by Seth Eden
“Marco!” Gabriel shouted, and we all ran toward him and Denise.
Marco rolled over, and the blood on his shirt turned my stomach, but he grabbed his shirt and then looked over at Denise, whose side had a much darker concentration of blood.
“She got shot.” He pressed his hands to the spot on her side, and she winced. “My god, Denise, I can’t believe you. You saved my life.”
“Well, it wouldn’t work for you to get shot the day your kid was born.” She groaned. “Go! It just grazed me. I’ll be okay.”
Marco looked up at Alessandro, and Alessandro nodded and swapped places with him. “Gabe, get him to the airport now. Stacy, you go. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”
They didn’t respond but immediately jumped into action. Marco still lingered at Denise’s side. “Denise.”
She shook her head. “Go.”
He jumped into Gabriel’s passenger-side front seat, Gabriel climbed into the driver’s side, Stacy into the back, and they were screeching off down the driveway a moment later.
Luca and Molly rushed back over to where Alessandro was kneeling. “She saved Marco,” Luca said.
Molly had a warm smile on her face. “Geez. Hero complex, much?” Denise laughed and then groaned. Luca put his phone to his ear as Molly knelt to take Denise’s head in her lap. “Just hang in there.”
“Yeah. Hey, doc. We gotta call one in.” Luca had his phone to his ear and was talking fast. “No, not a Varasso, a friend of the family. Saved Marco’s life. Fuck. All right. We’ll bring her to you. Bye.” Luca looked back at Alessandro, his phone in his hand. “He can’t get away. We have to bring her there. He says take the normal measures, and he’ll meet us at intake.”
“Fine. We should wrap her.” Alessandro looked up at me. “Can you go grab the first aid kit from my office?”
I knew I was going to get flack for my next response. “No.”
Luca, Alessandro, and Molly’s eyes rushed to me. “What?” Alessandro asked.
“I’m not helping. She set this up,” I replied.
Molly’s jaw dropped. “Are you fucking kidding me? She got shot. She saved Marco’s life.”
“How do you think she knew someone was going to shoot?” I asked.
“I saw him,” Denise replied, but then she touched Alessandro’s hands on her side. “Don’t make her do anything that she doesn’t want to. If I were her, I wouldn’t trust me, either.”
That made my blood run twice as hot. She was intentionally trying to come off as the understanding victim. Luca raced past me toward the house, and Alessandro was looking at me like I was the one who shot Denise.
“Go inside,” Alessandro ordered.
“No. I’m staying here,” I refuted.
The looks Alessandro was giving me were way harsher than any he’d given me any time before. I knew I was losing him to Denise’s tricks, and now that he thought she was the holy savior of his brother, he wasn’t likely to believe me about what Mira and I had found.
“Go inside,” he ordered again.
I glared back at him. “No. I’m staying here.”
“I told you to leave her out of it, Sandro,” Molly said.
“Stop. Please don’t fight because of me,” Denise moaned. “Willow’s smart to be distrusting.”
“How can you not see that she’s trying to earn your respect?” Alessandro asked.
“How can you not see that she’s doing exactly what she needs to in order to trick you?” I spat back.
“Do you seriously think she got shot just to fool us?” Molly asked. “It could have killed her.”
I looked at her and saw she gripped the far outside of her stomach—not a fatal shot. “Unless she organized it in a way to make it non-fatal.”
“You are impossible,” Molly huffed in disbelief.
“I told you already. If you’re not going to help, then stay out of the way.” Alessandro leered at me before turning his attention back to Denise. “I’m so sorry. Just hang in there, okay? We’re gonna get you some help.”
Luca came flying back a couple minutes later, and he, Alessandro, and Molly worked slowly and methodically to wrap medical gauze around her waist to hold blood in. She winced as Luca pulled it tight around her stomach, but he kept uttering warm apologies. Molly pet the sweat away from her head, and Alessandro looked on with concern, his hands still covered in her blood. After everything I’d been through with the Varasso family, they were catering to a woman they’d known less than seventy-two hours with more concern than they ever did me. It was painful knowing that, at the end of the day, my words meant nothing, even to my own husband.
