The coffee tasted like acid in his mouth—her words rendering him hopeless.
Again.
For everything he had a solution, an answer. His logical, analytical brain could take the most complex problem and unravel it to the base solution. Yet nothing—not logic, not reason, not power, not brawn, not wealth—could solve this.
Nothing!
‘Leave him.’ He stood up, stared into her eyes and even as he pleaded again, he knew it was futile, as futile now as it always had been.
‘You know I cannot!’
‘You can…’ His usually strong voice cracked, and he saw his mother flinch—both of them realising that he was near to tears. It had been so long since he had even been close to crying that the sting in his eyes, the swell in his throat caught even Luca by surprise. The pain, the fear, the helplessness, the never-ending grief he had lived with as a child was still there—right there and ready to return at any given moment—the anguish waiting to floor him. ‘Leave, Ma.’
‘He is dying, Luca. How can I leave a dying man? What would people think?’
‘What does it matter?’ Luca burst out.
‘It matters!’ Mia sobbed. ‘And he matters too. He is sick, he is scared…’
‘He wasn’t always sick! He can be moved to hospital.’
‘Luca. Please. I beg you to stop this.’
She didn’t want his help—she simply didn’t want it, yet he could not accept that.
‘He is a bastard, and he has always been a bastard,’ Luca tried again. ‘That he is dying does not change that fact.’
‘He’s my husband.’
Those three little words that had condemned her to a lifetime of pain and suffering.
The shame of leaving, the scandal attached to such an action had silenced her and in turn had silenced Luca too.
It hadn’t always silenced him.
He had spat in his father’s face many times as a child—and he still bore the scars to prove it.
He had tried to intervene when he was twelve years old, and had been beaten to within an inch of his life for his trouble.
And always Mia had sobbed—always she had pleaded that he ignore what his father was doing, that he was making things worse.
So he had waited.
Waited for his moment, waited till he was taller, fitter, stronger—and then one night, when the inevitable had happened, an eighteen-year-old boy in the body of a man had intervened.
Eighteen years of tension and frustration, combined with a generous dash of testosterone, had exploded, and he had beaten and bullied his father that night as mercilessly as his father had beaten and bullied his mother over the years—sure this would end it, sure that finally it was over.
Yet the next morning, his knuckles bruised and bleeding, his top lip swollen, his left eye closed, his cheek a savage mess, something inside Luca had crumbled and died when his mother had walked into the kitchen—bruises that hadn’t been there last night on her face, her arms a pitiful mass of red and blue. But worse than that had been the accusing look in her eyes as she’d faced her son, telling him that he had made things even worse, that his interference hadn’t helped. And then she had said the words that would stay with Luca for ever.
‘Siete no migliore del vostro padre.’
‘You are no better than your father,’ Mia had told him as Luca had sat appalled at what he had done and sick with what she said next. ‘It is as I always feared—you are just like him.’
‘Don’t make things worse, Luca,’ his mother said now, and her words dragged him straight through the coals of hell from the past to the even more hellish, hopeless present. ‘There is nothing you can do. Having Emma here has made things better.’ Mia gave a tired smile. ‘He is proud that perhaps his name will continue, and that has appeased him for a while.’ Her eyes anxiously scanned Luca’s face. ‘She is a wonderful girl—I am pleased. It helps in other ways too…’ Mia admitted. ‘Seeing that you are finally happy. But please look after her, Luca, and don’t let your past…’ Her voice strangled off into silence, and Luca shut his eyes. ‘Soon, one day, there are things I must tell you—about your past, your history…’ she finally managed to add.
But he knew them all already, had worked it out long ago.
Vigilance and tombstones had taught him the unenviable truth.
And now, on this morning, discovering that his mother thought he might be capable of the violence of his father, that his mother, who loved him, worried for the woman who was starting to—That the most innocent of them all slept upstairs in his bed, was, for Luca, an added torment.
‘There are things you need to know, things we have to face,’ Mia said.