“Maybe you should just spit it the fuck out,” I spat, frustration and betrayal boiling over.
“You’re getting very bold with how you speak to me,” Anteros growled. His voice was low and his eyes dark—signs he was losing patience. I didn’t give a shit about his patience anymore.
“You know what, fuck you. I’ll use the internet. I don’t need you.” The words were runny and almost illegible and I probably couldn’t decipher them, but fuck him. I’d seen a computer in the bedroom—I’d use that. As I walked by him, he reached out and grabbed my elbow. I tried to shake him off, but he pulled me into an embrace.
My fists connected with his chest, my knees with his thigh. Nothing swayed him. He held me, his face unmoving from that goddamn stoic, almost grieved countenance. Finally I stopped fighting, face sinking into his chest.
I was in a vise grip, surrounded by his arms. I had no choice but to breathe in his unique spicy, masculine musk, no choice but to hear his rapid heartbeat, feel his steady breath go up and down. My body told me to relax because this was my other half. My mind screamed traitor.
“Why are you doing this?” I yelled, voice muffled by his chest.
“Lucio Pavoni is your father,” he said. I stopped struggling and he let me go as I absorbed the information. So the head of the Family was my father? I was a bastard or something? But he had been the Boss, so couldn’t he have had me around anyway? I didn’t understand. How could Lucia be my grandmother? The grooves in my forehead were eroding through the skin.
“And Lucia Pavoni is your mother.”
I dropped the letter and it floated to the ground, slowly dancing on air currents.
Mother.
Lucia Pavoni and Lucio Pavoni, as in brother and sister? I felt sick. The room spun. I stumbled back, almost tripping into the mantle. Anteros caught me.
Just as he did, my hand collided with the wine glass. I felt more than saw it. The cool splash of wine against my chest right before the glass fell and shattered. The liquid seeping through the fabric, drenching my skin. My dress stained and corrupted—fairytale ruined, once again.
And I was the one who’d caused the glass to fall.
“That’s not true,” I said, voice barely whisper. I couldn’t look at him, tried to focus on anything else, but it all reminded me of him. The beautiful white fur rug we’d made love on. The hallway he’d carried me down when we’d first arrived.
I closed my eyes.
“I didn’t understand at first either. Lucio and Lucia hid it masterfully. They concocted the Pavoni Princess myth so if a child was found, instead of looking into their affair, others would look for parents that didn’t exist.”
I opened my eyes, and it was a total mistake. Anteros was still impeccably dressed and the firelight behind him was a traitor. Shadows caressed the valleys of his muscles, light licked the peaks. Everything was hard, from his thigh to his bicep, like a statue come to life. His face—that infuriatingly beautiful face—looked at me with pity. I hated how I’d thought I could trust him to see me differently than the others, but there it was on his face: a shining reminder that I was alone. My heart was shattering inside my ribcage and it took everything I had not to clutch my chest like some dame in an old movie.
I would be strong, or at least I would make him believe he hadn’t broken me.
“You…” I took a breath. “How long have you known?”
“Since right before the river.”
Anger. Fury. Bright red in my eyes. Enough to blind me from the crippling pain that lashed through me. He’d known my most deepest pain, the thing that had haunted me through my life, the thing I’d desperately wanted to know, and hadn’t told me.
The man I thought wanted to
protect my soul.
The man I thought knew my soul.
He’d kept the shard that pierced me to himself.
I held on to my anger so I didn’t crumble to pieces.
“I hate you,” I whispered. Anteros and I weren’t soul mates. We weren’t meant to be together. We had become a fistula. We were simply an abnormal connection between two people.
Fifteen
Frankie’s words pierced his skin like needles, dragging poison to his blood, pumping death into his heart. I hate you, she’d said, but it was different than the many times before. This time it wasn’t to hide her love, it was to shield her heart. The one he’d broken. He dragged her to him as if he could stop the thing between them from falling to the ground and shattering.
The day Anteros had found Frankie perusing his stack of books, he was ready to destroy the letter the minute he was alone. When he got downstairs, though, it was missing. For the nearly two days Frankie had been asleep, he’d searched constantly for it. He’d retraced his steps over and over again, but it was like it had vanished.