by Cora Reilly
“You’ve never been gentle to someone?”
I wrecked my brain for a moment in my life when I’d shown a softer side of me, but the only memory I came up with was when I was a boy of five. I’d found my mother crying in her bed and had walked over to her even though I wasn’t allowed in her bedroom. I had been scared by her wailing and had touched her hand to stop her. My mother had jerked her hand away and Father had come in a moment later. He’d dragged me out and beaten me for trying to cater to the silly whims of a woman. “No. Our father taught Matteo and me that any kind of gentleness was a weakness. And there was never any room in my life for it,” I said. All the sentimental baggage from my past wasn’t something I wanted to lay in the open, not even to my wife.
“What about the girls you were with?” Aria asked. Her voice shook with a hint of worry and jealousy. I peered down at her blond crown, her naked body stretched out beside mine, elegant, breathtakingly gorgeous, mine. It was understandable that she worried about other women after the Grace incident, but I didn’t have the slightest intention to ever touch another women again, and all the women of my past had meant nothing. I didn’t even remember most of their names or faces.
“They were a means to an end. I wanted to fuck, so I looked for a girl and fucked her. It was hard and fast, definitely not gentle. I mostly fucked them from behind so I didn’t have to look them in the eyes and pretend I gave a shit about them.”
Aria surprised me by kissing my Famiglia tattoo, her lips soft. I held her even tighter, not sure how to react to her loveliness, her innocent tenderness. It wasn’t something I’d ever been on the receiving end of. I wanted to give her something as meaningful in return, and there was only one way I could do it. “The only person who could have taught me how to be gentle was my mother,” I said, even as the words felt like shrapnel in my throat. I didn’t like talking about her, or even remembering her. “But she killed herself when I was nine.”
“I’m sorry,” Aria whispered, tilting her head back to meet my gaze. She pressed her soft palm against my cheek. No one had ever done something like that before Aria, and whenever I’d witnessed that sort of affectionate gesture with other people, I’d wondered why the hell anyone would touch a cheek or would want their cheek touched when they could have their cock sucked. A fucking cheek. But this felt good. Not as good as the other, but damn good anyway. Aria’s eyes held compassion, but I didn’t want to dwell in the past.
“Does it still hurt?” I asked, and when it became clear that she wasn’t sure what I was talking about, I brushed my fingertips over her abdomen.
Aria blushed, golden lashes fluttering in embarrassment. “Yeah, but talking helps.”
“How does it help?” It seemed impossible for mere words to do that. When I was in agony, I definitely didn’t want to talk to anyone, much less listen to anyone’s rambling, even though Matteo mostly ignored my wishes.
“It distracts me,” Aria admitted, her eyes still on mine. It was the longest she’d ever held my gaze, and I had to admit I enjoyed it. “Can you tell me more about your mother?”
There were so many things I remembered as if they’d happened yesterday, but none of them were happy. I wasn’t sure if my mother and I had shared a single happy memory, if anything hadn’t been tainted by my father’s brutal shadow. “My father hit her. He raped her. I was young, but I understood what was going on. She couldn’t bear my father anymore, so she decided to slice her wrists and overdose on dope.”
Aria shivered. I wasn’t sure if it was because she imagined what my mother had gone through. I was fairly sure Aria had worried it would be her fate as well. The mere idea that I could do to Aria what my father had done to my mother, that Aria would lie under me broken and terrified, made me want to take a shower.
“She shouldn’t have left you and Matteo alone.”
This was what got to her? Aria was too kind, too good for me, and as usual she barreled straight through another one of my walls. I’d spent all my life building them, strong as steal, and here she was taking them down without realizing it. “I found her.”
Aria sucked in her breath and those blue eyes filled with tears. Tears for me. “You found your mother after she’d cut her wrists?”
Emotions squeezed my chest, but I shoved them down, deep deep down where they belonged. “That was actually the first body I saw. Of course it wasn’t the last,” I said, glad that my voice was firm and hard.
“This is horrible. You must have been terrified. You were only a boy.”
I had been a child and I hadn’t been. My life had always been filled with blood and violence, with the cries of my mother at night. “It made me tough. At some point, every boy has to lose his innocence. The mafia isn’t a place for the weak.”
“Emotions aren’t a weakness.”
I searched Aria’s eyes. The softness and compassion in them were already a risk. Those were emotions I couldn’t risk, definitely not in public, and even behind closed doors they weren’t wise. I needed to be tough as steal, feared and brutal, if I wanted to rule over the Familgia one day, and until then I had to keep my bastard of a father off my back. “Yes, they are. Enemies always aim where they can hurt you most.”
Father would use Aria against me in his fucking mind games if he thought she was more to me than a pretty fuck thing I could dominate and brutalize. He posed as much of a risk for my wife as the Bratva, maybe more because my options to protect her from him were limited for now.
“And where would the Bratva aim if they wanted to hurt you?” Aria asked softly, sounding hopeful and curious at once. My gaze traced the tender lines of her face.
