I close my eyes as the heat of emotion chokes me. I’m a coward for not telling her sooner. I fucking hate cowardice. I force my eyes to open and shake my head.
“Elise…” I reach for her face, but she jerks away.
“Tell me. Please,” she whispers.
I draw in a deep breath. “We found out that he’d taken you, and Angelina was in your place. You were supposed to be married that night, Elise, and you know it.”
“Of course. We’ve been over this.” Her voice is choked. “It’s why I’ve been punished. Why I was forced to marry you.”
Somehow the forced to marry you stings far worse than I ever anticipated. My heart aches.
“I knew he was the one that betrayed the Regazzas, and because he left with you, he was the one that betrayed us. He stole from us. And you and I both know that theft from The Family warrants death.”
“Say it,” she whispers. “Just fucking say it.”
I release a shaky breath. “I didn’t kill him myself, but I was the one that ordered his death.” I exhale angrily. “So it’s the same damn thing.”
“Tavi,” she whispers, her voice breaking as she shakes her head. “And Santo was the one who did it. Wasn’t he?”
I nod.
My phone rings. I let it go to voicemail, but then it rings again insistently. We have so much to say, so much to uncover. But the call’s from Romeo. I’m not allowed to ignore a call from Romeo.
“I have to take this.”
Elise gets to her feet and waves vaguely at the phone, a look of resignation on her face. “Get it,” she whispers. “Of course. What the family needs always comes first, doesn’t it?” The hollow, painful ring of her voice twists my heart. “Go on. Get the phone, Tavi.”
I answer the call. “He’s in Tuscany. Find him.”
Elise has gone out of the greenhouse. She stands, her back to me, as she wipes at her eyes.
“I’ll do it.” I hang up the phone.
“Elise,” I call, but she only shakes her head at me. She needs a moment. Maybe ten. Maybe days. Or weeks.
Maybe forever. God.
“Santo’s in Tuscany, baby.”
When she turns and faces me, her face is contorted with rage. “Don’t you call me that.”
“Elise—”
“I’m not your baby. I’m not your… your anything. I’m your wife by law, and we knew going into this that we’d have a business arrangement.” She shakes her head and a tear splashes on her cheek. She swipes it furiously away. “Just like everyone else.”
Not everyone else.
I stare at her, not sure of how to respond. I want to tell her that I was within my right to order the hit on Piero, but I don’t think logical reasoning will help now.
“Elise.” I gentle my voice. “I’m sorry.”
She turns away and doesn’t respond. And worse than any of the pain I’ve been through, this one stab to the heart aches so deeply my throat gets tight and my nose tingles. I believed there could be something between us. No, not something.
I believed for a little while we could have it all.
“Find who?” Elise says, swiping at her eyes again.
“Santo.”
She laughs mirthlessly and shakes her head. “Oh, yes. Let’s find him. When we do, I have questions for him, too.”
“Elise.”
“What?” she snaps. And this is how it begins, I think to myself. The slow descent into a joined union where we hate each other. Like my father and mother, who sought comfort in the arms of their lovers. Like Elise’s parents, who made a business deal and moved on with life. Like goddamn nearly everyone in The Family.
They all started off with hope. Just like I did.
“How did you know he was here?” she asks. I hate the cold, detached tone of her voice. It would have been easier for me to accept that she was cold and detached before I saw the real Elise—the beautiful, brilliant woman who makes magic in the kitchen, who transforms an empty building into a business worthy of the centerfold in a magazine. The woman who hugs my Nonna thank you and eats my Mama’s pasta and revels in the taste of fresh herbs, good wine, and homemade food. The woman who makes a homecooked meal an orgasmic experience. The woman who put up with all the bullshit my family put her through and still stood at the altar with grace and dignity and took our vows.
I got to know the real Elise. The one who loves. The one who lives.
The woman before me now is only a shell of the woman I brought back to America and kept hostage.
I don’t have time to make this right. Not now, when her safety and the safety of my family is on the line. Romeo called to tell me Santo was in Tuscany, but I need more than that.
And I need to keep tabs on my wife. An angry woman’s like a ticking time bomb, and I won’t let her detonate on my watch. We can’t fix this now. The first step in fixing anything, or at the very least preventing anything else getting fucked up, is finding Santo.
“Get in the car,” I order her. I unlock it and signal for her to go over. She stomps over with a haughty expression. I’m not sure if she’s hiding her need to cry or her need to hit me, and I don’t care. Before we can fix this, we have to find Santo.
I make a few phone calls before I join her, my mind as always working things through, like twisting a Rubik’s cube. If I turn things around the right way, the colors will line up.
Santo.
Anna.
Piero.
Jenoah.
They’re not random pieces of the puzzle. They all fit together.
How?
I could start at the morgue. My cousin’s body’s been claimed and we’ve sent him to be cremated. My family’s due to arrive in a few weeks for the funeral.
No. The morgue won’t give me the answers we need.
I pull up footage of The Castle and frown as I scroll back to the date of my wedding.
There she is. My beautiful bride, waiting at the foot of the stairs near the reception room. Her bouquet’s held up to her chest as she scans the crowd, her eyes a bit apprehensive. Then Angelina comes down the stairs, and Elise’s face lights up.
She won’t like that Angelina kept the truth about Piero to herself. She’ll feel betrayed, I’d imagine. I don’t blame her. I’d feel the same.
And even though I denied that I regret what I’ve done… I hate that I’ve caused her pain.
I was loyal to my family. I did what had to be done, and I told myself it was the right thing to do. But do I feel as if it were the right choice?
Do we ever have clear-cut right choices?
Sometimes, I suppose.
Sometimes, the answer’s clear. Other times, the answer’s neutral and still others, our choices are tangled like a rat’s nest.
And sometimes we make our choices and have to deal with the consequences.
I open the car door. Elise looks out the window, sitting as far away from me as possible in the small interior of the car.
I flip through the footage on my phone.
“So that’s what you used,” she says in a cold, detached tone.
“For what?”
“To watch me. When I was your prisoner.”
I don’t look up when I respond. “Exactly.”
She makes a sort of huffing noise, but I ignore her and continue looking through the footage.