The Arrangement (Crimson Romance)

by Bethany-Kris

  “Rocco!”

  Anton raised his hand to pet the animal, but the dog’s gentle nip of teeth on his two fingers stopped him. The bite was released. The animal lowered its head again only to push up under his lifted hand.

  “Oh, buddy. Vverkh.”

  Quickly, Anton pulled the dog into his lap, wrapping his arms around the animal and burying his face into the clean smelling fur.

  So, he curled the animal tighter to his midsection, letting his dog rest over his sprawled out legs. Anton’s hand ran a continuous cycle from the very top of the dog’s head, down its trembling back, to the tip of his limp tail.

  Eventually, Rocco’s eyes drooped, breaths turned to quick pants, and he slept.

  Anton only wished he could do the same.

  When Clarissa made her hesitant approach to take Rocco downstairs for his final outing in the backyard for the night, Anton damned near refused to let him go. Still, the dog had a schedule and it was important that no matter what, he keep it.

  Anton couldn’t help the tug in his chest as Clarissa asked if he would like for the doors between the floors to be left open. “Just in case he wishes to come back up and find you, sir.” He didn’t say no. It was painfully obvious trying to keep the dog away for the night wouldn’t be an option.

  With them gone, Anton was once again alone.

  Desolate in the silence of his own hell, the empty hallway, and the door behind him. That was how he found himself pleading with the woman inside to just let him in.

  The heart inside his chest that rarely ever felt was feeling everything.

  Anton didn’t know anything.

  He didn’t know if she had fallen asleep; if she had gotten clothes from their bedroom; if she was physically hurt from when he’d listened to her hit the walls earlier.

  “Please, Viviana, please…let me in, baby.”

  The knob wouldn’t turn under his hands, and despite the fact that there were keys in his office that would open the door, the very last thing he wanted to do was force his presence. After everything and all the choices she hadn’t been included in, Anton knew he needed to give her that option. It had to be her choice…had to.

  “I didn’t know,” he whispered to the door. “I grew up thinking I was being married off to some spoiled Italian princess. I watched my mother and father love each other, Vine. That’s all I ever knew, okay? Daniil didn’t have mistresses. He made it home every night to sleep beside my mom. I never heard their voices raise and not once did his hands hurt her.”

  Anton was rambling, and he knew it probably wouldn’t make a difference if she wasn’t willing to listen, but he had to talk to something, or that pressure in his chest was going to explode.

  “How was I supposed to love a girl who was just picked for me? I can’t tell you how many times I asked them that question. Over and over. That’s what they wanted for me? Exactly what they had, I wouldn’t ever get it. It hurt me, Vine. I was so fucking angry. I pulled some bad stunts and messed up a lot of things when I was just seventeen and stupid. Pulled the trigger before I ever should have and nearly got myself killed over it; screwed girls with fathers who wouldn’t have blinked to put a bullet through my brain.

  “I was made the day before my eighteenth birthday, but I was so screwed up by then. Drugs, drinking myself dead, not coming home at night and then not knowing where I was when I woke up in the morning…” A lump formed in his throat before he cleared it with a horrible sound, once more resting his head on the door before he continued. “Nicoli just up and said it was enough. I had to stop. Took me away to get my shit straightened out. Told me I needed to find my old soul. I thought that trip to Barbados was just a ploy for him to get me away from the drama I’d started back here; none of them told me we were coming to meet your family. I didn’t know when he said that, he meant I was coming to find you all over again.”

  Anton swore he heard a movement inside the bathroom but the stilled quietness that followed made him think he was just creating what he wanted to hear. So, he steeled his raging emotions with another ragged breath and kept talking.

  “I didn’t know,” he repeated thickly. “Not then, Viviana. I found the most amazing girl and it took me one day to realize how wrong I’d been. Just one. I watched this girl with sober eyes, happy laughs, and innocent smiles who didn’t know a thing about me or the shit I’d done and she didn’t care.”

