Page 81 of Righteous Deceit

Diego stops chewing and lifts his head slowly to me. He shakes his head. “No.”

“Have you been in a long-term relationship?”

“Yes.” His focus drops back to his food.

This is the Diego I know. Mr. Conversation and the man of the indecipherable mask.

I want to know whether what unfolded has changedanythingbetween us. And I’m not just talking about the sex. We killed together. I watched him brutally murder two men who threatened me with horrible violence. He witnessed me slam a rock into the back of another man’s head until it resembled mush. We’re connected in a way that most people will never understand—a relationship forged in blood and human sacrifice.

Still, just because I believe our relationship has moved forward, I can’t be confident he thinks the same, and I’m not prepared for his rejection. So, I’ve settled into conversation topics that will hopefully give me a better understanding of my new husband.

“But you didn’t love her?”

Placing his knife and fork down, he rubs his hands together, balancing his elbows on the table. “I thought I loved her. But I was young. Time has passed, and I now realize that what we shared wasn’t love.”

“What happened?”

Mouth pushed into a thin line, I can tell he’s considering not telling me. “She’s connected to the family.”

Understanding courses through me. “They married her to someone else while you were dating.”

A small smile teases at the corner of his mouth, but he bites the corner to stop it from spreading. “They married her to someone elsebecauseshe was dating me.”

“Oh.” Of course. I would advise Salvatore to do precisely the same thing. I’ve never spent too much time considering the feelings of young love. If a relationship threatened to damage the progression of the family business, it had to be stopped. “Was that hard to watch?”

He shrugs. “I guess.”

“Because she was happy with you, and seeing her marry someone else and be miserable hurt?”

“No,tesoruccio,because I thought she loved me, and then I watched her fall in love for real with another man.”

“She fell in love with her arranged husband?” Neither of us misses the softness in my voice. The fairy tale of his ex-girlfriend falling in love with a man she was forced to marry is too uncommon in our world.

“She did.”

“That would have been hard to watch.”

He shakes his head. “At first, but then common sense prevailed. Margot wouldn’t have fallen in love with another man if she loved me. And if I loved Margot, I would have fought tooth and nail, to the fucking death, to claim her as mine. I wouldn’t have stood idly by while she married another man. I would have made sure I was the only man her heart beat for. I didn’t do that. I didn’t want to do that. Seeing her in love made me happy, not murderous.”

“Love is messy.”

“The messiest,” he agrees. “If I’m not willing to lay down my life, if I’m not willing to watch another bleed to protect what’s mine, then it’s not the type of love I want.”

Neither of us needs to mention he did exactly that for me tonight. That I did the same for him.

“Obsession,” I whisper.

“Obsession,” he concurs.

“That sounds nice.”

He picks up our empty bowls and walks the short distance to the kitchen. He loads my dishwasher and returns to wipe the crumbs off my dining table.

“It sounds fucking horrible, Sia.” He moves back to his luggage, pulling three separate laptops out to use the dining table as a desk. “Imagine every minute of every day being hijacked by someone who has the ability to destroy everything that you are. Imagine needing another person to be able to breathe properly. Imagine your heart aching when you can’t see them. Imagine the fear you’ll live for therestof your life, worrying you’ll outlive them and knowing for a time they don’t exist in the same realm as you. Or worse, them outliving you and you knowing you fucking failed them and broke them in a way that the rest of their life always feels empty because you’re no longer there.”

He doesn’t take a single breath through his monologue, his voice trailing off into silence on the last word as he sucks in a breath.

We stare at one another until he blows out a shaky breath, widens his eyes, and turns his attention to plugging in cords and attaching additional keyboards and hard drives to his setup.

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