This was real.
What Ren and I had was real.
I was many things, but I wasn’t delusional.
This. Was. Fucking. Real.
And so long as she wanted me to, I would fight for us.
Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
Unknown
I knew I had asked him to leave, but when I woke up to an empty bed, the pang in my chest reminded me of what a horrible idea being near Damian was. I had spent the past ten years convincing myself that I didn’t care about him.
Now he was gone, and I didn’t want him to be.
All war is deception.
Sun Tzu
Three Days Later
Damian: I said I’d be gone, but I lied. I’m not giving up on us. I made a mistake when you left ten years ago. I should have chased you better. I should have never stopped chasing. I’m not making that mistake again. I’ll see you at the next summit in a month. We’re not spending another ten years apart when we both want this. This is happening, Knight.
Error: Message failed to send. This number is invalid. Please resend using a valid 10-digit mobile number or a valid short code.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
Arthur Conan Doyle
“Save some for the rest of us,” Sally joked as I hoarded half of one of the pepperoni pizza boxes in the empty staff room. She was my best friend in Connecticut, which was sad considering we weren’t really friends. Just colleagues who spent lunch period eating together on occasion.
My eyes lifted to hers, one hand on a plate full of pizza slices and the other shoveling a slice into my mouth. “Sorry,” I spoke around a mouthful of food.
Her nails tapped the table she sat at, and in a conservative cardigan, silky blouse, and loose slacks, she looked more like a librarian than our actual librarian did. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were eating your way through a heartbreak. You look like me after Eric and I divorced.” Her locker-blue eyes scanned my figure through oversized glasses as she tucked a blonde lock of hair back into her neat bun. “Just about nine years younger and forty pounds slimmer.”
“No heartbreak here.” I took a seat next to her and set down my plate on the cheap plastic tabletop. “I just haven’t eaten pizza in forever.”
Truthfully, I was stress eating. You know that feeling you get when you know something is wrong, but you do it anyway? After changing my number, I had that in droves, and it pushed me into the cushy arms of pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and extra marinara. I paused. Fuck, I forgot the parmesan.
Like the mindreader she was, Sally handed me a few packets and smiled when I thanked her. “Are you going to tell me what is eating away at you?”
I tore a cheese packet open and sprinkled the processed parmesan onto a slice with the skill of a Kitchen Nightmares chef. “Nothing is eating away at anything except me with this pizza.” To make my point, I chomped down on a bigger bite than I could handle.
My mind wandered to my phone, and I wondered if Damian had tried to text or call me since I left New York. Changing my number had been a spur of the moment ordeal, fueled by the fear and uncertainty I felt after waking up alone—even though, being the hypocrite I was, I’d asked him to leave before I woke up.
Sally handed me a napkin, which I dabbed against my face. Her mama bear instincts were strong despite our mere ten-year age gap, and she doted on me like she did one of her students. “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt? Really, Sal?” I pointed a pizza slice at her as I retorted, “You know, if this conversation were an essay and you were one of your students, you’d fail yourself for either plagiarism or unoriginality.”
“My students are seven and eight. They don’t write essays.” She took in my face, then paused, raised a manicured hand to her chest, and gasped. “Renata, you do not make your students write essays. They’re in second grade!”
I set the pizza slice down and dabbed at the oil with a napkin because I knew the pet peeve would distract her. “It’s a formulaic five paragraph structure on why family matters, not a research essay on the lack of bipartisanship in Washington. They’ll manage.”
“Do you have to do that?” Her eyes dipped to my fiery-orange, oil-soaked napkin, and she scrunched her nose before meeting my eyes again. “‘They’ll manage’? I swear, you were raised by tigers.”
Close.
Vitalis.
“They’ll write thank you notes to me from whatever Ivy League school they’re accepted to in ten years.” I shrugged and tossed the napkin at the trashcan by the door, nearly missing. “And yes, I have to do this. There’s more oil than pizza on each slice.”
She ignored me as I pressed a second napkin to the slice. Her unimpressed expression bounced off my shoulders. “I thought you were more fun than that. You’re supposed to be the cool teacher. You had your students build miniature catapults last year, and they got to launch little ping pong balls at the PE teachers. I remember all that screaming and cheering—and all the shade my students threw my way for not adding catapults to my lesson plan.”
“I’m not fun. It was an engineering, math, and physics lesson,” I pointed out.
Sally opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “I know what you’re doing.”
If you know what I’m doing, do tell, my brain begged. I haven’t known what I’ve been doing since I fled Devils Ridge. Passing time? Going through the motions? Making excuses not to apologize to Damian until too much time slipped by? Answer D, all of the above?
My pizza no longer appealed to me, and I pasted the most innocent look I could conjure on my face. “Enlighten me.”
“You’re distracting me from my original question.”
And I usually succeeded in drawing our conversations away from things too personal to discuss. I scanned my brain, wondering where I went wrong over the past five minutes.