  “Stop.”

  The word was all but hushed through the door, but his heart broke all the same.

  “No, I can’t. I’m sorry, but I won’t.” Once more he tried the doorknob under his hand, but it wouldn’t turn. “Maybe I should have seen something then, Vine. Like the way Roman and Nicoli tolerated each other, but they wouldn’t really speak. Or how your mother chose to keep her distance and stayed off of the property for most of the trip.

  “And twice…twice when Nicoli called you his sweet girl in Russian,” Anton murmured, thinking back to the way he’d let those comments roll off his shoulders so easily. “I should have known. I should have seen the way your lips quirked off to the side when something angered you was the same way his did when I pissed him off. I should have noticed yours eyes were the carbon copy of his. I know I should have. I know, baby, but I didn’t. I was so damned caught up in you.”

  Once more, tears welled with a stinging burn as he tried to hold the inevitable back. When the drops slid through his eyes, Anton said, “I was too busy realizing I’d spent so much time hating a girl who’d be so fucking easy to love. I didn’t fall in love with the daughter of a boss, no matter which boss it was. I fell in love with the girl who stole my favorite T-shirt, made me eat healthy crap, snuck past an entire house just to climb in my bed, and who wanted me only because I was supposed to be hers. That was the girl I knew. She was the one I wanted, too.

  “I didn’t fall in love because they told me I had to,” he continued through clenched teeth. “I did it because you didn’t give me the choice. Everything I didn’t even know I wanted was being reflected in a girl who didn’t know me from Adam. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. You saved my life in six fucking days and you didn’t even know it.”

  The lock turning to unlatch echoed in the deepest part of his blackened soul. Anton literally stumbled away from the door like it had burned him. It wasn’t an invitation for him to go in, but it was a clear indication that she was finally starting to hear him—that she was listening.

  Then, the door swung open. Viviana stood in nothing but a thigh length, wool sweater that hung over one bare shoulder. Her wet hair hung loosely over the other shoulder, while she kept her eyes lowered and chin tucked down.

  “Look at me,” Anton pleaded.

  “My Wikipedia page says I was one month premature.”

  Confusion settled in him like a dead weight. “What?”

  “My Wikipedia page. You have one, too. Except yours is a lot more involved than mine is. But that’s not the point…the point is that my page says I was born one month early. Apparently there’s hospital records to show proof of my mom going into early labor.”

  Anton didn’t have a clue what to say, but if it got her talking and kept her that way, he didn’t care. “Okay.”

  “I wasn’t premature, Anton. More than once my mother told me I was just as stubborn before I was born as I was after because I made her wait two extra weeks before I came, and even then, they had to induce her.”

  “Uh…”

  Viviana didn’t give him a chance to find words. “Roman has a Wikipedia page, too. Funny, our whole fucking lives are just recorded right here,” she said, waving her cell phone mockingly. “People who don’t know a thing about me can go on here and find out I’m thought to be the daughter of a deceased Cosa Nostra Don. Alleged Don, because you know, he never admitted it in court. They can learn my middle name is Christina. That I had an older brother who died in a car accident along with my mother, although it’s still under investigation.”

  Her voice had tur
ned sour, but she still wouldn’t look up. “And then they can click on my father’s name. Roman, I mean. His page, like yours, is quite extensive. It talked about his arrests for drugs, and for the weapons. It describes the circumstantial evidence to other crimes he was never charged for. And your page… The lists on the dealings you're thought to be handling, how you rose to your respective positions, and the years served.”

  The final word had all but been spit from her mouth like poison.

  Anton finally found his voice. “I’ve spent a few months in jail, but nothing serious. I’m careful with anything and everything I do.”

  “Not my dad, though,” she said pointedly. “He wasn’t so careful. It’s no wonder my page says I was a month premature. Considering if I wasn’t, he would have still been in prison when I was conceived.”

