Ricco shook his head. “That’s not entirely true, Stefano. I’ve given this a lot of thought. Their shadows were already so merged by Nicoletta’s second year here, they might as well have been married. Taviano couldn’t have survived as a rider if she had left. We all talked about that. We knew if she married someone else, we would have had to dissolve them first. We’d lose Taviano as a rider at that time, there was no getting around it. No matter what, he was going to have to share information with her. If she agreed to marriage, she would know, and if she didn’t, she wouldn’t remember.”
Nicoletta avoided Taviano’s gaze. She couldn’t look at any of them. It felt more than ever as if she’d trapped Taviano into marriage. Maybe it wasn’t her fault, but it was still the end result—he had to marry her. He didn’t marry her because he loved her, or even because he was so physically attracted to her, he couldn’t do without her. He had to marry her in order to continue his career as a shadow rider.
Her stomach lurched and she pressed a hand deep. Her life was a mess. She wanted to go home to Lucia and Amo. There was unconditional love there. She felt it every time she walked through their door. She mattered to them just because she was theirs. They were like that. It wasn’t because her shadow was different or that it happened to tangle with Taviano’s; they just loved her.
She realized she had started to rock herself, another bad habit she had developed that she’d been working on breaking. In the course of less than an hour in the company of the Ferraro family, she’d had panic attacks twice and was now rocking herself.
“Not all partners know what we do,” Stefano denied. “They don’t always want to know everything.”
“Nicoletta, obviously, is not one of those partners,” Vittorio said. “She already realized we were capable of disappearing into the shadows. Taviano had to get to her fast when she alerted him to the danger. He took her out of harm’s way, just as any of us would have done. She asked him to help get her friends free from the Demon gang members.”
“All of which, until that point, seems reasonable enough. At that point, no matter what she wanted, or said, he should have taken her back to the plane or had the cousins take her ass to the safe house and sit on her until he cleaned up the mess.”
Stefano made his opinion absolutely clear. There was no doubt in Nicoletta’s mind that he would have done exactly that. He wouldn’t have cared what she thought or felt. He would have taken her somewhere safe and forced her compliance. To him, there was no other reasonable course of action.
She flicked a quick glance at Taviano’s brothers. In spite of the fact that Ricco, Giovanni and Vittorio had stood up for him, it was clear from their expressions that they agreed with Stefano. Her heart sank. When she was younger, she’d often thought of Taviano as a dictator, a man who insisted on things his way, but as she had grown up, she’d realized he was looking out for her. Now, she could see he was different from his brothers in some ways. Many ways. This was one of them, and it was going to hurt him.
Stefano’s dark eyes were back on his youngest brother’s face. “Why? You broke the rules of the famiglia, of the riders, and you must have had a compelling reason or you would never have risked everything to do so. I know you, Taviano. You love what you do. You’re good at it, and you know we need you. We need every single rider we have. Our numbers are decreasing, not increasing. Tell me your reason.”
There was a long silence. For the first time, Nicoletta sensed Taviano hesitate. He actually felt uncomfortable. She was very tuned to him and knew it was because they were so connected. He could read her every mood, just as she could read his, and she was the reason he was unwilling to tell his brother why he had risked everything to take her into the shadows because she’d asked him to.
She wanted to know. More than anything, Nicoletta wanted to know, but this was Taviano, and what he did was life. She took a deep breath. “I can go into the other room and give you privacy.”
It hurt to make the offer, but she would do anything for him. Even this. And this hurt. They were supposed to be partners. She had sacrificed, going knowingly into a loveless marriage, when she was already so in love, which made it so much worse.
Taviano put his finger under her chin and tipped her face up to his, studying her expression. It hurt to let him see that she was trying not to show she was unhappy. One long finger slid over her cheek.