." She slumps back on the bed, rubbing her hands over her face. "Fuck, I'm sorry," she sighs. "I..."

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