“It hurt me to watch you turn into someone other than yourself. I know you, and that person wasn’t you.” I rubbed his stomach lovingly. “This is you, the man I fell in love with. I don’t want you to go away again.” A lump of emotions choked me at the thought. “I don’t want you to become that other man again.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to, either. I forgot what it feels like to be…” He took a deep breath. “Me.” He kissed my forehead. “That’s why, in the morning, I’m giving the family back to Luca.”
I shot up from where I was lying. “What?”
Taking charge of the family from Luca may have been a decision that the dark Alessandro made, but it was one I wholeheartedly agreed with. Luca’s decision making had taken a severe downturn. One could argue that it was because he did the opposite of what Alessandro did—let falling in love and having a family soften him—which wasn’t a bad thing, but it didn’t entirely bode well for what we were trying to accomplish. Then again, if Alessandro was to hang onto his real self more than his dark one, that meant that he, too, served in opposition to that goal.
Alessandro chuckled. “I thought you’d be pleased, but you seem shocked.”
“I think you handled things better than him.” My hands trailed over Alessandro’s fingers, where his father’s rings were still nestled. The middle finger on his left hand held the ring that was meant to be worn only by the head of the family. Luca handed it over when he gave in to Alessandro’s demands to run the family. “I don’t know. Do you think he has the spine for it?”
“I don’t think any of us have the spine for it anymore. Gabriel never did, and Marco was always better at punching than thinking. It was always going to be Luca or me, and it came down to who my dad had poisoned more, and that was me.” He sighed. “Luca’s better suited to it because he managed to resist the temptation to turn into Angelo Jr.”
I recalled Denise telling us that she knew the Varasso patriarch and that he intended to name Alessandro after himself. Alessandro’s name was the closest to Angelo’s, and no one could deny that Alessandro had proven to be most like his father. Maybe he was right. The longer he sat in Angelo’s chair, the more likely he was to be diseased by his father’s domineering, post-mortem presence.
“If you think that’s best, then I trust you,” I said finally. “Hopefully, we’re close enough to the end that it won’t make much of a difference.”
“If only we’d listened to you, we wouldn’t have taken this huge step backward,” Alessandro said. “I’m so sorry, baby.” He sat up and wrapped his arms around my back in a hug. That’s when it hit me. Alessandro still didn’t know what I’d learned.
“Sandro.”
“What, my love?” He kept his head nestled next to mine while his hands stroked my back. I pulled his face back so I could look into it, but before I could get any words out, he kissed me.
I relented as he pulled me down onto the bed, lips attached to mine. There was a single brain cell of logic screaming at me to stop and tell Alessandro what I knew about Denise, but all the rest were binding and gagging that one in the interest of letting myself get swept away in him again.
He pulled away. “I’m sorry.”
My eyes widened a little bit. “For what?”
“I know that I do that, too. You’re trying to talk to me, and I just kiss you instead of listening. You said that to me, back at the hospital. I didn’t realize how frequently I did it, but once you said that, I realized how true it was.”
The hospital. That day was one I’d rather erase from my memory. There was nothing good about it—Marco nearly getting shot, Alessandro flipping sides, Alessandro’s attempt to use his power over me, me deciding I was done with him for good, me getting those pained stares from Molly and Luca, me talking to Denise and confirming she wasn’t who she said she was. I didn’t want to think about it.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up,” Alessandro said.
“No, it’s okay.” I smiled at him. “Thank you for thinking about the thing
s you need to work on. I know I have things, too. We’ll get through it together.”
He rubbed my cheek gently. “What did you want to say?”
“Alessandro, I learned stuff about Denise. A lot of it. She’s not who she said she is.”
Alessandro nodded. “I don’t know why I let myself get so lost in her charm. I guess I just really didn’t think that she’d go to such lengths to prove she was in it. I mean, a slight miscalculation, and she could have died while trying to convince us of something.”
“This is what she does. She’s a con woman. She has been for many years. Maybe always.”
Alessandro tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“Have you heard of the Costa family?” I asked.
Alessandro nodded. “Yeah. Head by Illiana Costa. She’s currently trying to run Anthony Carducci out of Chicago, or she was. A few years before my dad died, their rivalry came to a screeching halt. They weren’t aligned necessarily, but something kept them from going at one another. It was a bloodbath out there, and then it just…stopped.”
“Just a bit before your dad died? Like when he started trying to arrange an alliance with your family?”
I saw Alessandro’s eyes glass over as he considered it. When he looked back at me, it was with darkened shock. “Almost exactly.”
Every time I learned more about Denise and the Costa family, it left me with more questions. “Denise is a Costa. She’s Illiana’s daughter.”