“Is it a boy?” she pressed.
“When have you ever seen me with a boy?”
“I never see you outside of work.”
Fair point.
I slid my plate away from me and crossed my arms. “It’s not a guy.”
“Then, why are you blushing?”
Oh, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.
Blushing? Really? This was what I’d meant when I said time outside the mafia had softened me. I passed time by training, so I could still fight and shoot a gun, but I had the emotional fortitude of a preteen popping her L.J. Shen cherry.
“Fine, it’s a guy.” I didn’t elaborate, hoping the bell would ring before she could pick apart my sanity.
No such luck.
“Who? Do I know him? Does he live here?”
“No, no, and no.”
She furrowed her carefully plucked brows. “‘Who’ isn’t a yes or no question…”
“His name is Damian.”
“Hot.” When I didn’t continue, she leaned forward and asked, “Well?”
“Well, nothing.”
“I give great advice.”
“Good to know.”
“Seriously, I could have been a therapist or a life coach or a fluffer.”
“I don’t think that means what you think it means.”
“Fluffer? Someone who fluffs someone else’s ego. What else could it mean?”
“You know how movie sets film multiple takes of a single scene?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Porn sets do, too. To keep the men hard, they hire fluffers, whose job it is to suck—”
“Oh, my goodness! Renata! We’re in a school.”
My lips quirked up, and I finally relaxed. “You ask, I answer.”
“If only that were really true…”
I ate in silence for a moment, pausing to study Sally. My teeth dug into my lower lip as I considered whether or not to take up her offer for advice. I mean, who else could I ask? Maman would just tell me to lower my walls, accompani
ed by a litany of other things I didn’t want to hear.
Standing, I brought my plate to the sink and washed it before returning to my seat. “Have you ever been afraid to let your guard down?”
“Around a guy?”
I thought about it. “Yes, but also around everyone, I guess.”
Who was I kidding? My walls had more guards than Fort Knox, and living trapped behind confines of my own making wasn’t living. Happiness over the past ten years had been a lie I deceived myself into believing.
“I think most people have that fear of letting their guard down, especially if they’ve gone through something difficult in the past. Take me and Eric, for instance. Dating feels nearly impossible after the divorce. Every time I convince myself to go on a date, I always feel like the relationship is destined to end, which is a horrible state of mind to enter a relationship in. Nothing can succeed if you don’t give it a chance to.”
“So, what do you do?”
“You take a leap, knowing you’re strong enough to catch yourself if no one else is there to.”
“I have a friend who used to date a guy ten years ago, and she recently met him again…”
“Your friend…” Sally started, clearly not believing this friend existed. “How did she feel when she saw him again?”
“Like the world flipped upside down, butterfly clips suddenly came back in style, people still communicated via AOL Instant Messenger, and floppy disks were the new biggest invention of our lifetime.”
“So, her feelings never ebbed?”
“I guess not,” I allowed, because who could get over Damiano De Luca? I was only human.
“Why didn’t she try to make things work the first time?”
“She was scared.”
“Of?”
“The boy’s dad approached my friend and threatened to”—I considered how truthful I could be before settling for a minor substitution—“disown his son if she continued their relationship.”
“So, she left.”
“Yep.”
“And she regretted it.”
“Every day since.”
“And the dad?”
“What about him?”
“Is he still a problem?”
“He stopped being a problem less than a year after she left.”
“Then, why did she stay away?”
“She didn’t explain to the boy why she left. Instead, she created a fake fight and fled, because she was afraid he’d stop her if she told him the truth.”
“She could have explained that to him. Any reasonable person would understand.”
I tugged at my dress, reluctant to admit the truth. “She was afraid.”
“Of?”
“The problems in her relationship with the boy had never been just about the boy. In a perfect world, they’d be happily married by now. But the world isn’t perfect, and she was raised by a woman who showed her how to never fight for love and a man who told her to never let her guard down. So, it wasn’t just the boy I couldn’t let my guard down for. It was everyone.”
I didn’t even catch my slip up, too caught up in the realization that I needed to fix my issues before Damian and I could ever have a chance.
“Can I offer you advice from someone who’s seen you nearly every day for the past seven years?”
“Of course.”
The sympathy in Sally’s eyes struck me. “Sometimes, people don’t build walls to keep others out. Sometimes, they do it to protect what’s left inside.” She reached across the table and took my hand, all pretenses of talking about a ‘friend’ discarded. “Remember—that brick you use to build your walls can be a brick you use to rebuild what’s within them.”
A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
Criss Jami
I smiled at Gaspard, Maman’s majordomo, as he left me with a little bow and strode out of Maman’s library. My eyes strayed to the books on the shelves, noting a few new limited editions sitting beside a box of Gurkha Black Dragon cigars, like the ones Damian used to have in his bedroom’s humidor. Except I’d never seen him smoke. Come to think of it, I’d never seen Maman smoke either. Expensive decoration. That was what they were.
