“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.”