I shook my head at the scene and turned to walk away. “Don’t.” I looked back over my shoulder, and Alessandro was glaring at me. “Stay here.”
“Ten minutes ago, you were telling me to go. What the fuck do you want from me?”
Alessandro didn’t answer. He turned his attention back to Denise, and Luca and Molly were now slowly bringing her up to her feet. She was gritting her teeth and wincing with each step, but Molly and Alessandro kept her braced against them while Luca climbed into his car and started it up. Alessandro helped Denise into the back seat, and then Molly ran around to the other side and climbed in alongside her. Alessandro opened Luca’s passenger’s side door, and I thought he was going to climb in and leave me standing there.
“Call me when you get there. We’re right behind you.”
Luca nodded. “Okay.” He looked past Alessandro to give me one disgusted stare before Alessandro shut his door and Luca’s car screeched as it pulled away.
When the car was gone from sight, Alessandro turned and looked at me. “We need to talk.” I didn’t recognize the man staring back at me. He had fury in his eyes, the likes of which had never been directed at me before, and as he started toward me, my fight or flight kicked in, and I backed away. For the first time in my life, I was afraid of Alessandro.
17
Alessandro
I took long strides toward Willow and ignored the alarms going off as she backed away from me. “What is the matter with you?” I barked.
Willow was shaking. “What is the matter with you?”
“How could you watch her take a bullet for Marco and not want to help stop her bleeding, at least. I wasn’t asking you to make her a friendship bracelet. Are you honestly telling me that you would have been comfortable with her dying?”
“She wasn’t going to die,” Willow responded. “Her wound wasn’t fatal. She planned it that way.”
“You’ve seriously lost your mind. No one in their right mind would get shot to further a personal agenda. The margin for error would be astronomical! A small miscalculation and that bullet could have hit her in the chest or deeper in her gut, and she’d be bleeding out right now. I know that we thought she was shady at first, but this proves she just wants to help.” My hands were clenched into fists at my sides. “We’re a little shady, too, but it doesn’t mean we’re bad people.”
“Yesterday, you thought she was just as much of a liar as I did!” She was breathing hard as she fought through anger to find her words. “You don’t find it strange that someone just happened to be here when Marco was leaving?”
“They probably just had someone stashed here, waiting for the next available opportunity,” I explained. “The Binachis have always been a family of opportunity.”
Willow threw her hands up in defeat. “How could you flip sides so quickly? How could you just let someone we don’t know anything about walk into our family and act like she belongs here? We met her three days ago!”
“What would it take for her to prove herself to you?”
Willow’s eyes widened. “I don’t want her to prove herself to me! I want her out of our lives. She’s not even telling the truth about who she is! I did research and—”
“You’re done with that.”
Willow raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“The research,” I responded. “You�
��re done. You’ve clearly let this one little task go to your head. You haven’t had anything to do with this life, Willow. This is what loyalty looks like, what she did for Marco, not you refusing to help someone bleeding from a gunshot wound.”
Willow went quiet for a second. The fear she was displaying disappeared in favor of rage. “Are you saying that I’m not loyal?”
I could hear the accusation in her voice—all the things she didn’t need to say. Willow lost patience with me long before the Binachis decided they were going to kidnap our wives and try to kill us. She was probably on the right track when she was thinking about aborting our baby and never talking to me again. Instead, she followed me into the lion’s den to save me from myself, and then she agreed to marry me, even after I’d proven time and again that I couldn’t be trusted.
She stuck by my side through everything and had loved my family like her own, despite getting dragged into a business she wanted nothing to do with. Willow was loyalty personified. That didn’t change the fact that she’d clearly traveled far off base when it came to Denise. I wouldn’t leave Denise alone with my daughter, but I trusted that she was in it with us until the end. She wouldn’t have taken a bullet for Marco, otherwise.
