19. Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Lorenzo

“No, don’t hit me with a hello like you haven’t massively messed things up.”

I roll my eyes because whatever she’s upset about now is probably an overreaction.

“It’s nice to see you too, sister dearest. Not like it hasn’t been months since we last saw each other.”

She rolls her eyes and drops her bag in front of me.

“Oh please, don’t be a baby. I texted.”

“Once a month, letting me know you were alive.”

I could’ve very easily found her, but she had made me swear that I would stay out of her business.

“And that wasn’t enough?”

I grit my teeth and say nothing. I can never win with her.

“That’s not even important right now.”

She turns to Vincent, and the anger in her expression vanishes.

“Hey, Vee.”

I watch my best friend, and probably the cruelest person I know, cough and blush before he mutters something that could’ve been a hello. What the hell?

“What has you so worked up now?” I ask, and she turns back to me, her fury returning in torrents.

“You got Dani pregnant?”

It takes me a while to understand who she’s talking about. My eyes narrow when I do. It isn’t possible for Vincent to have told her about the pregnancy because he is just now finding out.

“How do you know Daniella?”

She rolls her eyes like I’ve just asked the most boring question.

“We are like, best friends. How could you get her pregnant, you prick?”

What on earth is happening? She and Daniella are friends? So the one friend Daniella was talking about is my sister?

“What the hell have you been doing for the last year and how the fuck are you best friends with Daniella?”

Renee slides in to sit beside Vincent and I watch him scoot to the other end of the booth as if trying to get away from her. If she notices, she says nothing.

“We worked together before she quit. She’s focused on getting revenge on you for Jeremy. Fucking Jeremy. I told you I didn’t trust him.”

“You don’t trust anyone.”

“And with good reason, case in point, fucking Jeremy.”

This conversation is getting away from me.

“Backtrack a bit for me, will you? How did you start working with her?”

“The week after you hired Jeremy to clean up our books, I knew he was sketchy. You wouldn’t listen to me, so I found out everything I could about him, including the fact that he was engaged to the beautiful Daniella Roberto. I thought they might be planning something or working together, so I got hired at her workplace to keep an eye on her. Suffice to say, she was really fucking clueless about her fiancé’s double life. You should’ve seen her crying for the bastard.”

She takes my glass and downs whatever was left in it.

“She’s all right…actually, she’s pretty amazing…except for her shit taste in men, case in point…” She looks at me with one brow lifted.

“Fucking Jeremy?” I ask with a small smile, and she narrows her eyes.

“You.”

Ouch. My sister always knew how to wound me.

“How long have you been in her life for?” I ask, and she looks away.

“I told you, six months.”

“Liar.”

She rolls her eyes again and I see Vincent swallow. What on earth is going on with him?

“Fine. I know you only hired Jeremy officially this year, but he'd been trying to weasel his way into this family for a while.”

She leans back in the chair and crosses her arms. Renee never liked Jeremy. She also was never shy about letting us know just how much she didn't like him.

Even the man himself knew that she hated him. I always thought she was being a little much, but then she disappeared a year ago.

“It didn't take much to find out about Daniella from Jeremy. The guy was showing everyone with fucking eyes his fiancée. I think he was more proud of how insanely hot she is than anything else. He was such a brag.”

I raise my brows at her.

“You're a braggart too.”

“Yeah, but when I do it, it’s cute and charming. When he did it, it was gross and creeped me out. I once heard him joking with the guys at the docks about maybe letting them have a go at her.”

She shivers from a non-existent chill, and my blood boiled. The thought of another man touching Dani makes me want to kill Jeremy all over again.

It’s unfathomable to me that he could even joke about letting that happen. It’s a fact that she is insanely beautiful and has a body that would send any living man into overdrive, but I want to bottle her up and keep her so I'm the only one who gets to look at her, who gets to touch her, who gets to have her.

“Go on,” I say, and Renee continues.

“I got curious. I wanted to know what kind of person would be with a sleazebag like that so willingly. And that was when I started thinking that maybe she was in on whatever he was planning too. Maybe she knew all about his sleazebag ways and could tolerate it because he was bringing in the money. And so, I got as much information about her as I could to make an informed decision. It was very easy moving things around and getting a position at her office. What wasn’t easy was getting close to her.”

