by Bethany-Kris
“And my uncle?” Calisto asked. “What of him?”
“He thought a marriage would be a good thing between our families.”
Calisto was stunned.
Speechless.
He could do the math in his head perfectly fine. The time when Affonso was running back and forth to Jersey to woo Connor’s daughter and the idea of a marriage with the girl, he had already agreed to a marriage with Emma’s family. It had already been set in stone.
Calisto couldn’t understand why his uncle would do that. Double playing two families in the business of marriage was a dangerous game to be mixed up in. Affonso would have had to know that. It was downright stupid.
Why would he even bother?
Unless …
Calisto clenched his hands, his thoughts running wild.
Unless Affonso meant for an issue to be caused close to home, one that would put his family in danger and make his seat as the boss look bad to his men. It would be yet another way to force Calisto to protect his family, step up the way Affonso wanted him to, and be the man he intended for him to be.
A man Calisto didn’t want to be.
“And then what?” Calisto asked, managing to keep the anger out of his tone.
“Affonso didn’t answer my calls for about a week,” Connor replied. “I did a bit of checking. It was about that time that I found out he had taken a trip to Vegas.”
“When he came home, he brought his new wife with him,” Calisto finished.
“Yes.”
“And so you began attacking us in little ways, wanting to cause an issue for his betrayal.”
“No,” Connor said quietly.
“I don’t understand. Other than him screwing you on the marriage deal, I don’t see what other problems he caused you, Connor.”
The Irish boss dug in his pocket, and pulled out a phone. Turning it on, the man swiped his finger over the screen a few times, bringing up a gallery of pictures. Soon enough, he found the one he was looking for.
A young, pretty woman with red hair was smiling tiredly at the screen. In her arms, she held a dark-haired, black-eyed baby swaddled in white.
“He was born just a few months ago,” Connor said. “My daughter—Ciara—named him Dylan. He’s five months old now.”
Calisto stared at the picture of the baby boy, seeing his family features reflected back at him, and feeling like he couldn’t breathe with every passing second. Everything that had happened finally started to make sense to Calisto.
“Affonso didn’t know about the baby,” Connor said. “He wouldn’t answer my calls, or the attempts my men made to talk to him. He even went as far as killing my men, which started the back and forth on the streets. He did it first, not me. I only wanted him to know what he had left my daughter with, and nothing more.
“I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t sit down with me again,” Connor continued when Calisto stayed quiet. “I didn’t expect anything from him as far as my daughter and the child went. I understood he had married another woman, and his focus was there. I only wanted to let him know that he had a child, should he want to be involved with the boy. We Irish keep family very close, and I assumed the Italians would be no different. Clearly, I was wrong.”
“You’re not wrong,” Calisto admitted, “but Affonso is not like most Italians.”
Connor shrugged. “I know that now. Nonetheless, the more pressure I put on Affonso, the more he pushed back on me. Before I knew it, there was a mess everywhere and the bodies were piling up. My last hope was the night his wife was attacked. I only meant to show how close I could get to him, and then his wife got in the way.”
“She was going home, actually,” Calisto said.
“I see. I apologize. It never should have happened.”
Calisto willed his sympathy away. He couldn’t afford to feel for the Irish boss in this situation. He still had a famiglia to protect. Still, as he stared at the picture of the baby, he felt a kindred connection to yet another one of his siblings.
Affonso just kept making children.
All over the fucking place.
He never cared for them.
“You’re telling me that he still doesn’t know about the boy?” Calisto asked.
Connor shook his head. “No.”
“I assume, guessing by the way you talk fondly of your daughter and her child, that you love her a great deal. Am I right?”
“Don’t you love your children?” Connor asked.
Calisto’s heart ached and he said coldly, “I have no children.”
“My mistake. I do love my daughter very much.”
“Then your best effort would be spent doing the exact opposite of what you have been doing.”
Connor’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“Protect your daughter and her child from the awfulness of my uncle—make sure he never knows that baby boy exists. If he does know, he’ll stop at nothing to have the boy as his and his alone. Make no mistake about it, he would let the baby watch its mother die, if that meant Affonso could raise the boy on his own and by his terms.”
“Why would you say that?”
Calisto wet his lips, and forced himself to look away from the picture. “Because he did it to me, but it was my father that he killed. I would hate to see him do it again, Connor.”
The Irish boss grew silent for a long while. He put his phone away, rested back in the pew, and said nothing. Calisto let the man absorb their entire conversation, and he did the same.
“I’ll allow you to continue the business on the Brighton streets,” Calisto said. “I don’t see the problem, but I will ask that you keep your men away from mine and make sure they understand the Italians own the majority say there.”
“I’ll accept that,” Connor replied.
“I would also appreciate an update every once in a while.”
“On what?”