  The way the word broke coming out of her mouth had him rushing forward. It was soaked in pain and truth, wrapped in sorrow and hatred. More than anything, Anton just wanted to hold her. Viviana wouldn’t let him, taking a quick step back.

  “Please don’t, Anton. I can’t … I need to breathe and I can’t do that when you touch me.”

  Something lodged in his airways. Didn’t she know what she did for him?

  “I need to, though. You make me breathe.”

  Viviana ignored his grief-stricken confession. “How long?”

  “I don’t—”

  “How long did you know that my mom had fucked around with Nicoli?”

  Anton blinked in disbelief at the harshness in her tone. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Really?” she bit out bitterly. “How was it, then? How was it, that Christina Carducci ended up pregnant with another man’s child when her husband was just one month off his release date from prison? How was it that to hide who my real father was, they arranged a marriage to put me in his path another way? They lied to me my whole life. Given what my mom did, it’s no wonder he had so many goomahs and—”

  “That’s why he forgave her,” Anton interrupted softly.

  Finally, Viviana’s head jerked up. Wide, red rimmed eyes stared brazenly open with pain and confusion reflecting back. “I don’t understand.”

  “I only know what I was told,” he explained with a shrug. “And from what I understand, Roman put her through the ringer, too. They married young. He was running with women from one side of New York to the other. Your brother was just a newborn when he went back to prison, leaving her alone to raise him for those first two years. Their relationship was bad. One of those destructive things where you know it has to stop, but you can’t find the strength to do it because when it’s good, it’s so fucking good—”

  “That’s not an excuse.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t, but that’s not how they saw it. They believed what they’d been taught. Once you married, you were married for life. You accepted the spouse you chose. When I was able to ask Roman why, because any other boss would have put her six feet underground, baby, all he could say was that he loved her. She made a mistake—one he made several times over—and he couldn’t punish her any more for it.”

  “She conceived another man’s child.”

  “You, she conceived you,” Anton pointed out.

  “That’s great. I’m the product of some ridiculous revenge my mother decided to enact by fucking Roman’s enemy. I bet she had the best time running around with Nicoli right up until she found out about me. That’s just great, Anton.”

  Again, he was stunned speechless. It took him an entire minute to regain his thoughts so what he said didn’t hurt her more than she already was. The last thing he needed was her running to hide again.

  “It only happened once. Nicoli gave me very little details because he was a private man in that regard. Just the once … bad timing and random circumstance. They didn’t see each other again until you turned two.”

  When Viviana didn’t speak, Anton took it as his chance to keep talking. “No one knew but a few choice people that you weren’t Roman’s. Christina told him the moment he returned home; he wanted you, despite the fact that you weren’t his blood. She didn’t know, and neither did he because she couldn’t give him a last name, who Nicoli was. They didn’t meet under circumstances that led her to think he was a high-ranking member of the Bratva. It wasn’t anywhere near Brighton Beach. Like a perfect storm, that’s all.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense.”

  “The only thing Roman wouldn’t do, Viviana, was risk having you marry a Cosa Nostra man because your children wouldn’t have been full Italians,” Anton finished quietly. “He couldn’t do it because he believed, respected, and followed his creed.”

  “How?” she asked, brown eyes daring to flick up to meet his.

  “How, what?”

  “This … us,” she said, waving.

  “Sonny. A mix up happened between trucks and Nicoli’s guys stepped in to take what wasn’t theirs; Sonny’s guys got in and some lead was tossed. A meeting was set up, and because they didn’t want it to end violently, the wives were brought along. Or the ones that were alive, anyway.”

  Anton felt his chest grow with that painful pressure again. God, he wanted so badly to reach out and touch her, but he was terrified that wouldn’t do him any good. He settled for shoving his shaking hands in the pockets of his pants, instead.

  “Again, the perfect storm. Shitty circumstances. Christina could have just not told Roman and he wouldn’t have known the difference, but they’d changed a lot in those two years after your birth. They weren’t the same people. She wouldn’t lie, so she was honest, and Roman … he was good man, Viviana. Decided to give Nicoli the chance to know he had a daughter.”