She shakes her head and scoffs.

“The girl was wound tighter than a grandfather clock and so firmly welded shut. The only person she let close to her was Jeremy. Believe me, I tried. I’m not even joking when I say that the guy was her whole world. Him dying gave me the perfect opening to get close to her and that was when I realized that she really didn’t know anything about him other than the fact that he was an accountant, making barely above minimum wage. The house they lived in together was so tiny. My closet is bigger.”

I’ve seen the house, and she’s not wrong. It was a small place, but Daniella had somehow managed to make it hers. Beautiful, inviting. The small bungalow was tucked away in a quiet neighborhood, with a charming exterior painted in soft blue and white.

The front yard was meticulously kept, with a neat lawn and flower beds bursting with color. Inside, the house was modest, with a cozy living room that welcomed you with warm, inviting tones.

Daniella’s personal touch was evident in every corner—from the carefully chosen artwork on the walls to the plush cushions on the sofa. All the furniture in the house was mismatched in a way that would normally have been too chaotic for me to handle, but Daniella makes chaos look good.

Despite its size, the house felt open and airy, with plenty of natural light streaming through the windows.

“She put her heart into that place,” Renee continues, and it’s so rare to hear my sister sound like she actually cares about someone.

“She did,” I say, thinking back to the details I noticed. “It might be small, but it’s beautiful and inviting.”

“Anyways, Jeremy clearly wasn’t bringing any of the big bucks he was earning into their home. Unless she has a secret penchant for suffering and poverty, then she didn’t know about it.”

I turn to Vincent.

“You knew about this?”

He is twirling his glass in his hand and still looks like sitting here with us is the last place on earth he wants to be.

“Yes.”

“Don’t give him grief. He told you what you needed to know and I asked him to keep my business private.”

“Except, it wasn’t just your business. This concerns me too. This concerns the entire family.”

Renee has always been a lone wolf, running off on her own and making a name for herself completely separate from us. It’s something I’ve always admired, except for when it pisses me off, like right now.

“I know that. Which is why he told you about the relationship between the two in the first place. I thought that learning that she was Jeremy’s fiancé would be enough to get you to stay away, but clearly I underestimated your ability to think with your dick.”

“Really, Vincent. You allow a woman to tell you what you can or can’t tell me?”

“Don’t fucking talk about me like I’m not here, and what do you mean ‘a woman’?”

I turn my glare away from Vincent and back to her.

“You’re a woman, or is that something else you’ve had changed?”

She opens her mouth and closes it two times before she raises her finger to point at me.

It is so similar to how Mama would always wag her finger at me when I'd done something she considered wrong. It amazes me sometimes how similar they look.

They have the same ebony hair and green eyes, the same fire in their hearts. But while Mama had been an expert at keeping that fire contained, Renee never cared much for extinguishing her flames, and they always ended up burning those around her.

“This ‘woman’ is the one who told you not to trust Jeremy. This woman, is the one who thought to investigate him. This woman is the only reason you know that she is Jeremy’s widow. Do not call me ‘woman’ like it’s a derogatory term.”

I know that it is wrong to have said that, that this is a problem she always had with our father. He never believed that women could do the things that we do. He always felt that women should be taken care of, protected and provided for, rather than them taking care of themselves.

His grand plans for Renee’s life had been for her to marry a man in the Cosa Nostra, have a bunch of sons and live out her life planting magnolias. In fact, he had betrothed her to Massimo, but she and I had decided that she didn’t have to honor that promise once our father died. He might have been our friend when we were children, but he was not a fit friend or husband as a grown man.

Renee had nipped any ideas of compliance in the bud as soon as she went off to boarding school. Her choice of lifestyle was always a bone of contention between herself and my father, even at the end of his life.

“I suffered years of discrimination and condescension from Dad and the rest of the men I'm surrounded with. I won't take it from you too.”

“I shouldn't have said that. It was wrong, and I apologize.”

“I was right. I need you to say that I was right.”

It’s not a hard ask. I've never been one to withhold compliments, especially when they are earned.

“You were right.”