“When you’re a Varasso, you need to be loyal to more than just me,” I said finally. “Being one of us means being one of us. If you aren’t prepared to take on everything that this means, then—”
“Then what?” Willow asked. I couldn’t find the words to say. I knew what I wanted to say, but the truth was, I didn’t entirely believe it. “Then what, Sandro? Are you telling me that I made a mistake by staying by you this whole time? I should just go?”
It was like there were two different people inside me, battling it out. Half of me wanted to rush Willow and tell her that I loved her more than anything and didn’t want her to leave. The other half was wondering if taking Willow along had been a mistake. Were her feelings about the life and my past clouding her ability to remain impartial when I really needed her to be? Was it better for her to go? Was it better for her to stay? My brain couldn’t decide, and the more I thought about it, the more muddled it got.
“It wasn’t a mistake, but…” I scratched my head. I couldn’t sort out my feelings for the life of me.
“Fine, then,” Willow said. “If I’m such an unloyal burden to you, I’ll go.”
A bolt of fear rocked through me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if Willow left, I would never see her again. “I don’t want you to go,” I replied instantly. “I know you’re loyal. I just…I need you to see reason here.”
“I’m the only one seeing reason here.” She crossed her arms. “If she’s so trustworthy, why is she lying to us? You were just as skeptical as I was, and that’s why you asked her all those questions about her life. That connection between the Binachis and the Carduccis didn’t come from nowhere. There’s a reason I get zero results when I Google Denise Binachi. That person doesn’t exist.”
“I heard those stories the same way you did, Willow,” I replied to her. I did think that it was possible that Denise was lying, but I heard her tell stories about her brothers and father and knew that she was being honest about her past. Whatever reason the internet didn’t have any information on her, it wasn’t because she wasn’t a Binachi. “She’s telling the truth.”
Willow had an expression that I’d seen a couple of times before, one that told me she was holding back on me. She had something unspoken she wanted to say. “What? Tell me.”
The fight fled from Willow’s eyes in a second. Her face drained of color, and she just stared at me blankly. “Nothing.”
“No, there’s something you wanted to say. Tell me.”
She shook her head again. “Nope. There’s nothing. I guess you’re right. She’s telling the truth.”
It was a dramatic and unexpected turn, and I didn’t buy it for a second, but I’d taken more than a few steps backward with her in the conversation. I wasn’t about to try and force something out of her and make it worse.
“Fine,” I said finally, irritated. “If we’re done here, then we should get to the hospital.”
“We?” Willow asked. “I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are,” I ordered. “She took a bullet for Marco.”
Willow looked back at me, some of her anger returning. She opened her mouth, probably to argue, but then closed it again. “I’m not going to the hospital, Alessandro.”
My fury was coming back, too. After everything I’d just said, how could she still remain so stubborn? I looked down at her, and I saw her recoil a bit. “It wasn’t a suggestion.”
Willow’s eyes flashed through several different emotions rapidly. Frustration, sadness, desperation—but when they stopped, they were angry. “Don’t talk to me that way. Don’t you try to use whatever this power it is that you think you have against me. You’ve been doing it to me all morning, and I’m done.”
I felt bad in an instant. “I’m sor—”
“No,” Willow cut me off. “You don’t get to apologize to me for talking to me like I’m one of your little minions. You should know better. I’m not just some muscle you keep around. I’m the mother of your child, and I am your wife.”
The resonance in her voice was as thick as steel, and I knew I had crossed a line. It wasn’t just that Willow was stubborn and didn’t like being ordered around. I’d never before tried to exercise any amount of control over her. It was dumb of me to do so.
“Fine, stay here, but I’m going. She saved my brother’s life.” I started for my truck, already feeling the sting of leaving her behind. I climbed into the driver’s seat. I heard the passenger’s side door open, and Willow climbed in, slamming herself into the seat and shutting the door. I looked over at her and saw the anguish in her face, and the part of me that loved her finally shoved the angry part of me aside.