Calisto nodded at Connor’s pocket. “The child. He’s my family, after all.”
“I can do that as well.”
“Thank you.”
“I have something else for you,” Connor said, pulling a folded up paper from his inner suit jacket pocket. He handed it out to Calisto. “Here, take it.”
Calisto did, opening up the paper slowly. A picture of an unknown man with reddish-brown hair and green eyes stared back at him. Freckles dotted the man’s sharp cheekbones, and a large, rounded scar was under his right eye. On the bottom left-hand side of the page, a name and information was provided about the man in the picture.
Aiden Allen.
Thirty-four years old.
Single, no family.
An address was also listed, as well as the man’s favorite places to hang out when he wasn’t working.
“My man was not punished as he should have been because I thought I owed the Donati family a bit of retribution for the beating Affonso’s wife suffered,” Connor explained.
Calisto’s rage was spilling into his throat again like bile. He barely kept control, and his hand shook as he clenched the paper into a crumpled ball.
“And this is him?”
“Yes,” Connor answered instantly.
The man would die before the fucking night was out.
Calisto would do it himself.
“After this man is gone, no more bad blood between us, yes?” Calisto asked.
“No more,” Connor confirmed.
“It will not be an easy death.”
Connor nodded, and stood from the pew. “I wouldn’t assume differently, Calisto. I don’t imagine the young woman’s beating was an easy one, was it? Please make sure my man understands that when you find him.”
“Absolutely.”
The Irish boss stepped out into the aisle. “It was good to meet you, Calisto. And I hope we don’t find ourselves having another one of these.”
Calisto didn’t respond.
He figured that he didn’t really have to.
The entire meeting had been enough.
>
Emma
Emma’s hands trembled, and she clasped them together in her lap in an attempt to hide her nervousness and shame. The taste of her recklessness rested heavily on the back of her tongue, reminding her of the mistakes she had made over the last couple of months.
Really, over the last year.
She should have been more careful.
This shouldn’t have happened at all.
Emma hadn’t wanted it to happen again.
“It’s very early,” the doctor said across the desk from her.
Emma felt smaller than she actually was, like a little bug hearing big words it couldn’t understand. She might as well have been a million miles away and not actually in the moment like she needed to be.
“The routine bloodwork brought it to our attention,” the doctor continued.
How was this real?
How was she supposed to fix this?
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said quietly.
Emma’s head snapped up at those words. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman repeated. “You don’t seem happy about the news.”
“I don’t know how to feel,” Emma lied.
She did know.
Worried.
Terrified.
Ashamed.
Confused.
Happy …
It was one big jumble inside her body, the emotions crashing into one another over and over like waves in an ocean. The only problem was that Emma was the ocean, and she wasn’t very good at weathering the waves until they passed.
“If you’d like, I could set you up with an appointment to term—”
“No,” Emma rushed to say, cutting off the doctor before she could even finish.
After the mistakes her previous doctor had made—errors that cost Emma her child’s life—she had found a new doctor. Affonso hadn’t said much all those months ago when Emma told him she would be seeing a physician of her choosing. She was grateful for the change, now.
Affonso’s chosen doctor would not have treated her with as much kindness and respect as this one was. He would not have offered her what this one just had.
The doctor sighed, reached forward, and flipped open Emma’s file. She quickly scanned through the pages of Emma’s medical history, and focused in on the most recent months.
“I see you talked with a fertility specialist,” the doctor noted.
“I did,” Emma replied faintly.
“And what came of that?”
Emma struggled to remember her conversation with the fertility doctor. It had been such a difficult time for her—one she would rather forget entirely. All those months had been spent in a haze of dazed days and going through the motions. Her grief had been damn near unbearable.
“I believe there was a procedure that was mentioned, should another happen,” Emma replied.
The doctor glanced up. “I’m familiar with it.”
“It’s not a guarantee.”
“It’s better than what you’re looking at now. A lot better.”
Emma nodded, and stared down at her hands. “I went to eighteen weeks.”
“Good. Then we have a bit of time to plan.” The doctor reached for a pen and said, “I need some information, and then you can head on home and tell your husband the good news.”
Good news.
It was more like a horror story.
One that would end terribly for Emma.
“Last missed menstrual cycle?” the doctor asked.
Emma’s throat tightened around her words. “Tomorrow would be the first day for it. I should have gotten it tomorrow.”
The doctor hummed. “Early indeed. It was really just luck that we caught the pregnancy like this. If you hadn’t come in for bloodwork, you might not have known for another few weeks, maybe a little less.”
What did it matter now?
She was, regardless of the rest.
Pregnant.
Emma swallowed convulsively, her stomach churning. She was pregnant. Her own stupidity was going to cost her another child, or worse, her own life. After mentioning a couple of weeks ago to her doctor during a follow-up appointment that she was still quite tired and often exhausted after the beating, the doctor suggested a blood workup. It was possible, the doctor had said, that after losing so much blood, her body was struggling to regenerate as fast as it should, and her iron levels could be lower than normal.