Since Matteo was strong enough to defend himself, there had been no one my enemies could have used as leverage against me. They knew I didn’t give a fuck about anyone, only the Famiglia. My life was devoted to the mafia, my only goal in life to become Capo. I had been raised with only this purpose. Everything else was supposed to be irrelevant, especially a woman. Women could be replaced. That’s what Father had taught Matteo and me, and it was something he’d lived by. It hadn’t taken him long to replace Mother with Nina.
The look in Aria’s eyes hammered away at another of my walls, but I couldn’t let her. I turned off the lights, needing the dark to hide the emotion in her face. “They won’t ever find out,” I said.
Aria released a small breath, deflating against me. She needed to stop wishing for something I couldn’t give her, wouldn’t give her for both our sakes. It would have been easy to crush her hopes, to nip her emotions in the bud. A few cruel words that always came so easily for me. I got what I wanted, stop the fucking emotional bullshit. All I give a fuck about is your tight pussy milking my cock. You’re nothing to me but spread legs to relieve tension. Those words would have cut Aria to the bone, they would have stopped her from prying past my walls ever again. She would have believed them to be true, no doubt, because they were words more fitting to the man I was than the sweet nothings I’d murmured while taking her virginity. Everyone would believe them to reflect the true nature of my feelings for the woman beside me. The words lingered on my tongue, needed to be said to protect Aria and my claim to power, but I couldn’t get them past my lips. I couldn’t fucking lie to Aria like that, couldn’t crush her like that.
But most of all, I couldn’t bear the thought of how she’d look at me afterwards, of how she’d never give me that small, trusting smile again.
CHAPTER 20
I woke with Aria pressed up against me, her forehead leaning against my chest, our legs scissoring. Her stirring had woken me. She tried to untangle herself from my hold without waking me, which was a futile endeavor. My sleep was light, and I woke at the smallest sound or movement. “What’s wrong?” I rumbled.
“Need to go to the bathroom,” Aria said in a sleepy voice.
I loosened my iron grip around her and she pulled back, peering up at me. I watched her through half-closed eyes. Aria bit her lip, smiling uncertainly. She was shy because of what
we’d done last night.
I rubbed my thumb over her swollen lips, watching the blush bloom on her cheeks. Slowly she climbed out of bed, her movements stiff. My eyes followed her beautiful ass as she walked toward the bathroom. Her gait was slightly off from discomfort. I was glad for the reminder because my cock was already erecting a tent with the covers. Groaning, I reached for my phone on the nightstand. It was only eight, and Romero was supposed to arrive at nine to guard Aria.
I sent him a short text, telling him to be there at twelve, then another text to Matteo informing him that business would have to wait until later. Then I shut off my phone, not in the mood for my brother’s annoying questions just yet.
Aria returned ten minutes later, her face twisting occasionally.
“Sore?” I asked, even if it was a rhetorical question. Even someone less familiar with the signs of pain would have seen that she was in discomfort.
Aria stopped in front of the bed, nose crinkling in shame. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
Aria stretched out beside me, her eyes briefly darting down to my groin then back to my face. There was no way I could have hidden my desire for her, but that didn’t mean I’d disregard her body’s needs.
“I thought you might want to do it again, but I don’t think I can.”
I caressed her ribs and side. “I know. I didn’t expect you to be ready so soon.” Aria’s skin pimpled under my ministrations. I stroked her belly then the edge of her lovely blond triangle. She held her breath. “I could lick you if you’re up for it.” Desire consumed my insides at the idea of burying myself between her thighs.
Aria swallowed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I leaned back, but I didn’t take my eyes off her. Her nipples puckered under my attention.
Aria leaned over me, her gaze lingering on my chest and abdomen. Her expression wasn’t sexual, so she wasn’t admiring my muscles, but I knew they turned her on, just like Aria’s body drove me raving mad with desire. I reached up and stroked the pad of my thumb over her pink nipple. Every inch of Aria was perfection, not just the outside but also her sweet persona. I’d been with so many beautiful women who’d fulfilled my every fucking desire. Women who had never known a single truth about me, women who had never wanted to know more than what I could give them.
I had taken everything I desired without a fucking care for their emotions, had chosen them by their looks, the size of their tits or shape of their lips, by the skill of their tongue or willingness to take it up their ass.
Aria was the first woman I hadn’t chosen for myself, and I probably wouldn’t have ever chosen. If Father had left the choice up to me to pick an Outfit girl, I’d have chosen someone else because, from the first moment I’d seen Aria, I’d wanted to protect her. Even back then I’d known deep down that marrying her posed a fucking risk to everything I’d built. Marrying Gianna would have been the safe choice because, with her personality, I wouldn’t have had trouble to be an asshole, to keep up my monstrous mask. With Aria it was a losing game. The most dangerous game I’d ever played.
What the fuck was she doing to me? “Your breasts are fucking perfect,” I said into the silence, needing to break this insane moment.
Aria brushed her fingertips over a scar on my stomach. “Where did you get this scar?”
Safer terrain. “I was eleven.” The memories slithered up, clawing their way through all the other, many worse memories.
Shock flashed across Aria’s face. She knew what story was coming. Everyone knew the story. The boy who killed his first man at eleven, even then a monster. His father’s son. Maybe people had been scared of me even before then, but the first time I noticed how other people regarded me like someone to be wary of was after that first kill.
