Page 29 of Brutal Legacy

Then he tilted his head to the side.

“Who?” His tone was cold, disinterested.

“Elio, is it you?” I murmured. My heart was hammering, threatening to break through my ribs. Did I ever think about the man who had broken my heart into pieces? Only every single day, but hey, I’d improved upon the first few years of my twenties, when I’d thought about him every few minutes.

He sighed, the lower part of his face still not giving a single thing away.

“Again, who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Liar. You’re him.” I was convinced. I could hear him murmurtopolinaagain and again in my head. It had tripped off his tongue so naturally, there was no mistaking it.

He shrugged. “Think what you want, Signora Conti. It doesn’t matter to me, and it won’t change anything for you.”

It felt like the world slowed to a crawl as he reached up and pulled at the arm of his sunglasses. They came off slowly, and every second lasted a lifetime while I waited to see if my ghost, the man who’d haunted me every day since he’d left, had come back into my life.

The glasses fell away, and he looked right at me.

And his eyes were brown.

Dark brown.

Emotions I couldn’t name swirled inside me. Relief, disappointment, fucking confusion.

“Are we done here?” the man murmured.

I nodded mutely.

“Good. Now get the fuck inside, and stop testing me.”

10

GEORGIA

Then

When you lived in the countryside, you had to get creative when you got old enough to want to party on the weekend. The local hot spot for parties in Castel Amaro was just a little too far out of town to comfortably walk to. Down by a hollow near the river, where we’d played as kids on a tire swing, now, as teens, we lit a fire and drank.

I didn’t get to go out much. I went to school, of course, but my father made sure to fill up all my free time with tutors. English, mathematics, economics… all sorts of subjects I had no interest in. My passion was design and dressmaking, but my father thought that was beneath the Bellisario name. I had no idea who he wanted me to be when I was older, but I was certain it wasn’t the real me.

He had no idea who that was.

Only my English tutor got my full attention. I needed to be able to speak English to go to Parsons, after all. Also, my mother hadbeen an American. She had passed when I was too young to have a single memory of her. All I had was my American inspired name, for the state she’d been from. For her, I wanted to speak English, and one day, live in her country.

I brought my beer bottle to my lips and sipped, then winced. Tepid beer wasn’t a great taste, but it was all that was left around the bonfire. My classmates had gotten increasingly wasted and disappeared in pairs off into the bushes.

Even Tommaso had abandoned me.

I swigged my beer and wished Elio Santori was here.

Right, and why would he be interested in what a bunch of little country mice were up to? I frowned at the dark, moving water of the river just beyond the hollow.

It had been a month of the Neapolitan bad boy sleeping in the barn, just outside my bedroom, and absolutely nothing had happened.

Clearly, he didn’t want to know.

Despite my knowing that, a monstrous crush had developed on my part. I was obsessed. I watched him out the window whenever I had a moment. I contrived meetings whenever I could, but it was tough to catch him. I’d even started to enjoy church, since I usually saw him there. He had to know, right? He had to.

I rested my back against a wide tree trunk and scrubbed a hand over my face, wrinkling my nose at the feeling of my heavy mascara. The fact that was becoming impossible to deny was that he knew, but he wasn’t interested.

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