61. Tasha

61

I took half an hour to scroll through my social media. I'm not sure who has been in charge of my profiles, but they did an excellent job in keeping me absently present. Apparently, I went on a surprise trip with my dad to some backwater adventure in Canada where there's no network. A perfect place to be eaten by a bear and disappear permanently. I couldn't be bothered to know more or even see what my friends have been up to.

For now, I'm in this bubble, and I don't want out of it. Not until I've digested everything, and I suspect it's going to take months, maybe years. People might have questions and I'm not ready to answer any of them. Matteo was right when he said I should take my time before I respond to any messages.

For all I know, Matteo has changed his mind about me going back to my studies. We're balancing on a tightrope and the only way to get across is by taking each other's hands and helping one another along. Beyond sex, neither of us has been the first to reach out for the other; stubborn.

I've been to check in with Burley. Rosalia has done her daily dose of cleaning. I'm channel-hopping because there's nothing else to do but wait for my husband. I hate being in this apartment alone. When he said he was going to the Don, with those two sardine cans in tow, I shuddered. That was hours ago, and I hate that I'm this worried. He's crawled so deeply into my heart in such a short amount of time. I can't imagine life before Matteo. It's as if I didn't have a life, and I guess I really didn't.

I'm tempted to phone him, but I don't want to disturb him when he's in the middle of something serious.

When the front door opens, I sigh in secret relief. This is going to be my life going forward. Waiting, wondering, praying for him to come back. His gait is something I start to recognize when he isn't soft-footing around so he can creep up on you. I get up, wanting to hurl myself at him, but hold back as he appears around the corner in the open plan living area.

This man… He was born to wear a suit. Sexy Italian to his core. From the way he spoke Italian it's clear it's his mother tongue. To have a sneak peek into his life growing up would be so insightful.

"Hey," I say, suddenly shy with the way his gaze consumes me. It's that look in his eyes, the way he touches me, the things he says that make me want to believe that he isn't indifferent to me. That this marriage, which I entered into under some duress if I look at it closely, isn't the Don's or even Matteo's ultimate revenge against my dad.

"Kitten." He looks tired, but in a good way.

"Are you okay?" I want to ask how his meeting went, but that would cross into territory I'm not ready for.

"Never better." He walks up to me and holds out a thick file. "This is for you."

I take the file from him. It's heavy. "Okay." I read the label on the side. Armstrong, Peter. "Oh God. What is this?"

Matteo walks to the kitchen as he strips off his jacket and throws it onto the barstool by the island. The gun and holster go too and I'm relieved. I hate having that thing around all the time. "Dirt. On your dad. Do you want to go through it together?"

My knees want to buckle with the weight of his words, never mind the weight of the file which speaks of more than just a little dirt. I don't want to know, yet I slump back on the sofa and flip the file open. I take in the first few pages and my stomach turns. Such detail. Photos. Copies of emails and other papers. I swallow at the bile that stirs in my stomach. This is just the beginning. Before I was even born.

When Matteo comes over, he puts a glass of water and one of Rosalia's fruit platters on the coffee table. The man likes his food healthy. I can't stomach a thing. "Where did you get this?"

"The Don had dirt on everybody. Mafia, remember?" He sits down next to me and leans in to see what I'm looking at.

"Had dirt?" I ask as I look at him. That was past tense.

"He's dead."

"Matteo—" I break off, staring at him in shock. "How? When?"

He shrugs. "He had cancer."

I know nothing of the man in front of me. So little of his past, his relationship with his dad, his family.

"Were you there, this morning? While he…?" I take in a sharp breath. "Oh, God, you were there for his last minutes?" And here I was, scrolling mindlessly through my phone, channel-hopping through some random TV.

"Yes, you could say so."

I want to say I'm sorry, but I'm not. Who knew what else the Don had in store for me. For Peter Armstrong. Another man I never knew.

Matteo seems unfazed about whatever happened this morning, so when he flips a page in the file, my attention is back on my dad's undocumented criminal activity. Evidently undocumented anywhere except here, in the tight-knit Mafia circles. I keep on flipping through the file. Details of bribes my dad accepted from big businesses, votes he bought—bought—by arranging partnerships and money deals under the table. The higher he climbed politically, the bigger the deals became. I can hardly breathe with the shock of it.

By the time we get to the part where Dad got involved with the Scaleras, my hands are trembling. He was in business with them for five years. Five years of sly dealings, getting stolen cars out of the country, getting counterfeit goods into the country, clearing the paperwork trail through Boston Harbor. Like everywhere else, Dad got in one step at a time. Until he got in too deep.

"He knew," I whisper. "There isn't a chance in hell he didn't know." Tears are streaming down my cheeks. There is no chance that Dad did business like this with the Don, being in various political positions that gave him insight to everything that happened in the crime circles, and not understand that two-for-one was a rule, not a rumor. "He lied to me."

"Of course he lied to you."

"You were there, weren't you? Just outside the door."

"Yes, sweetheart. I waited until he pushed me too far."

This man…

My whole life is a lie.