She exhales and nods.

“Thank you. I asked Vincent to keep it quiet because I knew that you would have taken over if you'd known what I was doing. I couldn't risk that.”

She's not wrong.

“Fine. What now?”

“What do you mean ‘what now’? You've gotten her pregnant. I know you well enough to know what that means. You're going to want to keep her.”

She's right again.

“Is that so bad?”

“You’re not seriously asking that. Of course, it is! There's no way you can hide your involvement in Jeremy’s death forever. She's going to have questions and when she gets the answers, she’s going to hate you. And you know Lorenzo, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“She can ask her questions and she can get the answers. She can hate me if she wants to. It doesn’t change anything. I’ve asked her to move in with me.”

Renee gets up and starts pacing the floor.

“That particular decision, I agree with. Massimo is a loose cannon right now, and there’s no telling what he will do to her when he finds out. She has already exposed herself to him.”

“What do you mean ‘exposed’ herself to him?” Vincent asks before I am able to.

She sighs and drops back down into her seat.

“How do you think she found out about you? Massimo and Romero were at the funeral. They introduced themselves as college buddies of Jeremy’s, but I think they were also there to scope her out.”

This is news to me; information that I should have had as soon as it happened. I make a mental note to ask Dino about it.

“She tracked him down to his tiny little hideout downtown and he was a little birdie, all too happy to sing about you.”

“She went to his hideout alone?” I ask, and she nods. “And he didn’t snap her neck in two?”

Even as I ask it, bile fills my throat and makes me sick.

“I think he didn’t hurt her just to mess with you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has someone here reporting everything to him.”

“How did he miss seeing you at the funeral?” I ask, and she frowns.

“That’s the thing, he did see me. He knows who I am because he has hit on me every single time he has seen me. I’m not sure what game he is playing right now, but I wouldn’t trust him.”

“I’ll expedite the move,” Vincent says and gets up like his butt is on fire. I think he was just looking for the perfect opportunity to escape.

Before either of us can say anything, he slips through the table and goes away.

“What’s his problem?” I ask, and Renee frowns but says nothing.

“Moving her into your house is the best way to keep her safe. I’m happy about that.”

“I’m filled with joy,” I say drily. “Making you happy was the number one thing on my mind when I made the decision.”

“I still think you should talk to her, tell her everything before she talks to the wrong person and gets the wrong version of the story. She’s at the point in her life where she is very impressionable, you want to be the voice in her ear.”

Again, she’s right.

But how do I explain that I’m almost scared of what her reaction will be to finding out the role I played in this whole mess?

“This whole thing is very royally fucked up,” she comments, and I cannot agree more.

“Can I ask that you continue to keep an eye on her?” She turns serious.

“I know you don’t trust me, and you think I’m reckless. Believe me, I get it. But hear me out and believe me when I say that I may have started out seeing her as a target, but it’s changed now. She’s my friend now and I care about her. I don’t think I have to explain to you how she sneaks up on you and makes you care about her.”

She’s right, about the fact that I don’t always trust her, and I think she’s reckless, but she’s also right about what I feel for Daniella.

“No, you don’t. And I trust you,” she tilts her head and raises an eyebrow. “Sometimes.”

She smiles and takes Vincent’s cup, draining what’s left of the contents.

“What on earth is going on between the two of you?”

She looks up at me, and she smiles, but it is not a Renee smile because there is no mischief in it.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

She gets up to leave, and I get up too.

“Renata, wait.”

I use the Italian rendition of her name and the sentimental pull of it settles on my skin. She turns to me, and there’s a look in her eyes, something like longing, and I know my eyes mirror the expression.

We are both longing for the times when we were just children, running around and breaking Mama’s precious china. The times she would run after me, hanging onto big brother’s tailcoats. A time before the reality of our inheritance and what the life we were born into meant could affect us.

I come out of the booth and walk to her. I don’t touch her, though.

“I would have been happy to hear from you.”

She smiles up at me and adjusts the strap of her bag.

“Would you?”

And without another word, she turns and leaves.

It’s my turn to sigh, and I’m left to clean up after the tornado and turbulence that Renata Durreti always leaves in her wake.