Taking a seat in front of Maman’s chessboard, I looked out of the floor-to-ceiling French windows and studied two birds perched on a tree.
“Thank you for coming, Renata.” Maman kissed me on the cheek before taking a seat across from me. The way her smile consumed her face made her radiant, and I understood how Papà could be so worried and insecure that she’d leave him.
People loved Maman. Gravitated to her. She was kindhearted, empathetic, and someone I could tell all my secrets to. Hell, I’d even told her about Damian’s existence before he rose to the De Luca throne. I spilled to her about falling in love with him and running away, and I trusted her to keep my secrets like I trusted Tijan to write a page-turner every time.
With her connections and magnetism, a divorce with Maman would embarrass Papà. Which was why she holed up in her fortress in the States, and Papà stayed the hell away to avoid poking the bear.
My eyes dipped to the chessboard, and I took in the pieces. “You’ve moved something.”
“Good eye,” she praised, that smile still glued to her face. “Knight to F7.”
“This has got to be the slowest game of chess ever. You’ve been playing this exact game since I was a kid.”
“It’s a game of patience, yes.”
“Not speed chess.”
“Speed chess doesn’t gratify.”
“Tell that to the multi-million dollar World Rapid and Blitz prize winners each year.”
Her bubbly laughter echoed in the room. “Remind me why I raised a smart ass.”
I suppressed my smile with pursed lips. “You love me.”
“That, I do.” Her fingers traced her queen, and she continued after a beat, “I didn’t bring you here to discuss speed chess, Renata.”
“Why am I here? Not that I don’t love seeing you…”
“We need to go over what’s required of you before the next event.”
“Event? Are you saying I’m going to the city again?”
“Yes, you had to have known that.”
“I—” After a sharp inhale, I let out my exhaustion with a deep exhale. “What if I don’t want to?”
I’d left the mafia for a reason. After fleeing Devils Ridge, Papà wanted me back in Italy to train as his second in command, but I needed out. I couldn’t stomach being part of a system that birthed Angelo De Luca, and the lies, the deception, and the way people used one another sickened me.
So, I turned to the only thing left that I enjoyed—school. Mama helped me extricate myself from the Vitali, and I left for college, went on a fast track to becoming a teacher, and have been teaching second grade ever since. But being the Vitali representative at a function felt like too close a step to rejoining the mafia fold.
Maman repositioned the queen and clasped her hands together. “I pulled a lot of strings to get you out of the mafia, Renata, and I don’t ask you for much. Your father won’t come to America, even to represent the Vitali name, and I can’t come because…” Her voice trailed off, but I knew what she’d been about to say.
She couldn’t come because of her secret relationship with Vincent.
My eyes traced the fine lines on her forehead and the way her eyelids drooped a bit. Maman still grieved the loss of her love, and I was being an ungrateful daughter. A grudge-holding chicken, too, who couldn’t see past her barriers but also resented the way Damian left the library nook.
“Please, do this for me, Renata.”
I let loose the sigh that had been building the past few minutes. “Okay.”
Maman covered the events and gave me a detailed binder of things I needed to say and do, while I prepared myself for the idea of seeing Damian again. But there are some things you can’t prepare for.
<
br /> Betrayal.
Love.
Damiano De Luca.
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true.
Soren Kierkegaard
One Month Later
“I wasn’t sure I’d find you here.”
I placed a bookmark between two pages and set the book down—The Toynbee Convector, to my dismay. “You weren’t sure you’d find me at the place you know I stay at?”
I kept my face blank and the scoff I wanted to emit quiet. Damian didn’t need to know how much he shook me. I almost couldn’t believe that I’d once been so aloof. I didn’t feel like the same person I had been when I had first stepped foot in Texas ten years ago. Nor did I feel like the person I’d been when I arrived for the funeral just over a month ago.
Irritation scuffed at my throat, its temperature rising with each step he took toward me.
Why are you so bitter he left you that morning? You wanted him to. It’s not like you like him. You can’t like him.
The voice in my head could suffer tax audits for the rest of its life, jump off a cliff, and be forced to watch Barney and Friends on repeat in Hell, for all I cared. Denial felt better than the alternative—admitting the feelings I had for Damian hadn’t lessened over time.
“You’re mad at me?” He laid next to me on the bed, his back propped against my pillow. “You changed your phone number. I just couldn’t believe it.”
I’d done that because I’d spent the first day back from New York glued to my phone, and waking up alone reminded me of how alone I’d felt over the past decade. Damian and I were heartbreak. How could I want heartbreak?
He pressed on despite my silence. “I did what you wanted. If anything, I should be mad at you for making me leave—” His tone was light, but I swore I heard undercurrents of bitterness in him. He wouldn’t admit it, but he wasn’t over my departure.
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