I'm not some great politician's daughter. Dad is nothing but a white-collar criminal who has worked the system to get rich. He's a total stranger, and I his puppet, playing along for all these years.

I never pretended to be a good man who sticks to the rules, kitten. You got to know me exactly as I am. Matteo's words hit me hard. For the first time in my life, someone didn't pretend.

I sob, a cry tearing straight from my soul. I turn into Matteo's shoulder and his arms are there as I knew they'd be. He came in and wrecked my world, or so I thought. No, he came in and pulled the blinders away, making me see for the first time.

"It's okay, kitten," he says as he hugs me close, pressing sweet kisses to my hair. "Now you understand why I'm not keen for you to see him again."

"Yes." Eventually, when I have some grip on myself, I go back to the file and page through the last documents. Since Dad became a senator, he kept things clean, and not because he wanted to keep clean: he got burned by Il Consiglio.

I bite my lip as the realization dawns on me. "If your dad had so much dirt on my dad, why didn't he use it to break him?" I push away from Matteo's embrace so I can look him in the eye. "Clearly his career is his be-all and end-all. You only need to dump this file with the FBI, and he'll spend the rest of his life in prison."

Matteo gathers a strand of hair from my cheek and hooks it behind my ear. "Peter Armstrong is more useful to Il Consiglio outside of prison. And he wouldn't last long inside. He knows we have dirt on him, and he toes the line."

His careful, tender touch sends threads of longing down my spine. "I don't understand," I murmur. "How do I fit into any of this?"

"What do you mean?"

I take a shaky breath, not wanting to ask but having to know the truth. Am I a long-term revenge strategy or is there more? "Why did you marry me, Matteo? Everything here… you have him. You didn't need to…" I taper off as he cups my cheek and seals my lips by running his thumb along them.

"Would it be very hard to believe I have a heart?" he says softly as he stares into my eyes. "And you sort of marched right in and claimed it?"

My whole body, which hung over the dark abyss of a marriage that's a farce, pulls back from the ledge. "What?"

"Come here, sweetheart," he says as he wraps an arm around my shoulders and urges me to sit on his lap.

Matteo cups my hip as I sink into him, into his warmth that's become my anchor. He is my safe place. He is my happy place, and I don't know when it happened. "Say that again," I whisper, not sure I heard right.

"Would it be very hard to believe that the moment you threw my phone across this apartment, I started falling for you so hard, brave and crazy girl?"

"Yes. It's very hard to believe," I whisper, somewhat in awe.

"Hmm. She's not convinced yet." He is staring into my eyes, worried.

"Nope." My heart is melting. Matteo's gaze is open and soft, vulnerable like I've never seen it before.

"Okay. Let me try again," he says as he glides his hand over my thigh, slipping underneath the skirt of my dress. I break out in goosebumps just because he is touching me in that way that sparks lust to the last cell in my body. "Would it be too hard to believe that by the time you jumped that crazy cliff, I basically lost my mind until I found you?"

He tore the world apart like he promised the first day we met. He killed Randazzo. And I can read between the lines. "You killed your dad this morning, didn't you?" I'm sitting on the lap of the man who avenged my mother and brother. "You killed him for me, didn't you?"

"For all of us. It was long overdue."

"Thank you." I don't need to know more. Il Consiglio works, after all, on a need-to-know basis. "You said that first day that if I were yours, you wouldn't be eating dinner if I were kidnapped… you'd be tearing the world down to find me and make sure I'm safe." I lick my lips, watching as he watches me. I have to tell him my truths too. "Would it be hard to believe that it was the moment when I fell for you? I never felt so seen."

"Oh kitten, I saw you—all of you—since that moment you were too shy to get out of the pool. You were just so off limits with the job I had to do."

I slide my hand into his shirt where the top buttons are open, gliding my hand up his neck so my fingers can rake into the hair by his collar. This is the only part of him that's soft, and to think I wanted to plant a knife in it at one point.

He pulls me in for a kiss that testifies to the truth of every word between us. "Would it be very hard to believe that I'm in love with you?"

"No, not when you're like this," I whisper. I love him like this, and in every other way.

"You're my anchor, Tasha. Without you, I'm afloat, pointless. Aimless. I've never felt like this before… I've never loved like this. It's scary. The idea of losing you?—"

"You won't lose me," I say between kisses. "Because I love you too."

He stares at me for a long while, so many emotions flicking through his mind, revealed through his eyes. "To have more than I ever expected in this life that I'm forced to live… to have you… I'm the luckiest man on the planet," he says. "You're going to have to be a good girl for me, kitten. This isn't going to be easy. People come at us all the time and I'll have to keep you safe."

"You'll keep me safe. And I thought I was a good girl."

He laughs as he presses his forehead against mine. "Mostly, you're a good girl. And that was your one sass for the day."

I laugh and move so I can straddle his lap and be higher than him for a change. "I plan to sass you often, now that you've told me you love me. I'm not scared of you one bit, you know. Especially now that it would seem you have a heart."

"Good," he whispers against my lips. "And you better believe it, kitten, because it's all true. And it's all yours."