She had finally gotten in yesterday to do the bloodwork.
Today, Emma had gotten a call.
“I see you’re on birth control,” the doctor said now.
“Yes,” Emma said.
“Stop taking it today. Do you have any idea why it failed?”
“Because I was an idiot,” Emma replied.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
Emma flinched at the pity in the woman’s tone. “Don’t do that. What I said was true. I’m an idiot, and I wasn’t careful like I should have been. I had missed a few pills last month after my attack during my days in the hospital. And when I had to continue taking antibiotics after I got out, I knew I was supposed to use a backup.”
It was almost like she’d done this to herself, knowing what would come of it. It made Emma hate herself a little more.
Instinctively, she put a hand over her stomach as the doctor continued talking about options and how they would proceed from here.
“I understand you’re frightened,” the doctor said quietly. “After all that you’ve been through this last year with your previous pregnancies, I can certainly understand why you would feel that way. I want to assure you that this pregnancy is much more likely to succeed, Emma, because we know what the problem is and we can fix it. Or rather, try our best to give you as much time to carry your baby as possible.”
Emma nodded, but she couldn’t make her lips move to respond.
Nothing would be fine.
Her husband was not the father of this child.
If he ever came back from wherever in the fuck he was, Affonso would know the truth. He hadn’t slept with his wife in months. Emma couldn’t stick her head in the sand. Her husband was not a stupid man. She wouldn’t be able to trick him like the first time.
Not that she wanted to.
The baby was Calisto’s child.
How was she supposed to tell him?
What would they do?
As the doctor continued talking, Emma was lost in her own thoughts. She didn’t know what to do.
“Forgive me, Father,” Emma whispered. “It has been two years since my last confession.”
Across the floor from her, Father Day sat with his ankle crossed over his knee and his hands in his lap. In his robe and collar, he was the very picture of patience and grace. Strangely, that helped Emma a great deal to see him sitting there like that, waiting and not judging her.
“Why so long?” the priest asked.
Emma cleared her throat, willing away her emotions. “I haven’t felt a need to confess.”
“Yet, you do today, child.”
“Maybe I was too caught up in my own selfishness to give it the thought and time it deserved.”
Father Day smiled. “That’s probably more likely. We all have those moments, however, so it’s understandable that you would have one yourself. It’s a human trait we all share.”
“Thank you.”
“Who was your last confessor?”
“A priest from my family’s church. I grew up listening to him every Sunday,” Emma said.
“So you trusted him,” Father Day replied.
“Of course.”
“I hope that I can offer you the same, Emma.”
Emma blew out a shaky breath, willing her nerves to leave. Above most people in her life, she would always trust a priest. His job was with God first, man second. His doctrine required him to keep her confessions between him and God only.
She just needed to talk.
“So what’s made you come now, after two years, to begin confessing aga
in?” Father Day asked.
“It started fourteen months ago.”
Father Day’s head tipped to the side. “Right after you married Affonso?”
“Right before,” she corrected.
“Go on.”
“Everything changed, and not in the way I thought it would.”
“Why did it change?” he asked.
Emma stared beyond the priest to the cross hanging off the wall. “Because I met Calisto Donati.”
Father Day rested back in his chair with a nod. A nod that said her words weren’t a surprise, but one that said he had been waiting for her to finally come see him.
“I met him,” Emma continued, blinking away the sudden flood of tears and emotions, “and he changed everything, Father.”
A thump woke Emma from the slumber that had finally found her after hours of worrying and trying to fall asleep. She had waited up for Calisto to come back to the Donati home as he did every night since Affonso left, but he hadn’t showed up.
The day had been overwhelming, and sleep came late for Emma.
She pushed up from the bed, wiping at her face and running her hands through her hair. Another thump and low curse echoed outside of her bedroom. Confused, she got out of bed, grabbed the silk robe hanging off the bedpost, and wrapped it around her body. She padded over to the door, ignoring the cold hardwood chilling the soles of her feet. Opening the door, she peered out into an empty, dark hallway.
“Who’s there?” Emma called.
Silence answered her back.
She wasn’t worried that someone might have broken into the home. They would have been dead before they even got the front door open. The enforcers watching the house were on constant guard when Calisto wasn’t home.
It had to be Calisto.
Who else would it be?
A stream of light filtered out from beneath a door down at the end of the hallway. Emma knew for a fact that she had shut the bathroom light off before she finally climbed into bed. She quickly made her way down the hallway, and then knocked on the door.
“Cal?” Emma said loud enough for him to hear.
“Go to sleep,” she heard muttered behind the door.
Emma’s brow furrowed. “Open up.”
