Page 20 of Playing the Sicilian's Game of Revenge

“You mean the things you did not know when you agreed to marry me?”

She looked at him for a long second that made him want to do the unthinkable. Shift in his seat. “Perhaps I should just go.”

He wanted to be unaffected enough to invite her to do just that. But his plan. He needed people seeing them together. That was the only reason he considered her request. The only reason he began to speak of a time he did not care to remember.

“Our lives were very isolated. Mamma was afraid of retribution from Dante. So she steered clear of her family, lest they get involved. She stayed here in Palermo. She cleaned offices in a large building, and I worked alongside her.”

“What about school?”

“She educated me as a young child. When it became clear I wanted to go to university, she put me in public school. I was old enough to be focused on my studies by then. The only thing I was concerned with was doing what I could to create the potential to save my mother from her concerns. I did not make friends. I did not date, if that is what you’re asking. I had only one goal. To keep her safe.”

“And then she died anyway.”

It hit like the slice of a knife. Sharp and so cold he could scarcely manage an easy breath. “How kind of you to point that out,” he returned, his words utterly devoid of any inflection.

“Both of my parents were dead by the time I was eleven,” she said. “I didn’t have a great relationship with either of them, and still, it’s world-altering when a parent dies.”

“Perhaps. But I was not a girl of eleven. I was a man of thirty.”

She lifted her elegant shoulders. “I don’t think it matters, Teo.”

It mattered. Because her death had given him a new purpose. A name for his nameless father. All the revenge he needed.

“While you were lying to me—”

“I was not—”

“You were lying to me,” she cut him off sharply. “You led me to believe you loved me and wanted to spend your life with me.”

“I don’t recall ever using those words.”

She inhaled sharply—and made him wish he hadn’t said that.

“No, you didn’t.” She shook her head. “The point of all this, the reason it can’t just go back, is because a real relationship is based on trust and respect and love. It ends poorly—with those theatrics you mentioned—when one of those things are broken. You want me to forgo the pursuit of love, trust, and respect in order to protect myself from those things being broken. I think I even understand why you’d feel you must avoid those things. For me? I can’t simply...decide I don’t want those things. Protect and insulate myself from those things because they might hurt in the end.”

He did not care for the word avoid. It painted him as a coward when what he prided himself on being was rational.

“I will never trust you, Teo. Not now. So there is no hope that this turns into what I want. I can’t go back. We can only move forward with our mutual goal and my carefully considered ground rules.” She pulled a paper from her purse—the ridiculous ground rules she’d written out in her pretty, precise handwriting. She pushed it across the table to him. “If you cannot agree to all of these, I cannot agree to be part of your revenge.”

Teo ran his tongue over his teeth in an effort to remind himself to be as rational as he prided himself on being. Irritation with her—with the loss of her—was pointless. Because revenge was all that mattered.

“Very well,” he said when he trusted himself to speak calmly. “Then you will have to follow a few of mine.” He pulled a pen from his pocket, flipped her paper over, and began to write.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SAVERINA FROWNED AS Teo wrote. His ground rules.

As if he had any right.

She considered leaving again. She did not have to do this. Lorenzo had told her for years he didn’t need Dante to pay, so maybe she shouldn’t want that either. Maybe she should leave this for Teo. Perhaps Dante had spent years dragging Lorenzo’s name through the mud, but that was not nearly as awful as refusing to acknowledge your son. Creating an environment where the mother of your child lived in fear in isolation.

But she couldn’t let the idea of revenge go. Not just for Lorenzo anymore. For a little boy who’d been raised the way Teo had outlined. Saverina was well-versed in sad and bad childhoods. They came in all shapes and sizes, and she could never be immune to feeling compassion for those who found ways to succeed in spite of their upbringing.

And more... Oh, she hated herself for it, but Teo’s story of his childhood had softened her. Not enough to change her rules, of course. Just enough that it was hard to hate him. That she thought...he wasn’t so much hard and cold and mean.

He was misguided. He didn’t understand love. He’d only known it from his mother, and no doubt her death had made it feel like more weapon than joy. Saverina might have felt that too...if she had not had her siblings. If Lorenzo had not found Brianna. If she had not watched love and family change him.

She blew out a breath, knowing this was a dangerous line of thought. She could feel sympathy for him, she could work with him, but she could not under any circumstances believe she could change him. That she could teach him how to love.

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