Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
“I don’t know where to start,” she says after a long pause.
She nods, her weight shifting once again as if she has to physically prepare herself to speak of them.
“Can you sit?” She points to the chair across from her. “You’re really intimidating, standing there like that.”
The fact that I’m unnerving to her turns me on even further, but I sit. Not because she wants me to, but because standing there any longer runs the risk of her noticing the way she turns me on. It gives her more power than I’m willing to let her know she has.
“There was always talk that I’d marry into the Severino family. I remember my mother mentioning it when I was still a child. My mother would mention Marcello taking care of me one day, and I remember wanting to tell her that wouldn’t happen. Marcello couldn’t even take care of his toys much less another person. He was always mean and spiteful, even as a child.”
“I don’t give a shit about your childhood,” I spit.
Her jaw flexes as she grinds her teeth, and I fully expect her to get sassy with me, but she looks down, pulling her hands from the tabletop and placing them into her lap.
“I was trying to explain how I ended up with them,” she whispers, and it feels like a punch to the gut.
How can I want to grip her by the hair, bend her over this table, and fuck her until she screams, but at the same time, want to wrap her in a hug and tell her that she’s safe now?
“Continue,” I grunt instead of issuing the apology that almost threatens to escape my mouth.
“Maybe it would be better if you ask questions, and I answer,” she offers. “That way you only get the information you need.”
She doesn’t say it in a way that sounds disrespectful, but I can still see the sting of being chastised in her eyes.
“How did you end up engaged to Alessio if you were promised to Marcello?”
“I wasn’t exactly promised to Marcello. I think my mother just assumed that with my age being closer to Marcello’s, that we’d end up together.”
“Why the marriage? What benefit is it for you marrying a Severino?”
“My mother’s family was once very powerful in Italy. The needs and expectations changed over the generations as many migrated to the United States. Her family had to fight for what they had. They had to defend their rights and their families.”
“That’s a very narrowed viewpoint on why the Mafia was created,” I grunt.
She frowns at me but doesn’t defend herself before continuing. “Lucian’s great-grandfather and my mother’s great-grandfather were once best friends, but as things progressed, they each wanted more than half of the pie. Well, my ancestor didn’t so much want the power and money as much as he wanted the other man’s wife. There was a feud. Hundreds of men died because of one man’s greed.”
“Who got the girl?”
She shakes her head as if picturing it all playing out in a memory, despite it occurring long before her birth.
“Severino slit her throat when she confessed she wanted to leave him for the other man. The families were at each other’s throats for years. They instilled their hatred into their children, but my mother wanted no part of it. She inherited all of her family’s money after her father died, but she never took on the other baggage. Connecting the two families was her way of ending the feud. My mother fell in love with a man that worked for Lucian.”
“Your father?”
She nods her answer. “He always wanted to be a bigger part of that family, and with his marriage to my mother he was given more power. He ran one of the warehouses for Lucian.”
“And that’s how you were promised to one of the sons?”
She shakes her head. “I had an older brother. Elio was close to the boys. He was loyal to the family because that’s how my father raised him. He trained with Marcello and Alessio. He was excited to join them in everything, but then he had to be tested. He passed his test, but it changed him. He killed himself a year later. I think my mother blamed herself for not listening to her own family when they told her how toxic the Severino family was. She died a year after Elio did.”
Pain laces her words, but she’s strong, somehow preventing tears from falling at disclosing what happened to her mother and brother.
“Before her death,” she continues, “my mother changed her will. My father was no longer set to get her family’s money. She left it all to me. I have access to every penny when I turn—”
“Twenty-two,” I predict.
“Yeah. My mother made no provisions in the case of her death for my father. I don’t know if she stopped trusting him or if she knew him well enough to know that he was desperate his entire life to be a part of the Severino family, that he would give Lucian whatever he wanted. She didn’t take into account the income needed to maintain the household, and that our lavish lifestyle couldn’t be sustained with the income my father made working at the warehouse.”