The Beginning (The Life 1)

“There was a wedding; the Ricci were all gathered that day. I don’t know what the plan was, papa never said. All I know is that night, he came back in a rush and told me I had to leave the village. He’d been planning all along. He’d sold what he could and begged where he could to get me passage to America.

I knew nothing of this plan; I had no time to even say goodbye. I was taken out of the village under cover of night, and I still didn’t know why. It was only days later that I learned the truth. An eye for an eye! Papa believed that they had killed his daughter, so he took theirs. It was her wedding day. She was blown to pieces at the altar.”

She flew off the bed and ran to the bathroom with me hot on her heels. I held her hair and rubbed her back as she retched into the bowl.

There were a million emotions going through me at once. Anger, regret, pity, compassion, they all fought for place, but anger had a head start. “You better now?” I helped her to her feet and over to the sink to get her cleaned up.

She was so pitiful and weak. My heart squeezed in my chest, and I faced the inevitable. It had been brewing for weeks, and I should’ve known it would only be a matter of time. I’m not one of those men who need to have two or three women to feel like a man.

But I knew the way I felt about her wasn’t going to be ignored for too long. The struggle I’d had with myself all this time, about calling off my two-year relationship with Charlotte, the girl that both our families expected me to marry, was at an end.

I can already imagine the uproar this shit’s gonna cause, but there are going to be some changes in the Russo household pretty soon. I would never have pegged myself as the type to raise another man’s child, but somehow with her, it didn’t seem to matter as much.

There was no way I could leave her like this, to just let shit go on as before; she didn’t deserve it. She’d suffered enough. And what about the kid? If I turn my back on her now, what will happen to her and the kid? Innocents, both of them.

DRACO

I helped her back to my bed and got her settled, placing the tray with the leftover food that had been kept warm over her lap. “Eat some more!” I didn’t say anything about what she’d told me while she picked at her food again, but my mind replayed it all as I tried to get my thoughts together. If I’d found her pitiful before, that emotion was now magnified by a thousand.

Sometime later, I realized that she’d fallen asleep sitting up with the tray still across her lap, her food pretty much untouched. I’d been so lost in my head I didn’t even realize that she’d dropped off like that without a sound. I removed the tray without jarring her and eased her down on the bed. She was so tired she didn’t even stir.

As I pulled the blanket up around her to protect her from the cold, something soft and tender unfurled in my chest. It was such a foreign emotion that it caught me off guard. Still, I didn’t play into it too much as I sat back to watch her sleep. I felt a huge sense of protectiveness as if, after hearing her story, I was now taxed with watching over her, keeping her safe.

I’m more of a doer than someone who can just watch from the sidelines, but I had to accept that in this case, there really wasn’t much I could do. Not now anyway. How had I gone from one extreme to the next so quickly with this girl? What was it about her that tugged at the strings of my untouchable heart?

Now that she wasn’t looking back at me through those big sad eyes, I took my time and studied her fine features as if searching for the answer. She’s gorgeous, like a portrait that has been retouched by a master. In other words, her beauty was not your run-of-the-mill everyday drivel that most women seek to find in a bottle. She has one of those faces that would be hard to forget, even if seen only once.

It was all there for me to see now that she wasn’t hiding from the world like the little mouse I first thought her to be. In sleep, it was easy to see it all, now that her barriers were down. My eyes traveled over her features, taking her in at my leisure. Her skin was creamy white and startling against her reddish-gold hair that, together with her blue-blue eyes, made her appear almost otherworldly.