Forgivable Sins (Bellandi Crime Syndicate 2)

The walls, the self-preservation, the fear. I knew realistically that all of those things were a natural reaction to the kind of betrayal Connor committed against me, but I didn't want to let him ruin my life. I didn't want him to influence my decisions and keep me from what could make me happy.

Lino probably wasn't a good man. He'd likely done horrible things that I'd just turned a blind eye to and wanted to pretend didn't exist, and I was sure he had more crimes ahead of him. Especially since Connor had yet to be caught.

"Good morning," I sighed back, rolling onto my stomach so that I could look over at him. I loved the way he looked when he first woke up. Loved knowing that after so many years of him being my first good morning, I finally got to hear that sleepy voice. I finally got to see the way his hair stuck in all directions, and he looked so much younger and more carefree before the realities and pressures of his day settled over him and the businessman took over.

"Promise me you won't run again, Little Dove," he whispered, and the anguish in his voice damn near broke my heart. "My life isn't safe. You can't slip your security like that."

"I can't promise I won't test you, but I promise I won't slip security and disappear," I said in response. His hand touched my back, trailing his fingers up and down the spine at the center as he watched me. I smiled shyly. "But I won't deny that it's addictive to know you looked so hard for me. That you tried to find me, and that you were so angry with me."

"You like that I was angry with you?" His brows raised, and his fingers paused on my back.

With a swallow, I tried to explain the thoughts churning in my head. Tried to find a way to explain what it meant to me that he cared enough to do those things. "Mom always gave me freedom, you know that. Yavin is real

ly only interested in being a brother when it suits him, and as much as I love him, he's too busy with work to ever really be there, you know?" He nodded, and a frown pursed his lips. I had to hope that eventually things between the two men in my life would settle down, and my marriage to Lino would eventually bring my brother and I closer. "He keeps me at a distance, because he can't ever tell me about his day. He thinks I'm so innocent that I've never been to a strip club, or I would be horrified by whatever he could tell me. With nothing in common, there's just not much there." I paused again, letting him consider that. I knew he and Yavin were close, but Yavin had never made as much of an effort as Lino.

Now it made sense why.

"He loves you," Lino responded.

"I know he does, and I love him. I hope now that I'm a wife of the family he feels like he can be more candid with me, but we'll see how he does with the marriage first. Anyway, Connor didn't want me to leave the house. But it wasn't because of safety, he disguised it as him wanting to be with me. But then he'd ignore me. Eventually I just stopped going out, unless I was with you. He'd guilt trip me about it when I got home, but he never showed any interest in calling me or finding out where I was. He never cared if I was safe." I cut off the ramble, because I really didn't want to go into too much detail about my marriage to Connor. No more than was necessary anyway, but some of it felt like it was important to make Lino understand what it meant to me that he looked for me. "So having you drop everything you were doing, call in a team to find me, call and text Yavin, all those things. It's endearing. It makes me feel loved. It feels good to know that someone worries about me. It makes me feel like maybe for just one second, I'm the center of your world."

"You are the center of my world, Samara. You're everything to me." I choked back tears at the declaration.

My fingers trailed over the tattoo of the eye on his chest, feeling as if I saw it for the first time. The words he’d said about it, his everything, weeks ago.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, Little Dove. It’s you. Matteo and I got them together. The tattoos that reminded us of the women we thought we’d never be able to have. So that we could carry a piece of you with us always,” he explained. I’d never seen Matteo’s tattoo, never seen the brutal man out of his suit, so I couldn’t know what tattoo he had for Ivory.

I just hoped it was as beautiful as Lino’s.

“You tried to tell me how you felt, and I didn’t listen,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

“You weren’t ready. That’s not something you need to be sorry for, Little Dove. Our lives and our relationship haven’t been easy, and they probably never will be. Not with the life I lead. I'd walk away from all of it for you if you asked me to. Now that Matteo's in charge, we could go and it would be safe."

"I would never ask you to walk away from your family. They love you, and you love them." I rolled to my side, feeling his hand settle on my hip as he smiled at me.

"I know you wouldn't, and I love you even more for it. You accept me, all of me. Just the way I am, even though you know I'm not perfect. That I'm not a good man." I wrapped my arms around his hips, snuggling into his bare chest and loving the way he smelled like him, but also like me. Like I was a part of him, right down to his scent.

"You're a good man to me. That's all that matters."

His lips touched mine, and he murmured against them with a smile. "I love you, wife."

I smiled back, jumping up from the bed and going to the closet to pull out the box I'd kept tucked behind my shoes. I had to toss the shoes out of the way to grab it, but soon had my little box of memories in hand. When I went back into the bedroom, Lino had sat up in the bed. The sheet pooled around his waist, hiding his legs while he leaned against the headboard and looked at me curiously. "I—I wanted you to have these. So that you know how I felt. You don't have to read them, but—"

"What are they?" he reached forward, tugging the small box from my hand.

"My journals. From the day we met to the day you graduated. I stopped journaling that day. I gave up on us, and I realized that I'd been chronicling our love story, or what I'd thought was our love story, to look back on one day." He took one of the purple notebooks out of the box, opening up to a random page, and I winced at the massive Mrs. Angelino Bellandi that I'd scrawled at the top of the page. It had to have been middle school for me to be that open about my feelings, that convinced that our marriage would happen. My confidence had waned as I'd gotten older and Lino dated other girls in school. I swallowed, shuffling my feet nervously as he read whatever horrifying and humiliating declarations of love were on that page specifically. When he grabbed a second and a third notebook from the box and flipped through the pages, skimming them with rapid eye movements and absorbing all my humiliating memories, I wanted to die. Wanted to crawl into a hole, but I forced myself to crawl into the bed instead.

His eyes finally turned up to meet mine, heat blazing in them briefly before he stood and strode from the room without bothering to cover up his nudity. I watched him go, staring at the box of journals and wondering if maybe I'd gone too far. If maybe they made me seem more like a creep than I'd intended given he confessed he'd had feelings for me all along. My eyes landed on the open notebook; on the sketch of our little family I’d envisioned for us. Lino and I, our four kids, and a dog.

He came back a moment later, something clutched in his hand and strode right for the bathroom. I followed with my heart in my throat, and he stood there with an arrogant, satisfied smirk on his face. Lifting the package in his hand, I felt my eyes widen on the sight of my birth control packet. "What are you doing?" I asked.

He popped a single pill out and it splashed into the toilet.

"Lino!" I protested.

"I'm done waiting," he declared, holding my eyes as he popped out a second pill. There was another splash.