I back away from him, rubbing my throat. My brain struggles to catch up with what just happened. He’s dangerous.
“Don’t ever do that again,” I say, unable to keep my voice from shaking. “No, I didn’t tell him. But I won’t help you. I don’t want anything to do with you.”
He snarls. “I should kill you right here so that you won’t run your mouth to him.”
I straighten my back and force myself to stay calm. “I’d like to see you try. If I’m dead, Rafaele will make sure you’re carried out of here in pieces.”
I brush past him, but he seizes my forearm and jerks me back. “Whatever he told you to turn to his side is a lie. You’ll be miserable with him. He’s not a good man.”
“And you are?”
His hold on me tightens until he’s practically crushing my bones.
“Ow, stop!”
“You’ll regret this decision.”
“Let go of me.”
“You’ve always been such a fucking disappointment,” he hisses.
“Want to know what I find disappointing?” a cool voice drawls. “Your utter lack of manners, Garzolo.”
Papà releases me at once. I whirl around to see Cosimo standing at the end of the hallway studying us. His appearance somehow feels a lot more menacing than all of Papà’s threats.
He crosses his arms over his chest and props a shoulder against a wall. “Save the domestic dispute for when you’re in your own home.”
“My daughter and I were just catching up,” my father says, a tense smile on his face.
“We’re all caught up,” I mutter.
That earns me a sharp glare, but at least Papà keeps his mouth shut. He hurries past Cosimo and disappears around the corner.
Cosimo studies me as I walk toward him. “He’s a real piece of work,” he says when we’re shoulder to shoulder. His gaze drops to my arm. “Something tells me your husband won’t be thrilled about that.”
I pull down my sleeve. “I’m fine. Please don’t say anything to Rafaele.” He’d lose it.
Cosimo stares at me for a long moment and then nods. “Not my business.”
I brush past him, knowing there’s no way to undo the decision I made.
Tonight, I will have to come clean to my husband.
CHAPTER 27
RAFAELE
Gino and I walk out onto his terrace, and he leads me toward a rectangular pool full of koi. The fish are apparitions in the dark water, coming to the surface for only a few seconds before they disappear again.
“They don’t get cold in the winter?”
Gino follows the movement of one with his gaze. “They’re resilient. The pool is deep enough for them to swim near the bottom even when the top freezes over.”
“They can live under the ice?” That sounds like a claustrophobic nightmare.
“They can.” A smile pulls on his lips. “Impressive, isn’t it? One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting by a koi pond with my mother and watching them swim. She’d take me to the Japanese garden in Brooklyn and tell me the tale of the koi that climbed up the waterfall. A Japanese legend. The fish that managed to overcome the challenge of swimming upstream in a waterfall became a fearsome dragon. She’d say to me that no matter how impossible it felt to navigate a given situation, pushing through would make me stronger.”
A bitter taste floods my mouth. I can’t remember ever having moments like that with my mother.
Father didn’t like her spending a lot of time with me, so he kept us apart for most of my childhood. She was always with the girls, and I was cared for by a rotating menagerie of nannies, none of whom ever stuck around for long. When I turned eleven, he sent Mamma with the girls to the house in the Hamptons. By then, I was glad she left. It meant she’d be safe from him.
“She sounds like she was a good mother.”
“She was. She left us too soon.” Gino clasps his hands behind his back and wanders over to the edge of the terrace.
Only a thick sheet of glass and a black railing prevent a gust of wind from throwing us off the side of the building. Central Park sprawls below us, a dark gash in the sea of concrete and skyscrapers.
Gino drags his hand over his beard. “I’m curious… How did your father explain our tense relationship to you?”
“He said it was because he killed one of your uncles.” He always claimed it was an accident, but knowing my father, that was probably a lie.
Gino exhales a low laugh. “Of course he’d give you that reason. He probably believed it himself.” He places his hands on the railing. “My father had eleven brothers. He got along with about half of them. One of them, he choked with his bare hands over an argument that had something to do with a car his brother borrowed without asking for permission. Another was so brutally humiliated by my father on multiple occasions that he hung himself. We are a complicated family. The uncle your father shot was frankly irrelevant.”
I glance at him. “Then what really happened?”
“As I’m sure you’ve realized being inside my home, I have an affinity for water. But your father… He loved fire. Did you know that even before he killed my Uncle Aldo, he burned one of my warehouses down to the ground on a cold night in December?”
Fire.
A memory scurries through me.
My father used to burn the faces of the men he interrogated. He’d grab them by the scruff of their neck, drag them to the fireplace, and shove their face into the flames. When I was a kid, he’d sometimes make me watch. I had repressed that memory for years.
Gino continues, “I’ll never forget it. It was Christmas Eve ninety-one. You weren’t even born then, were you? I was with my family, and Vita had prepared a feast. I can still remember that giant roast turkey. It looked like it was taken straight out of a commercial on the Food Network.” He chuckles. “I couldn’t wait to try it. I think I ate one bite before I got the call. They shouted that a warehouse was on fire. I had to leave the dinner to go check it out. Vita looked like she was going to kill me, but we had about twenty million dollars’ worth of product in that warehouse, and back then, that was a lot for my family. By the time I got there, there was nothing left to salvage. The fire burned everything to the ground.”
Yeah, that sounds like my father. He liked to destroy things.
“I walked through the smoking rubble and found a charred corpse. A guard. We only had one that night because we thought no one would dare try something on Christmas?” Gino sounds incredulous. “None of us are upstanding citizens, but for men like us, family means something.”
I purse my lips. My father was first and foremost a don. For him, family wasn’t even in the top ten of his priorities. He cared about me in his own twisted way, but when it came to my mother and my sisters… He treated them like possessions devoid of thoughts and feelings. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d ever have any empathy for another man’s family. For all his rigid rules and traditions, he spit on all our family’s core values.