  “And then this happened,” she assumed, her bare shoulder lifting before it dropped back down.

  “Basically. Nicoli didn’t want to take you from the man you already loved, but he did want the chance to someday know you as a different woman. When he noticed how well you and I seemed to take to one another, he was quick to throw the arrangement on the table. It served to fix Roman’s issue of not marrying you to his side, but instead, the one you were more suited to because of your bloodline. And, it served Nicoli’s purpose of having you close to him at a different stage in your life. Not everyone was happy with that.”

  “No?”

  Anton shook his head. “Sonny again. Everyone already thought you were Roman’s, so what difference would it make? He didn’t want to be mixed up with Russians. By Nicoli and Daniil’s accounts, it was pretty clear those brothers weren’t on good terms even then. I think Sonny was planning a long time before you came along to get rid of Roman, he just needed a reason to.”

  Viviana sucked in a harsh breath. “I was that reason.”

  “It’s not your fault, baby.”

  When tears slipped over her cheeks, she was quick to swipe away the glimmering wetness. Anton stood stoic and silent as he let her digest everything he’d said. He knew it was a lot and that she’d probably have a dozen more questions, but what he really wanted her to do was just sleep. The dark circles under her eyes and tremors rocking her small hands had him worried.

  “Come to bed, please.”

  A simple shake of her head had him sighing. “What about you, Anton?”

  “I’m going to shower and then, if you want, I’ll join you.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh.”

  His heart kick-started with another painful rhythm.

  “Just … when did you know?”

  His lips wet under his tongue. It was the truth he’d been avoiding even more than the history of her paternity. “That morning you left Barbados. I couldn’t figure out why Nicoli was so fucking mad at me. Roman, I got. He was your dad and there was that tiny spot of blood on my sheets that said what I wouldn’t. But, Nicoli? I couldn’t get it to click. And he slipped … in his anger, with his Russian. I heard my father kind of choke and my mom just made this awful sound. I got it then. His princess, he’d sa
id. My dad called me the little prince my whole life, Vine. I knew what he meant when Nicoli said that about you.

  “And then he went really quiet, but I finally recognized the eye color when he just sat there and stared at me. Nicoli didn’t ever show his emotions, but the pain in his eyes was unbearable,” Anton admitted, frowning. “He was so torn because I was finally getting it together. I was happy, healthy, and I wanted you, but I’d disappointed him because I’d taken something from his daughter. It didn’t matter that you were going to be my wife, in his eyes, what you gave to me wasn’t mine to take at that time.”

  Her voice was just a breath when she said, “That long.”

  “It didn’t matter to me,” Anton rushed to say. “I already wanted you. I wanted you because I loved you. But Nicoli was clear and so was Roman, I couldn’t tell you. Neither of them wanted you to know, unless there was no other way around it, but there was the big issue of safety, too. They just wanted you to love the life you already had, not the one you could have had. I decided after Sonny made it pretty obvious that he wanted to all but eradicate the truth of his involvement in hiding your paternity that when the time was right, and we were safe, I would tell you.”

  “But … I do.”

  That time, it was his head that jerked up. “What?”

  “My life, I did love it. Loved Roman so much. And I love the life I’m just beginning to build with you.”

  Anton felt frozen at her words, and when Viviana finally stepped close enough to pat his chest, all that pressure and pain he’d been fighting off ceased to exist. He could breathe. His heart continued to beat. When her fingers fisted in the blood-stained silk shirt he wore, she stepped to his side.

  “I’m going to go to bed now.”

  “Okay,” he murmured, not sure what else to say.

  “Please be there for me to wake up to in the morning. You promised.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “If he is, that means something’s about to happen, man. You need to keep a keen eye out and be careful. Get those bulls of hers on a closer detail for a little while. Rocco shouldn’t be left at home, ever. You know the drill.”