“I’m sorry I acted like that with you. That wasn’t fair.” She remained quiet, but I wanted her to know how I felt. I reached my hand over and set it on top of hers. “Will—”
She snatched her hand away from me. A tear streaked down her face, but she stayed facing forward. “If you ever pull that shit again, I will file for divorce. Immediately. I won’t wait. I will take Alexis, and you will never see either of us again.”
My hand shook as I pulled it back. Willow had never been that nasty with me before. I’d messed up. All the fear I’d ever felt in my life didn’t compare to the way I felt thinking I’d never see Willow or Alexis again. I didn’t say anything else for fear that I would make a bad situation worse. I started the car, and in quiet, choking fear, I set off for the hospital.
18
Willow
I was officially done. In all of the time that Alessandro had spent slowly slipping away from the person I’d married, not once had he ever behaved as though I was some random woman who could be ordered around. He looked at me in a way that scared me, and he tried to use that fear to force me to do something I didn’t want to do. He accused me of not being loyal and boldly took the side of a woman he barely knew over his own wife. I could admit that part of me always hoped he’d get better. I hoped that one day, he would wake up and realize that getting help was for his own good, and as he dealt with his mental health, we could also rebuild our relationship and be a family again. When he opened his arms to me, I always went to them because I didn’t ever want to get to a day when I felt like those arms were for anything other than to hold me close.
He was a totally different person now.
The Alessandro I married, the one I had a baby with, that man was gone, and I was afraid I’d never see him again. As long as I could trust Alessandro to always love me more than the trivialities of being the head of his family, I was perfectly fine to sit by his side. Maybe it was foolish of me to think that, when all of this was over and there was no dangerous life to run off to, he would get himself the help me needed and we would be okay. Maybe it was foolish to hope that Alessandro would just
magically get better. I couldn’t trust that Alessandro would never try to exercise muscle with me again, and I couldn’t trust that he would never do it with our daughter. I was done letting him have his way—kissing me or saying sweet things to me whenever he wanted—I was done sleeping with him on the weak excuse that I still could, and I was done standing with him if he wasn’t going to stand with me. I’d see things out with the Binachis, mostly because I had to for mine and my daughter’s safety, but once things had finally come to the end, I was done. I’d find some corner of the world to sneak away to with Alexis, and I would leave Alessandro and the Varasso family in my past.
I wouldn’t ask Alessandro to deal with himself for me anymore. If he wanted any hope of being in my or our daughter’s life, he was going to have to prove it on his own. Aside from that, I was just another body in the room, since that was apparently what he wanted.
He pulled his truck into the parking lot at the downtown hospital that the Varassos had on the payroll. In the line of work the Varassos were in, they needed a doctor or two on hand who could deal with serious injuries without asking questions or alerting the police. These individuals were usually called in to the Varasso estate to deal with injuries like Denise’s to make sure that no civilians saw and raised any questions of their own. Whenever the doctors were on call and couldn’t get away, though, bringing the injured in was the only option, so the doctors had an emergency protocol to get the Varassos in as quietly as possible.
Alessandro turned off the car and looked over at me. “Look, Willow.”
I ignored him entirely. I took off my seatbelt, climbed out of the truck, and started off for the hospital. I didn’t see Alessandro’s reaction, but I heard his car door open and shut followed by the sound of his footsteps after me. He didn’t say anything when he reached my side, and we walked in silence into the hospital. A receptionist recognized us when we walked in. He handed over a pair of visitor badges that had already been printed and directed us to where we needed to go to see Denise. We took the elevator up to the correct floor and walked down a long hallway that eventually brought us to the waiting room for trauma injuries. Luca and Molly were sitting there, and both sneered when they looked up and saw me. I didn’t care. I found a seat as far from them as I could and waited.