“The Famiglia wasn’t as united as it is now,” I began and told her how everything had started, how I’d become a Made Man, a killer. Even back then I hadn’t felt guilt over killing another human being. Killing my father could rip the Famiglia apart again if I wasn’t careful.
Aria watched me with an intent expression, lacking the sick fascination or reverent fear usually directed my way when this story was told.
“That was your first murder, right?”
“Yeah. The first of many.” I wasn’t exactly sure how many people I’d killed, not just because it wasn’t always clear if Matteo’s or my bullet ended someone in the chaos of a mass shooting, but also because at some point I’d stopped counting. What did it matter if I’d killed twenty, fifty or one-hundred?
Aria’s fingers still stroked my scar, but I doubted she noticed. She was completely focused on my face. “When did you kill again?”
“That same night. After that first man, I told Matteo to hide in my closet. He protested, but I was bigger and locked him in. By then I’d lost quite a bit of blood, but I was high on adrenaline and could still hear shooting downstairs, so I headed for the noise with my gun. My father was in a shooting match with two attackers. I came down the stairs but nobody paid me any attention, and then I shot one of them from behind. My father took the other down with a shot in the shoulder.”
“Why didn’t he kill him?”
Oh, Aria, so innocent. “He wanted to question him to find out if there were other traitors in the Famiglia.”
“So what did he do with the guy while he took you to the hospital?”
As if my father would have ever stopped torturing someone to get me medical help, much less take me to a hospital.
“Don’t tell me he didn’t take you.”
“He called the Doc of the Famiglia, told me to put pressure on the wound and went ahead and started torturing the guy for information.”
Aria shook her head slowly. “You could have died. Some things need to be treated in a hospital. How could he do that?”
“The Famiglia comes first,” I said. It was a truth I lived by. It was something we demanded of our soldiers and something Matteo and I had to live by as well. “We never take our injured to a hospital. They ask too many questions and the police get involved, and it’s an admittance of weakness. And my father had to make sure the traitor spoke before he got a chance to kill himself.”
“So you agree with what he did? You would have watched someone you love bleed to death so you could protect the Famiglia and your power.”
Love.
Someone you love.
Did Aria really think I was capable of love? That men like my father or I had it in us to harbor that kind of pure emotion? Maybe every child was born with the need to love and be loved, but I’d been raised without that notion and eventually it had been burnt out of me with violence, betrayal and cruelty.
“My father doesn’t love me. Matteo and I are his guarantee for power and a way to keep the family name alive. Love has nothing to do with it.”
Aria’s face scrunched up, despair flashing in those baby blues. “I hate this life. I hate the mafia. Sometimes I wish there was a way to escape.”
My body grew tense at her admittance. “From me?” I asked, holding back the fury as well as pain the idea brought me.
“No. From this world. Have you never wanted to live a normal life?” She tilted her head and again searched my eyes, looking for a flicker of good or hope. She needed to understand who I was, who I’d always be.
“No. This is who I am, who I was born to be, Aria. It’s the only life I know, the only life I want. For me to commit to a normal life would be like an eagle living in a small cage in a zoo.” Fuck, I’d never even considered a normal life an option. I’d never dreamed of going to college, of having a normal job. I wasn’t even sure what I could have become if I wasn’t a Made Man. For as long as I could remember, becoming a Made Man, becoming Capo had been my goal. Nothing else had ever mattered. I’d finished high school, more for appearances than anything else, and only because Father’s influence and money had made the school board ignore my absence rate. “Your marriage to me shackles you to the mafia. B
lood and death will be your life as long as I live,” I said at last, hating having to crush Aria’s wishes and hopes but knowing it was better early on.
She’d always be mine, had no choice in the matter because I wouldn’t give her one. If she settled for what she had instead of hoping for more, if she resigned herself to a marriage of respect instead of love, then maybe she could survive this life and her bond to me.
The thought didn’t sit well with me, but entertaining silly emotional fantasies had been beaten out of me as a kid.
Aria nodded, but she didn’t look crushed. She actually looked determined. “Then so be it. I’ll go where you go, no matter how dark the path.”
And, in true Aria style, all innocent and caring, she blasted through another wall I had absolutely no intention of lowering, taking with her my goddamn determination to make her settle for a bond of respect and convenience. I kissed her harshly, burning up with a myriad of conflicting emotions, most of them entirely foreign and utterly insane.
Aria wanted a fucking fairy-tale, a love story worthy of a goddamn Hollywood blockbuster. She was determined to get it, and I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to deny her.
Aria and I went down into the kitchen together. It was a few minutes before noon, and I had to meet Matteo and drive to the Sphere afterward. I hadn’t intended to stay in bed for so long, but after last night I felt the urge to keep Aria close for as long as possible.
Romero wasn’t there yet when Aria searched the fridge for something we could manage to turn into something edible and I prepared coffee. My eyes kept returning to her. She was dressed in a white summer dress with colorful dots, her hair still damp from our shower, her feet bare, and humming a soft tune I didn’t recognize. She looked as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.
