Page 18 of Shadowed Loyalty

Sabina moaned, but she forced herself up. The others exchanged brief greetings with Lorenzo. Hoping he’d get distracted, she hung back beside the railing. No such luck—seconds later he put a hand under her elbow to lead her down the steps and halted all the idle chat with a short, “We won’t be long.”

His fingers scorched her arm, and she clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking. How often had she wished he’d take her arm, her hand, something? Now, he finally did, and there wasn’t even a sliver of affection in it.She felt like a naughty schoolgirl standing in front of a nun, wondering what punishment might be handed down, and how much it would hurt.

He said nothing as they gained the sidewalk. His tension sang through his hand, and she was about to snap with it. It was somehow even worse when he dropped his grip on her elbow. As if, just like that, he was letting her go.

She ought to be glad. For him, for her, for both of them. It would be for the best, wouldn’t it?

But she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready to lose him. She reached for his hand.

When she squeezed his fingers, he let out a hiss of pain, tugging them away. With a single look over her shoulder to make sure they were out of earshot, Sabina grabbed his hand again—by the palm this time. His knuckles were bruised. “What happened to you?”

Lorenzo pulled free again. Not even deigning to look at her, he rolled his shoulders forward. “Had a little run-in with your boyfriend.”

For a second she just walked, too stupefied to speak. “You hit him?” The idea was ludicrous. Lorenzo wouldn’t—couldn’t—had never—

“I imagine he’s still sprawled on the floor of the bar, if you want to go nurse him back to health. Though he was already pretty well medicated when he came in.”

A long blink didn’t change the impossible image. Lorenzo still stood like Val usually did, on the offensive and ready to brawl. She didn’t know if it frightened her or amused her. “If I went over there, I’d probably grind my heel into the first vital part I came across. I’m just surprised, Enzo. You never fight. Tony and Val, sure, and even Joey used to, but you…you’re…”

“What?” They turned the corner, and he halted her simply by stopping and crossing his arms over his chest. “What is it, exactly, that you think I am? Boring? Unfeeling? Stoic? Do you think I don’t have a heart beating in my chest?”

No. She’d always known he had a heart, one as beautiful as his mind. It was just that he’d closed her out of it. “I don’t—”

“I’m through, Sabina.” He slashed a hand through the air to illustrate it. “I trusted you. Maybe that makes me stupid, but I don’t think I’m the one to blame when my supposedly virtuous bride is out necking with the first smooth-talking charlatan who comes along.”

Her blood began to boil, a haze over her eyes blocking out the reality of nosy neighbors and other pedestrians. “You trusted me? Is that what you call ignoring me for the last three years—trust? Just trusting that I could keep going without you, trusting that you didn’t need to do anything? Trusting that I’d just sit around forever, waiting for you to remember that I exist?”

“That’s rich. As if I wasn’t working every day for us, trying to build a life we could live without strings. Why do you think I worked two jobs while I juggled classes, Sabina? Why do you think I insisted we wait until this summer to get married?”

A question she had asked over and over, time and again inside her own mind. Why was he always, always choosing something else above her? Why did he keep saying “not yet” for so long when she asked him about a date?

The truth had become clear, eventually, and it hissed out now like the accusation it was. “Because you didn’t want me, you never really wanted me!”

Funny—she’d meant it to accuse him. But it cut her own heart far more deeply than it could have cut his.

He gaped at her like she was an idiot. “It was for you. Everything was for you, it was always for you. So I could save enough to have a place of my own. So we wouldn’t have to rely on them, on the dirty money. So I could get you away from all this.”

Her hands shook. “Away? You want to talk about away? You’ve been ‘away’ from all this, from me, for years. You may have told yourself it was for me, but if so, why did you never give me a word? Never a touch? You couldn’t have made it any clearer—”

“I was protecting you! Honoring you.”

“You abandoned me!”

For a moment, the words seemed to hit their mark. A million thoughts flashed through his eyes, illuminated by the lamplight. But then a shutter—oh, that familiar shutter—fell over his gaze again.

“Is that your excuse, then, for why you fell into his arms? Instead of talking to me, you just turned to someone else?”

Her nostrils flared, but she couldn’t suck in air enough to steady the waves of pain. She’d done wrong—she knew it. But he’d left first. He’d chosen those jobs and school and his high ideals above her. She’d sat at home for three eternal years, silently screaming for someone to see her, to give her something to do, and he hadn’t. Whatever he told himself, he hadn’t.

He took a step away. “You’ve made your decisions, and now you’re going to live with them. I want you to take off my ring. You can keep it, hock it, whatever—I don’t want it. But I don’t want you wearing it.”

She wasn’t going to cry. Not again. Not for him. Ice. Numb. It was all she had now, all she’d ever have. It had seen her through the last three years, and it would see her through the next thirty. “Well.” She drew in a deep breath that betrayed her by catching in her throat. “I guess that’s that. Unless there’s something else you’d like to say?”

“Yeah.” Lorenzo shook his head. “I thought you had more sense than this—but him. Never mind that he was a cop—you didn’t know that. But you thought he was a mafioso. And that’s what you chose? That makes me doubt whether I even knew you. That you’d want to marry some gangster, just like our fathers?”

Her hackles rose. “What’s so wrong with our fathers?”

Disgust colored his countenance before he turned away, his legs already stretching into long strides. “Ask me that when a Betsy rips apart your world,” he tossed over his shoulder.

---