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October 6 - October 8, 2023
I said a little prayer that I might recover some of those precious fragments one day. That I might not go on so hollow and brittle, ready to crack into sharp pieces that might pierce anyone so brave as to pick them up.
The complicated knot of my own raw emotions was too difficult for me to unravel. Suddenly, I was tired of myself. So exhausted by the simple act of being me. It wasn’t an unusual sensation these days, but it made me weary to the bone.
I stared at him, finally pinpointing what it was exactly about Dante Salvatore that put me so ill at ease. He was utterly genuine. In his dominance, in his charm, in his concern.
The pathetic little lost boy whose mother had been killed by his own father, whose own brother didn’t believe him when he’d cried wolf, who’d been stranded in a country that wasn’t his own. Italy had embraced me the way darkness consumed sight, swallowing me up intractably in her shadows. Tore became my father, his Soldati my brothers and cousins and uncles.
She said to me, “Elena, lottatrice mia, you are just a girl in a very large world that owes you nothing. Not one thing in your life will come easy. This is the way of girlhood in Napoli. I wish it was not so. I wish I could have given you a better start, but understand, every woman must be a fighter, Elena, because history has tricked men into thinking women are less.” Caprice gripped my face in her hands so tightly, I remember thinking she might pop my head like a crushed watermelon. “This is what you must understand, Elena. They are wrong. Women bear the trials of their men, the delivery of
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Any comparison to Seamus Moore was an insult.
She hushed and clucked her tongue at me nonsensically as she gathered me to her and stroked my hair. A sob rose in my throat and lodged somewhere behind my voice box, robbing me of the ability to speak. There was nowhere I felt safer than in the arms of my mother. Nowhere I felt more loved and accepted than against her plush side, face buried under her thick black hair. She was the only person who was never disappointed in me, the only one who believed in my goodness and rooted for me no matter what.
At the end of the day, Mama had done her best for us and I’d always love her for the simple fact that she’d always loved me.
For the first time ever, I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore or how to get it.
I wanted to open my heart up to my mother and have her sort out the broken fragments that remained of my soul, but I was afraid of what she might find there.
This was one of the reasons I loved Beau. He wasn’t perturbed by my coldness or my reserve. He respected them just as much as he strove to abolish them. He loved to tease me, to make me laugh. He reminded me that sometimes, life didn’t have to be such a competitive sport.
hands going to her hips to strike a pose full of sass and fire. It was a heady thing to know I could make the ice queen burn.
I laughed, finally having fun at my own party, and it was at the hands of the most unlikely woman I’d ever met.
Something curdled in my stomach, a reaction that surprised me as much as it shamed me. Once again, I was left out of the group dynamic.
Alone. God, I was so fucking tired of being alone.
“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as a respect for right.”
Seamus had never liked me because from the time I could cogitate, I was smart enough not to like him.
“How can you take yourself seriously?” I asked, genuinely interested. “You haven’t cared about any of us in years.” “I care,” he countered, his features flickering like a bad TV connection between placid tenderness and curdled anger.
“Everything I do, I do for my family.” “You don’t know the meaning,” I snapped. “Spare me the fatherly bullshit. I can fight my own battles.”
Seamus was every bad part of me, the pride, the explosive temper, the inability to forgive, and the tendencies toward superiority. He lived in me more than enough. I didn’t need his presence in my life for him to take a toll on me, and I was done giving him the benefit of the doubt. He would never love me.
Most of what plagues me is because of you, and that is the only legacy you’ve ever given me. If you care at all about me, you’ll leave me with the scars you’ve already inflicted and never bother me again.”
It shouldn’t have turned me on to see such rage in a woman. It never had before, but something was deliciously wild about her energy like this, a static restless hunger I felt echoed in my own blood. She was fucking magnificent.
I watched as her skin warmed with a blush I wanted to taste with my tongue. It was so much fun to rile her up. I sincerely thought I could sit here and argue with her for the entire night.
At that moment, I wanted to crush her to my body and ravish that prim mouth, dishevel that perfectly curled hair, tear open the silk bow on her blouse with my teeth, then rip apart the bra barely visible beneath that so I could suck on her breasts. I wanted to make her shake for me, quake for me, fucking break for me.
It was the worst idea I’d ever had, and I’d had my fair share, but suddenly, irrevocably, I wanted to be the one who earned that hard-won trust. The man who would be rewarded with the glory of those spoils.
For one uninhibited second, I thought she might let me kiss that mouth. And for one vivid breath, I wondered if that might become one of the biggest accomplishments in my already storied life.
This woman who was barely alive made me feel like a live wire, a lit fuse raw with power. I hadn’t even kissed her, and I felt like roaring, like beating my chest and crowing with glory. All because the ice queen didn’t realize it yet, but the thaw had started and soon, so fucking soon I could almost taste her––something warm and plummy like wine––on my tongue. Soon, she’d be mine. For one kiss, one hour, one night, I didn’t fucking care.
Elena Lombardi was an acquired taste, something to be appreciated by only the most refined palette, the most exquisite mind. As deep and brilliantly complex as expensive Italian wine, and the more I learned about her, the more I wanted to drink her down like a glutton and force her to be mine.
“Did you just lick me?” I shrugged, the urge to giggle bubbling in my throat. “You wouldn’t let me speak.” He blinked at me once, then threw his head back to laugh so hard he held on to his belly as if to contain his humor. I watched him, enjoying the sight of all those muscles contracting with mirth that I’d caused. It felt good to make someone laugh. To make him laugh.
