Twisted Pride (The Camorra Chronicles 3)

Was this love? Or madness?

I sank down to my knees beside him, kneeling on the sticky floor, my white linen pants soaking up the blood greedily. My pants soon stuck to my skin with Remo’s blood. “No,” I whispered, finally answering him.

Remo’s eyes traced my face. He looked almost at peace. “To kill me?”

I tilted my head, regarding him. Remo was Nevio. Nevio was Remo. As if they had been carved from the same template. My children were the spitting image of their father. Even if I didn’t have feelings for the man before me, I could never kill him because the faces of Greta and Nevio would remind me of him every day of my life.

“I always thought it was meant to be that way. Your hand ending my life.”

I shook my head. “I won’t kill you.” I leaned over Remo, my fingers spreading through his blood on the ground, my hair dipping in it. So much blood.

“You didn’t marry Danilo,” Remo murmured.

“How could I?” I whispered, bending low until Remo and I were almost touching. “How could I marry him when I was pregnant with your children?”

Remo stiffened. I’d wondered how he would react if I ever told him about Greta and Nevio, but nothing came close to the look on his face. Complete and utter shock, and more than that … wonder.

“When you gave me up, I carried your babies in me, Remo. You gave us up.”

“I thought you’d return to me,” he rasped.

“You pushed me away.”

“I set you free.”

“I wasn’t free,” I hissed. How could I ever be free when his name was etched into my heart?

“You were pregnant,” he said quietly.

“I was pregnant, a living breathing reminder of the greatest failure of the Outfit, a living breathing reminder of something dark and shameful. A reminder that you took something from the Outfit, took something from me. That’s what everyone thought. My family and everyone else in the Outfit. I knew giving birth to a child of yours would ruin any chance I had to find my way back into the Outfit, back into my family. I knew I’d seal my fate if I had your child. I’d be damned to live a life of pity stares and disgusted expressions.”

Something flickered in Remo’s eyes. Dread, maybe even fear. “You got rid of the babies.” And his voice wavered ever so slightly.

A cruel, unbreakable man.

My nemesis, my captor, the man who took everything from me and without knowing it gave me the greatest gift of all.

I’d always wondered what it would take to break Remo, and I realized I held the power to do it, to crush the cruelest, strongest man I knew in my hand, held it on the tip of my tongue. One word would shatter him. The knowledge filled me with unparalleled joy, not because I could break the man before me. No, because our children even without knowing them meant so much to him that their death would destroy him.

“Oh, Angel, have they sent you to deliver the ultimate blow? Tell Dante he wins.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said quietly, then fiercer, “No. I didn’t get rid of the babies even though everyone wanted me to do it.”

Remo held my gaze.

“How could I get rid of the most beautiful creation I can imagine? Greta and Nevio are pure perfection, Remo.”

He exhaled, and the look in his eyes … God, that look. This cruel man had stolen my heart, and I had let him.

“They look like you. Nevio is you. Everyone who sees him knows he’s yours.”

Remo smiled the darkest, saddest smile I have ever seen. “Have you come to tell me before my death that I’ll never see them? Angel, I must say you are crueler than I could ever be.”

I linked my fingers with his bloody ones, the blade cupped between our palms. “Our children are perfection but here, in the Outfit, they represent shame and dishonor. People whisper behind their backs, call them Falcones as if it is something sinful, something dirty. Our children are beautiful.” My voice became fiercer with every word. “They are meant to hold their heads high, not be ashamed for who they are. They aren’t meant to bow, aren’t meant to live in the shadows. They are meant to rule. They are Falcones. They belong in Las Vegas where their names carry power and respect. They are meant to rule at the side of the cruelest, bravest man I know. Their father.”

Remo didn’t say anything but his expression set me aflame with emotion.

“How badly injured are you?” I whispered in his ear.

“Badly,” he admitted.

I nodded, my throat tightening. I reached for the syringe in my pocket and pulled it out. “Adrenaline.”

Remo’s mouth pulled wider. I injected him with the liquid and he shuddered. His pupils were dilated when he met my gaze again.