My stomach then plummeted past my knees and straight into the floor. “No, Molly, you can’t.”
“I can,” she said, not understanding. “I do.”
“No.” I sat up, dislodging her. “I don’t want you to.”
She crinkled her brows, looking puzzled. “Why not?”
“Because I can’t return those feelings.” Can’t being the operative word, because I already did return them. But I couldn’t explain that. Even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything. We still couldn’t be together.
Not if it meant some horrible tragedy would befall her somewhere down the line.
I’d been with Alana for three years before it happened to her, leaving Anna to grow up without her. My mom and dad had been married for nearly two decades before his wife and the mother of three of his sons had been torn away from him.
I didn’t think I could do it, have a relationship where I spent every second wondering when the axe would descend like a guillotine, cutting her off from me and destroying our life together.
I couldn’t do that to Molly. I wouldn’t.
I hazarded a glance at her. She’d gone stationary, eerily still. I waited for her to fume, to spew animosity in my direction, to fly at me like she had earlier.
And this time, I’d let her. I’d let her beat me to a pulp if it made her feel better.
I already felt like shit anyway.
I watched as she shoved herself to her feet. I watched as she turned in the opposite direction and collected her robe, throwing it on and tying the sash. And I watched as she calmly strode away from me and through the equipment of the gym, not once looking back.
19
Roman
I sat in my van mindlessly fast forwarding through the endless hidden camera feed I’d captured. And there it was. Precisely what I’d been looking for. Silently, I pumped my fist in the air, allowing myself a triumphant moment of celebration.
Finally, this was it.
Six years ago, I learned the truth of who I was, who my father had been. So I’d worked and slaved to infiltrate the impenetrable Varasso mansion.
Turned out, it wasn’t so impenetrable after all.
The Varassos, while a well-established and influential mob family, had their weaknesses like everyone else. For them, their greatest weakness came in the form of a story, passed along generation after generation. It was a fiction they fully believed in.
The Varasso Curse.
Such a ridiculous idea, that all the men in the bloodline were fated for heartbreak. Yet when anything bad happened to them, everything from natural disasters to the premature death of a loved one, that’s what they chalked it up to. The men of the family had convinced themselves that these random accidents and coincidences were somehow linked to their destinies.
What a load of crap.
Life sucked. For everyone. Shit happened. It’s just the way it was. It didn’t make sense to blame some nonexistent and misguided notion of mysticism for occurrences that were totally arbitrary in nature. But the Varassos did, luckily for me. And also luckily for me, this made them easy to manipulate.
I’d already treated the Varassos and the Bianchis like they were puppets on strings, and it’d worked. Forge a few records and plant a little fake evidence, and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, we have ourselves a conspiracy.
Granted, I was one of the best in the business. I’d been making forgeries ever since I could walk and talk. Being raised by a single mother addicted to meth who hooked for a living meant I’d had to start making my way in the world early. It’d been a way of life.
Next had come what I like to call my informal marksman training. In other words, I’d practiced with a stolen BB gun on some tin cans in a back alley. I’d been a little short of my seventh birthday at the time.
The funny thing is how good I’d been. The kids with me had jeered and said it was beginner’s luck. But I continued to have this ability to laser focus on my aim. I’d been accurate as hell. And I transferred that early knowledge to more weaponry as I grew to adulthood.
If I’d gone the military route, I’d probably be an expert level sniper right now, but being told what to do by authority figures had never exactly appealed to me. So as a teen, I did whatever might be necessary to keep food in my belly, including the occasional hit.
I looked at like this: It was nothing personal. It was a method of survival, that’s all. It was me, or it was them. And I knew who I’d choose to come out on top every time.