Page 76 of Tyrant (The Villetti Chronicles)

Did my brother not know when to shut the hell up? Clearly not because right now, he was asking me shit I had no answers for. Not ones I could tell him, anyway.

My heart hurt and my head throbbed from my conversation with Ari. Well, it wasn’t really a conversation, more her shouting at me and me having no clue what to say to her in return. I still didn’t know, and Enzo wasn’t helping matters. The tight hold I usually had on my emotions snapped. He had some fucking nerve questioning me when he was a waste of space who didn’t give a shit about our family reputation, unlike me.

“Do you ever wonder why no one tells you a single fucking thing, Enzo? Do you? If you stopped for one fucking moment, you’d realise we all treat like a child because you behave like one.”

“I’m not a child.”

The way he spat it at me only fuelled my ire.

“You are fucking clueless when it comes to this family. All you do is cause trouble for everyone and leave us to clean up your messes. I asked you to do one fucking thing for me.” I slapped a hand on my chest. “One fucking thing to help me after everything you’ve put this family through and you dare stand there and question me about my life like you have any right to it.”

My feet carried me over to my brother and I got right up in his face.

“Let me make something crystal clear to you. The things I’ve done and sacrificed for this family? You wouldn’t be able to handle it. You don’t understand what it means to be the eldest and have every-fucking-thing weighing on your shoulders. Not even Gil truly fucking understands what the man we call father has done. What he has forced me to be complicit in. And you, of all people, don’t get to question me until you grow the fuck up and start acting like a Villetti instead of a petulant little brat.”

Enzo blinked. Never in my life had I lost my temper with my brother, but he had to keep pushing me.

The thought of my father made me sick. How he’d chased after my mother when she’d worked up the courage to leave him because of all his affairs and the emotional abuse he subjected her to. The way he’d beaten the living daylights out of her for it. And now… now she was on life support at home because he put her there. My father refused to let her go, even though she required a ventilator to breathe because she couldn’t do it on her own. He’d paid off his doctors to make sure no one else knew about the condition he’d left her in. He was still punishing her almost ten years after he put her in a fucking coma.

Enzo and Gil didn’t know about that. They thought she’d been in an accident. If you counted my father’s fists as “an accident.” Gennaro Villetti was a liar and a sadistic piece of shit. There was no fucking way I was ever letting him get near Arianna. He could never know I had her and how I felt about her. Never. He might rip away the only good thing in my life if he did. That is, if I hadn’t already destroyed things between us all by myself.

“If you go to our father and breathe a word of this, make no mistake, I will make you sorry you dared cross me, you hear me, Enzo? I will make you pay because this shit with Ari and her father, it’s my business. Not yours, not our father’s, but mine. Because she’s fucking mine. And I will not allow you to jeopardise any of it by involving Gennaro.”

Enzo took a step back from me. My breathing was heavy and my fists clenched at my sides. The pent up rage coursing through my veins was going to burst if he didn’t get the fuck out of my sight.

“What didPapàdo to you?” he whispered with wide eyes and a confused expression on his face.

“You think you’ve had it bad with him, Enzo, but you aren’t privy to the real Gennaro Villetti. Despite what you think of me, I hope for your sake you never become acquainted with him.”

Enzo might be a massive pain in my arse, but he was my baby brother. I cared about the idiot regardless of his attitude to everything and everyone around him.

“Zayn…”

I shook my head.

“Promise me you won’t breathe a word of this to him.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

My fists unclenched.

“Good. Now get the fuck out before I do something we both regret.”

Enzo’s eyes were full of sadness, anger and confusion as he left the room, slamming the door shut behind him. I didn’t have the energy to give a shit about it. As long as he kept his word, he could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

I didn’t look at Arlo as I walked over to the sofa and threw myself down into it, putting my head in my hands.

What a fucking mess.

“You okay, Zayn?”

“No, I’m not fucking okay,” I ground out through my teeth.

“Need to hit something?”

I dragged my fingers through my hair.

“No. I need… I don’t know what I need.”

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