His father’s ageing face convulsed yet somehow he managed to dredge a smile, as if what his eldest son had justwhispered in his ear was something warm and witty. “He’s still my son.”
“You gave up the right to call him your son when you used his head as a football all those years ago.”
He could see by the glint in his father’s mean eyes that his thoughts were ugly, but whatever the ugliness of his thoughts, his father was an expert at controlling his emotions. It was only in private that he let his cruel, violent side run free. He’d never let that cruel, violent side run free on Gennaro though, something Gennaro had always assumed was because his father had recognised the same violent streak in his eldest son that lived in himself and knew he would fight back.
“Go and find your new friend and get the hell away from us before you embarrass yourself further,” he added in the same low undertone before sitting back down and picking up his cards.
Now he was the one pretending to study the hand he’d been dealt. Pretend, too, that his heart wasn’t racing.
Gennaro had let his violent side run free only once since his early childhood, decades back when he’d been certain his father would kill his brother. It was one of the few times he’d witnessed a beating. His father had lost control that day believing Gennaro was gone from the villa.
His heart made a sudden flump in his weighted chest.
Hands suddenly shaking, he downed his scotch as a maelstrom of thoughts collided.
His father was frightened of him. That’s why he’d never beaten Gennaro and why he’d saved his beatings of Niccolo for the times Gennaro was absent from the home.
Just as there was something in Niccolo that had always pushed their father’s cruellest buttons, there was something in Gennaro that had always frightened him, and on a subconscious level Gennaro had always sensed this and absorbed itinto a fact. He was violent and cruel like his father, an assumption that had steered the whole of his life.
But just because his father saw something frightening in the eyes of his eldest son didn’t mean that something was there. It didn’t mean that it was an inherent part of him as he’d always believed.
Luisa looked into his eyes and saw something different to what his father saw and different to what Gennaro believed he saw in his reflection. She’d goaded him, not to provoke him into acting on his worst instincts but to prove his worst instincts didn’t exist, at least not in the way he’d always believed them to.
“Gennaro?”
He looked at his cousin.
“I’ve raised. Match or fold?”
He loosened the cards clenched in his hand. Their pictures swam before his eyes. He’d lost so many hands in the short time they’d been playing that to match his cousin’s raise of the stakes, he’d have to go all in.
Go all in…
He turned his stare to his brother, now just two days away from marrying a woman he didn’t want, let alone love, and forming a marriage that would never be a true marriage and one he would never be able to walk away from.
If Gennaro’s intuition about Niccolo’s English lover was correct then Niccolo would have gone all in with her. Niccolo, who for all the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of their father, had never lost his ability to charm. It was a charm he used to keep people at a distance, a talent that stopped people noticing he never gave anything away about himself. The only close relationship Niccolo had was with Dante. In their very different ways, both Martinelli brothers had built walls deliberately to repel people.
Georgia had knocked down Niccolo’s walls, he was certain of it.
Luisa hadn’t just knocked down Gennaro’s walls, she’d smashed them. The ugly little buck-toothed girl whose shyness and unmistakable talent had touched his heart all those years ago had grown into a woman who now only had to look at him to touch his heart. Shewashis heart, and he’d sooner drive a stake through it than harm a hair on her head.
Over the last two years she hadn’t just consumed his every waking and sleeping thought, she’d seeped into him and wound herself around his heart to claim it.
He’d been an arrogant fool to believe he could contain the effects of opening Pandora’s Box. One prise of the lid and everything contained in it had sprung free, but it wasn’t the evils of the world that had been unleashed, it was the light to extinguish the darkness in him. Luisa’s light. Luisa’s love.
“Gennaro?”
Now they were all looking at him waiting for him to make his move.
He threw his cards on the table and shoved the last of his cash into the pile. “All in.”
And then he got to his feet and ran to the lobby.
Luisa sat in the back of the same car that had driven her to The Bianchi and left its exclusive grounds.
Just four days ago she’d expected to make this return journey ready to party like it was a new Millennium.
She’d never expected she would leave with her heart smashed into little pieces.