“No. A cook we had, I think.”
“Oh. It’s the kind of thing my mother probably would have said to me someday. If she had lived.”
“You miss her still.”
“I always will. But you lost your father.”
Guilt, ugly, strangling guilt, tightened in his chest. “Yes.”
“So you understand.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure I do.”
“You don’t miss him?”
“Never.”
“I know your father was hard to deal with. I know he was … I know he was shady like my father but surely you must—”
“No,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Will you miss your father?”
“I think so. He’s not a wonderful man, but he’s the only father I have.”
“I would have been better off without one than the one that I had.”
Alessia moved to put the pasta into the pan. “You say that with a lot of certainty.”
“Trust me on this, Alessia.”
They stood in silence until the pasta was done. Matteo got bowls out of the cupboard and set them on the counter and Alessia dished them both a bowl of noodles and sauce.
“Nothing like a little post … you know, snack,” she said, lifting her bowl to her lips, her eyes glued to his chest. “You’re barely dressed.”
“You should talk,” he said.
She looked down. “I’m dressed.”
“Turn around.” She complied, flashing her bare butt to him. “That’s not dressed, my darling wife.”
“Are you issuing a formal complaint?”
“Not in the least. I prefer you this way.”
“Well, the apron is practical. Don’t go tearing it off me if you get all impatient.” She took a bit of pasta and smiled, her grin slightly impish. It made it hard to breathe.
There was something so normal about this. But it wasn’t a kind of normal he knew. Not the kind he’d ever known. He wasn’t the sort of man who walked barefoot in the grass and then ate pasta at midnight in his underwear.
He’d never had a chance to be that man. He wondered again at what it would be like if all the things of the world could simply fall away.
“Matteo?”
“Yes?”
“I lost you for a second. Where were you?”
“Just thinking.”
“Mmm.” She nodded. “I’m tempted to ask you what about but I sort of doubt you’d want to tell me.”
“About my father,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“You really don’t miss him?”
“No.” A wall of flame filled his mind. An image of the warehouse, burning. “Never.”
“My father has mainly ignored my existence. The only time he’s ever really acknowledged me is if he needs something, or if he’s angry.”
Rage churned in Matteo’s stomach. “Did he hit you?”
“Yes. Not beatings or anything, but if I said something that displeased him, he would slap my face.”
“He should feel very fortunate he never did so in front of me.”
Alessia was surprised at the sudden change in Matteo’s demeanor. At the ice in his tone. For a moment, they’d actually been getting along. For a moment, they’d been connecting with clothes on, and that was a rarity for the two of them.
He was willing to try. He’d told her that. And he would be faithful. Those were the only two promises she required from him. Beyond that, she was willing to take her chances.
Willing to try to know the man she’d married. Past her fantasy of him as a hero, as her white knight, and as the man he truly was. No matter what that might mean.
“I handled it,” she said.
“It was wrong of him.”
She nodded. “I know. But I was able to keep him from ever hitting one of the other kids and that just reinforced why I was there. Yes, I bore the brunt of a lot of it. I had to plan parties and play hostess, I had to take the wrath. But I’ve been given praise, too.”
“I was given praise by my father sometimes, too,” Matteo said. There was a flatness to his tone, a darkness in his words that made her feel cold. “He spent some time, when I was a bit older, teaching me how to do business like a Corretti. Not the business we presented to the world. The clean, smooth front. Hotels, fashion houses. All of that was a cover then. A successful cover in its own right, but it wasn’t the main source of industry for our family.”
“I think … I mean, I think everyone knows that.”
“Yes, I’m sure they do. But do you have any idea how far-reaching it was? How much power my father possessed? How he chose to exercise it?”
She shook her head, a sick weight settling in her stomach. “What did he do, Matteo? What did he do to you?”
“To me? Nothing. In the sense that he never physically harmed me.”
“There are other kinds of harm.”
“Remember I told you I wasn’t a criminal? That’s on a technicality. It’s only because I was never convicted of my crimes.”
“What did he do to you, Matteo?” Her stomach felt sick now, and she pushed her bowl of food across the counter, making her way to where Matteo was standing.
“When I was fifteen he started showing me the ropes. The way things worked. He took me on collection calls. We went to visit people who owed him money. Now, my father was only ever involved on the calls where people owed him a lot of money. People who were in serious trouble with him. Otherwise, his men, his hired thugs, paid the visits.”
“And he took you on these … visits?”
Matteo nodded, his arms crossed over his bare chest. There was a blankness in his eyes that hurt, a total detachment that froze her inside.
“For the first few weeks I just got to watch. One quick hit to the legs. A warning. A bone-breaking warning, but much better than the kind of thing he and his thugs were willing to do.”
“Dio. You should never have … He should never have let you see …” She stopped talking then, because she knew there was more. And that it was worse. She could feel the anxiety coming off him in waves.
She took a step toward him, put her hand on his forearm. It was damp with sweat, his muscles shaking beneath her touch.
“One night he asked me to do it,” he said.
His words were heavy in the room, heavy on her. They settled over her skin, coating her, making her feel what he felt. Dirty. Ashamed. She didn’t know how she was so certain that was what he felt, but she was.
“What happened?” She tried to keep her voice steady, tried to sound ready to hear it. Tried to be ready to hear it. Because he needed to say it without fear of recrimination from her. Without fear of being told there was something wrong with him.
She knew that as deeply, as innately, as she knew his other feelings.
“I did it,” he said. “My father asked me to break a man’s legs because he owed the family money. And I did.”
CHAPTER TEN
MATTEO WAITED FOR the horror of his admission to sink in. Waited for Alessia to turn from him, to run away in utter terror and disgust. She should. He wouldn’t blame her.
He also desperately wanted her to stay.
“Matteo …”
“These hands,” he said, holding them out, palms up, “that have touched you, have been used in ways that a man should never use his hands.”
“But you aren’t like that.”
He shook his head. “Clearly I am.”
“But you didn’t enjoy it.”
“No. I didn’t enjoy it.” He could remember very vividly how it had felt, how the sweat had broken out on his skin. How he had vomited after. His father’s men had found that terribly amusing. “But I did it.”
“What would your father have done to you if you hadn’t?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does, Matteo, you were a boy.”
“I was a boy, but I was old enough to know that what my father did, what he was, was wrong.”
“And you were trapped in it.”
“Maybe. And maybe that would be an acceptable excuse for some people, but it’s not for me.”
“Why not? You were a boy and he abused you. Tell me, and be honest, what did he say he would do to you if you didn’t do it?”
Matteo was afraid for one moment that his stomach might rebel against him. “He told me if I couldn’t do it to a grown man, there were some children in the village I might practice on.”
Alessia’s face contorted with utter horror. “Would he have done that?”
“I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to find out, either.”
“He made you do it.”
“He manipulated me into doing it, but I did it.”
“How?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“It’s easy to do things, anything, when you can shut the emotion down inside yourself. I learned to do that. I learned that there was a place inside of myself as cold as any part of my father’s soul. If I went there, it wasn’t so hard to do.” It was only after that he had broken. In the end, it was both the brokenness, and the cold, that had saved him.
His father had decided he wasn’t ready. Didn’t want his oldest son, the one poised to take over his empire, undermining his position by showing such weakness.
And after, the way he’d dealt with the knowledge that he’d lived with a monster, the way he’d dealt with knowing that he was capable of the very same atrocities, was to freeze out every emotion. He would not allow himself to want, to crave power or money in the way his father did. Passion, need, greed, were the enemy.