It was an irrational fear, something like a superstition that each time Dante put his hands on me, something elemental changed in my physiology. I didn’t like his hand on my throat or my hand in his, so why had I let him do that to me? Why had I leaned into that strong collar just to feel my heart beat faster? It hinted of darker, deviant things I wasn’t ready to think about, let alone confess any kind of liking for.
I definitely didn’t experience a flash of spine-tingling arousal at the idea of a man like him being possessive of me. And if I did, I consoled myself with the truth. It had been a long time since someone had been possessive of me, and it was only natural to be intrigued. Still, I swore an oath as I left the coffee shop for my office that I wouldn’t breathe a word of it to Dante.
Dante chuckled, moving out from behind me having secured the apron. He tweaked her nose. “Little girls do not need to wear perfume.” She frowned at him. “What do you know about it?” I laughed. God, but I laughed. It burst out of me indecorously, seizing my belly and warming my chest. When I recovered, eyes wet with mirth, Rora had gone back to shaping pasta in her little fingers, but Dante was watching me with something written in black ink in those long-lashed eyes. “Bellissima,” he mouthed.
my broken pieces weaponized like shards of broken glass.
Fear and excitement tangled in my chest, dancing together in a way they never had before. I felt alive with sizzling energy, restless with the need to poke at the growling bear before me until he snapped. The perverse side of me wanted to see what would happen when he did.
Dio mio, I wanted him with an acuteness I hadn’t felt in years. No, that was a lie I couldn’t begin to swallow. I’d never felt like this. This hammering, all-encompassing fervor that struck through me with each beat of my heart like a lightning strike.
“If being a bitch means being smart enough to know the truth and brave enough to speak it, I’ll count it as a compliment,”
“You fuck with Elena, you should know, that’s you fucking with him. And he’ll do a lot worse than I would, capisci?”
The only man I’d ever wanted with this level of physical zeal and the only man I truly could not let myself want.
I ached to wake her up just to see those wintry ocean gray eyes flare back at me, to test the edge of her tongue against mine and know whether it was as sharp as her words or soft like the tender heart she was so careful to guard.
I wanted her, and I would have her, but Elena required a contrarian mix of forcefulness and care, my seduction a tightrope walk that could fail with even the slightest provocation. And I was more and more unwilling to fail.
Survivors came in all shapes and sizes, and not all of them came out on the other side of their trauma shiny and bright with hope and renewed optimism.
I thought about the night with Aurora, when Elena had transformed before my eyes. It was like watching a bear emerging from hibernation, foul-tempered and faintly aggressive with the outside world, turn to her cub and suddenly become all warmth and love. The smile she’d given Aurora, the way she’d made her feel strong just by bestowing a playful nickname. That was the night I discovered the true, tender underbelly of my fighter and decided, irrevocably, that I needed to have her. Not just have her to own her, because a woman like Elena couldn’t be owned and that was part of her powerful charm.
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Because I resolved in much the same way I resolved to solve my mother’s murder and resolved to save Cosima from the Order of Dionysus that I would show Elena Lombardi what it was like to live and love freely. And I’d do it by loving her. First, I just had to trick her into letting down her shields long enough to let me try.
“I am,” he countered, not to be deterred, that famous Lombardi tenacity setting his face to stone. “If you want to share with me.” Gingerly, feeling the sharp pangs in my abdomen, I leaned back against the tower of pillows to stare at the elaborate molding on the ceiling and blew a burst of air between my lips. “How long do you have?” In response, Seb stood up, kicked off his leather boots, and crossed to the other side of the bed so he could lever himself on top of the covers beside me. Once he arranged the pillows to his liking and propped a hand behind his head, he turned to face me with an
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Sebastian huffed. “There were no teams. You are both our sisters, and we love you. It was just…It was easier for us to see that you and Daniel weren’t as well suited in reality as you seemed on paper.” He hesitated before admitting in a soft voice that struck me like a hammer to the soul. “Gigi has always been so…dreamy and fragile. She has an artist’s soul and all of us, you included, safeguarded her from the bad things as much as we could. I think it became a habit. It was harder to be angry with her for hurting you, especially when she was doing it because she was in love, than it was to be
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“Sure, you do,” he insisted. “You’re sick. Binge-watching TV is the only good thing about being stuck in bed. You like HBO? My wife’s addicted to that True Blood. You like vamps, too? Lady catnip, I’m telling ya.”
And that was how I ended one of the most vulnerable days of my life, surrounded by laughing men, most of whom had probably killed a man or committed any other half-dozen felonies. And for the first time in my life, snuggled between the two big warm bodies of my brother and the mafioso I was coming to like more than I should, I didn’t care.
I had always found, if you could understand something, it was almost impossible to hate it because then you could empathize with it. The same, of course, could be said for their boss.
“Are you flirting with me?” I asked, proud that my voice didn’t shake the way my thighs did beneath the table. “Will you hit me if I say yes?” His playfulness was infectious. I tamped down my urge to smile and nodded somberly. “Yes.” “Good,” he said with a wink, “then hit me. I like it rough.” “You’re ridiculous,” I said, giving in to my laughter but sobering slightly when I caught the look he was giving me. “What? Do I still have pomegranate juice on my mouth?” “I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously. I swallowed the mass of emotion that rose in my
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“One day, Elena,” he practically purred, the sound a rough vibration that hummed through me. “I am going to kiss you until you melt, and then I am going to lick up every inch of you.”
