Page 83 of Taboo Flames

I haven’t seen the tattoo since my altercation with the pimp, but there’s no way I can forget the image. It’s been burned intomy brain. Why does one of Giordano’s men have the spider tattoo? And I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence.

It’s the same exact one, with the long spidery legs extended across the surface of the skin and the bulbous head dead center.

I do my best to keep the shock out of my expression until Gio and I are safely behind the doors of another room. Even then, I don’t know how safe it is to talk here.

First, it was the picture, and now this.

“Gio, I have to tell you something,” I immediately begin when I drop into the chair.

“I want to tell you something first,” he says with a serious look as he takes the chair next to mine. “And it’s important. At least to me.”

I stare at him in surprise. There’s a note in his voice that I’m not at all familiar with. It’s almost as if he’s…nervous.

“Okay, you go first.”

I can tell him about my conspiracy theories later when we are in a safer place. I’m too paranoid to believe the room isn’t bugged.

“No, no. You can go ahead,” he says.

“It’s fine. Please,” I insist, desperate to hear what he has to say. “Mine can wait.”

Yes, you can wait to hear that your beloved Giordano, The Godfather, is a sham of a man and may just be the enemy we’ve been looking for.

Gio swallows, stands up from the chair, and begins to pace. I watch him curiously as he rakes his hand through his hair severally, messing it up from its laid-back perfect state.

“You asked me about this once.” He holds up the chaplet that’s a permanent fixture on his wrist.

I nod.

“It belongs…no…it belonged to my mother. It’s the only thing I have left of her,” he tells me, his gaze stuck on a point in the distance. “I don’t know how much you know already?—”

“None of it matters,” I cut in immediately. “I only want to hear it from you.”

“You know I can’t tell you everything, right?” he states. “There are parts of me that are best left under lock and key. Parts that even I never want to remember.”

“You can tell me anything.” I jump up from the seat and walk toward him. “I just want to know and understand you, Gio.”

He licks his lips and clears his throat. “While my father was alive, he wouldn’t have won any Best Dad of the Year awards. He was far too much of a loser to even win Worst Dad of the Year.”

Gio let out a humorless chuckle. “There were only two things he lived for: coke and the gambling table. I don’t remember him ever being much of a man. Not even in my earliest memories. He never hit us, though, so maybe we had it good.” He shrugs. “He just didn’t care enough about us to hit us. He would gamble, win some money, lose a whole lot more, get coked up, and end up passed out in unusual places. We lived in permanent debt because of his habits. Imagine a seven-year-old kid wandering the streets of Sicily at dawn trying to find what corner his father had ended up unconscious in.”

I gasp and cover my mouth in horror at the thought of what he went through. I can’t even imagine it. My own father may have been an asshole, but we always had Leo to save us.

“I’m so sorry,” I murmur, feeling tears burn my eyes.

“It wasn’t all bad,” he deflects. “I didn’t care about him. It’d have been way worse if I did. It was my mother I pitied because she cared. She cared far too much to be able to abandon him for good and save herself, and I cared about my mother too much to leave him out there to die. It was a cycle no one should have been caught in.”

“You were just a kid.”

“Trust me, princess. After what I’d seen, I was far from being a kid.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I protest. “Youwerea kid, and someone should have saved you.”

“Knights in shining armor are things of fairytales, baby. They don’t exist.”

I give him a look. “It’s a good thing I’ve got my head stuck in a fairytale then because you’re my knight in shining armor.”

His gaze softens, the dark shadows that were behind them slowly shifting away.

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