Chapter 156: Chapter 156
PAOLO
I looked at my mother.
I looked at my sister across the room — her face, that blank terrible face, the metal barrel cold against her temple, her arms pinned back, her feet barely touching the floor.
I was fifteen years old. I had no weapon. No power. No door that wasn’t blocked by men with guns. I was fifteen and I was alone and there was nothing in that room that could save us except the one unbearable thing Lorenzo was asking me to do.
My mother pulled me close and pressed her mouth to my ear.
"Don’t you dare feel guilty," she whispered. Her voice was completely destroyed. "You hear me? Whatever happens in this room — none of it is you. None of it belongs to you, it’s not your fault. None of it."
I heard her.
I have never once believed her. Because how could I have sex with my own mother while my sister watched and not be guilty for ruining her sanity?
A horn blared behind me.
I came back to the car all at once — the wheel under my hands, the green light ahead, the city moving normally around me like nothing had happened, like nothing ever happened, like the world hadn’t ended in a windowless room when I was fifteen and then simply continued anyway without my permission.
My hands were shaking.
I pressed them flat against my thighs and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way Dr. Linda had taught me. One breath. Then another. The concrete room receded slowly back into the place inside me where it lived, where it had always lived, where I suspected it would live until I died.
The car behind me blared again.
The city stretched ahead through the windscreen, indifferent and glittering, and I drove through it with shaking hands and thought about Reina sitting alone in our apartment and the emerald necklace resting against her collarbone and the way she had looked at me on that yacht like I was still worth looking at.
I needed to get home. Even if I couldn’t tell her what happened, the exact shameful thing I did that ruined my sister, the same thing that made my mother take her own life and left me broken since I was fifteen. Even if I couldn’t exactly tell her any of that, I still needed to apologize to her. She didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
I needed to get home before I lost what little courage I had left.
My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
I glanced at the screen to see it was Aunt Marilyn who was calling. I had half a mind to ignore her call just like I had been ignoring her niece’s call, but I couldn’t do it. Aunt Marilyn barely calls me and whenever she does, there was definitely an emergency. I answered immediately.
"Aunt Marilyn—"
"Paolo." Her voice was tight. Controlled in the way that meant she was working hard to stay calm. "I haven’t been able to reach Reina. I’ve called her seven times in the last hour and it keeps going to voicemail. She called me this morning asking me if she could come stay with me and she didn’t sound like herself. She sounded frightened. And now she’s completely unreachable and I just—" A pause. "I have a very bad feeling, Paolo."
My grip on the wheel tightened. "I’ll find her. Let me make a call right now and I’ll ring you straight back."
I hung up and immediately dialled Calestino. He picked up on the second ring.
"Paolo—"
"Where is Reina." It didn’t come out as a question. "Her aunt just called me. She can’t reach her. What’s going on?"
Silence.
Not the silence of someone thinking. The silence of someone deciding how much to say.
"Calestino." My voice dropped. "Where is my wife? Did something happen to her?" I choked on the last sentence because I wouldn’t forgive myself if something has happened to her because of me.
What came through the phone next stopped every single thing inside me. My breathing. My thoughts. The blood moving through my body. Everything just — stopped.
The phone slipped from my fingers and hit the floor of the car.
I didn’t notice.
My hands found the wheel on instinct and I drove because driving was the only thing my body remembered how to do. My eyes were on the road but I wasn’t seeing the road. I was seeing nothing. Hearing nothing except Calestino’s voice on a loop, those words, playing over and over in a mind that was refusing — completely refusing — to accept them.
Not Reina.
Not my wife.
Not her.
I pressed the accelerator to the floor.
CALESTINO
I pulled my shirt back on, fingers working the remaining buttons slowly. Lorenzo sat on the edge of the bar, watching me with that half-lidded satisfaction that I had never been able to fully hate no matter how hard I tried.
I turned to face him.
"I need something from you," I said.
He tilted his head. "You just had something from me, Cal. You just took my ability to walk."
"I’m serious, Enzo."
The amusement didn’t leave his face entirely but it shifted, made room for something more attentive. He crossed his arms and waited.
"I’ll help you," I said. "With your father, I mean. I’ll help you get to Domenico and I’ll help you finish it. Whatever you need from me, I’m ready to do it." I held his gaze steadily. "But I need something in return."
"Name it." He said, groaning as he half glared at me.
"Reina." I kept my voice even. "She’s off the table. Whatever you’re planning, whatever pressure you think you can apply through her — it stops. Completely. She walks away from all of this untouched. She was never the cause of your problem."
Lorenzo was quiet for a moment.
"She’s probably carrying his child," he said.
Something cold moved through my chest. Just how much does this bastard even know? "How do you know that?"
He smiled. "I know everything that happens inside that building, Cal. I’ve had eyes in there for months." He pushed off the bar and moved toward the window, looking out at the city below. "She’s an interesting variable. My father’s weakness. His leash."
"She’s Paolo’s wife," I said. "And she’s innocent. She didn’t choose any of this."
"Nobody chooses to be collateral damage. It just happens."
"Enzo." I stepped closer. "I’m offering you your father. The man who threw you away. The man who built an empire on your mother’s suffering and gave you nothing. I’m offering you everything you came back for." I paused. "Reina is not part of that. Neither is Paolo."
Lorenzo turned from the window.
"Paolo," he said, the name sitting strange in his mouth. "He got everything I was supposed to have. The name. The position. The life." Something moved across his face — not quite anger, not quite grief, something complicated living between the two. "Do you have any idea what it was like watching from the outside? Knowing our father looked at him every day and saw a son worth keeping?"
