Page 29 of Playing the Sicilian's Game of Revenge

“You say that like it’s a positive.” And she could not go believing neutral statements were signs of love. She knew too well the path that led down.

“What triggered you this evening?” he pressed. Maybe confusion was rare, but giving up was rarer.

She was too tired to fight, so she simply gave in. “I don’t like to fail.”

“Who does?”

She shook her head. “I cannot explain it. The idea of certain failures...certain expectations...the pressure of it. I cannot handle it.” She tried not to think of it as a weakness. Therapy had taught her that it was a natural result of a traumatic childhood. Not her fault, something to work through with no shame.

But sometimes it was impossible to leave shame behind no matter how aware she was that she should.

“This is why you do not work in the IT department? The pressure.”

She could deny it, the logical leap he’d just made, but why bother? Maybe if he knew all her embarrassing little secrets, she’d stop being in love with him.

“Yes. I tend to put the most pressure on myself when it comes to my family. They...” She could not quite believe she was saying this, but why not lay it all out? It would never matter to him. It was freeing, almost. To say the things she’d only discussed with her university therapist out loud, to someone who was in her life. No matter how temporarily. “They sacrificed so much for me, particularly Lorenzo. I would never want them to know I struggle. With pressure, with anything. Lorenzo would blame himself.”

“It seems who he would blame is his problem. Not yours.”

“You don’t have a family, Teo,” she said. It was mean, she knew, but she thought it would get him to stop poking into her softest parts. “You cannot understand.”

“Perhaps not. But the way other people blame themselves—or don’t—is hardly your responsibility. And Lorenzo dotes on you. He would not be hard on you in a position in the IT department.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she repeated. Because no one ever did. “It’s not about whether he would be hard on me. It’s that I don’t want him to be disappointed. I know I can be an excellent assistant—or whatever else I end up deciding to do at Parisi. A mistake as his assistant, in marketing or sales or whatever, would be embarrassing, but...inconsequential. A mistake in the IT department? It’s the security of the entire company. He could lose everything. The consequences could be catastrophic. I couldn’t...” The panic was closing in again. She breathed through it, focused on one of the hanging plants over by the window. The way the ivy twisted down toward the ground. Her little sanctuary where she was safe.

But there was a man here. A man she loved, who did not or would not love her back. And too many old hurts in the air around them.

“Very well,” Teo murmured, as if he sensed she was on the edge of losing it again. “But you looking into Dante potentially being the one to attack his son is not pressure, bedda. We have a plan. Consider this...icing on the cake. If it does not come to fruition, it hardly matters.”

But it did matter. She could see it in his eyes. He wanted this so badly, and she shouldn’t feel obligated or pressured to give it to him. Not after what he’d done to her. But in a way that felt far too much like her childhood—her feelings and her rational thinking weren’t meshing.

“You don’t have to be kind, Teo. I know what it would mean to prove this.”

He straightened out his jacket, brushed at lint that was most certainly not there, and scoffed. “No one has ever accused me of being kind.”

But he was. Perhaps that was the heart of him. Behind all those walls and that need for revenge, he had a kind, bruised heart he’d rather harden than ever deal with. Hadn’t she gone through that season in her life too?

She wished she were back in his lap. Wished she could just stay there in the circle of his arms where she’d felt protected and safe even as she struggled to breathe.

But she’d been protected her whole life. She’d spent university and the past year trying to prove to Lorenzo and herself that she could protect herself. That she could handle her life, her triggers, herself.

If only she could handle her heart. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Teo spent the next few days not allowing himself to consider Dante’s possibly even larger downfall than he’d planned himself. He would not put that kind of pressure on Saverina. Every time he even considered the old story about Dante’s son, he could only picture Saverina struggling to breathe.

So he tried not to think about it.

He did not consider the lack of pressure a kindness. He did not consider it anything but smart business. You did not ask something of someone that was more than they could handle. That would only ever end in disaster.

It was not kindness. It was sense.

He told himself this day after day, lunch after lunch, when he did not push her on the matter. Did not ask if she’d attempted to find anything regarding Dante’s wife or son. He focused on his original plan. On how they would announce their engagement.

What he did not focus on was how much more he preferred these past few days with Saverina—no matter if she went home alone every night—than the one week he’d spent thinking she was off holidaying with her brother.

What he did not focus on was how every day at work, he looked more forward to his lunches with her, so much so that his work suffered in the mornings.

These things were frustrations, but they did not signify in the greater scheme of things. It was only good that he enjoyed the company of what was, essentially, a business partner. Revenge was a sort of business, after all. How nice they could share it.

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