Page 59 of Assassin's Obsession

"Call it what you want." The shrug in his voice says it doesn't bother him even a little to be called a stalker. "We were born to be together."

"That's more of that love-at-first-sight crap. I already told you, I don't believe in it." My fascination with him may have reached the point of obsession, but that's not love. "I can't believe you do either. You have to know that there's no such thing as soulmates."

"Before I saw you for the first time, I would have agreed with you. But before I met you, I believed I would never bring a woman into my life. Now I know we were both wrong. Because you are my soulmate."

I shove my tender heart into my shoes. "Angelo, it doesn't work that way."

"It does if we say it does," he assures me.

Why are those words so tempting?

"We implies both of us, right?" I ask.

Brows furrowed, his gray gaze fills with wariness. "Yes."

"We implies I agree with you and I don't." I ignore the constriction in my chest at those words.

Okay, I'm stupidly reluctant to steal his phone and call the police to tell them I have been kidnapped. Maybe I do trust him not to harm me in a way that makes no logical sense.

But no way am I in love with him. I didn't even know he was watching me for most of the year.

And no way do I believe he loves me. He can't. "You stayed in the shadows, how was I supposed to get to know you? How could you think you know me well enough to love me?"

"The connection of two souls does not require the kind of surface knowledge that will inevitably come with time."

What is he, the Cosa Nostra's love guru?

I don't think so. "Can't you hear how bizarre that sounds? Angelo, that's not the way relationships work."

"My parents married less than a month after their first meeting."

"So, I have them to blame for your belief in love at first sight?" My own parents were anything but poster children for the idea.

My mom fell in love with my sperm donor, but he never saw her as anything but his side piece, if that.

Angelo grimaces. "Not exactly."

My interest piqued despite the exhaustion dragging more heavily at me with every passing second, I ask, "Why not exactly?"

"They were promised to each other for 10 years as a political alliance. They were not soulmates like us."

"Then why use them as an example?"

"Because in my world, arranged marriages between virtual strangersiscommonplace. Some couples fall in love. Others don't."

"Okay, that's weird." Though I bet my sperm donor's wife is the other half of a strategic alliance.

If he loved her, he wouldn't have cheated on her.

"Not in our world."

"There is noourworld," I remind him.

"We both live in it. That makes it ours."

I shake my head. "You can't decide that for me."

"It was decided for you when Stefano Bianchi fucked your mother and got her pregnant. You are a daughter of the Cosa Nostra."

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