When she lunged at me, I tried to run to gather some momentum to attack back and failed miserably. She was as fast and vicious as a cheetah. She grabbed me by the hair but didn’t punch me back. The cuffs chimed in her other fist, and she hooked them around my wrist and the free side of the bed. Then she marched away without a word.
“Nicky,” Leo called out before she exited the room. “I’ll tear Sebastiano Bellomo limb from limb and then rip his heart out as I watch the last light leave his eyes.”
She stared at him for a moment. “And I’ll be there.”
Shoulders slumped, I closed my eyes, a disappointed sigh leaving me. She’d managed to blind him with wrath and set his mind on going on a suicide mission. Killing Don Bellomo.
Leo is going to die, and there’s nothing I can do to save him.
CHAPTER 12
Leo
“I understand now why you didn’t go forher,” Ravenna mumbled. “She’s an insufferable, cold-hearted bitch.”
“Nicole?” I asked absently, numb with rampant pain.
“When you told me she’s Lina’s sister, I was curious why you haven’t turned your obsessive compulsions toward her. She’s more your type.”
“You mean the blonde with the full rack?”
“Like Anastasia.”
I’d chuckle if I didn’t feel like a beast with his insides torn out of his body, forced to watch himself bleed out of his soul until he became a different beast. The one he was raised to be. “You were blonde once, too.”
There was a hitch to her breath. “You remember?”
“Yes, Ravenna. I remember everything.” I tilted my head to the side so I could see her face. “Was it because of me? To get my attention?”
Her jaw twisted as she blushed. “It didn’t work.”
“You know why?”
She lowered her head, her lips puckering. “Because I couldn’t pull off the full rack.”
Her ridiculous assumption infuriated me more than it should have. “No. It’s never been about looks. I know your psychiatrist mind is telling you people like me are incapable of love, only obsession.” Like that motherfucking Psychology professor who’d filled Sia’s mind with lies about me. “You’re wrong, but even if what I’ve felt for Sia, what I feel for Lina might be an obsession, it’s not a sickness or a delusion or something as naive as lust. I didn’t give up everything for fucking tits. You might not call it love, but it doesn’t make it any less intense or beautiful or important. If anything, it’s more. Much more.”
“How do you know for sure it’s more than lust?”
“Because I fell in love with Sia when I was thirteen, and Lina…I fell for her before I even saw her face.”
“How so?”
“I was having an infuriating conversation with my father. She was playing her violin in the apartment building across from his. It drew me in like a spell.” I closed my eyes, listening to the melody as if it were live now. “When everything you cherished and loved has been ripped out of your life, you can’t help but hold on to the only beautiful thing left like a lifeline. It becomes your every last shred of hope, every dream, every last hint of good still lingering in you. And the pain, every ache you wish gone but nothing ever takes away, that one little thing becomes your only salvation to stop it. It’s the only thing that can make you feel something different, anything other than all thatshit.”
A low scream raptured out of me. “Mamma was that for me. The only beautiful and innocent thing in a life where your father is Don Bellomo. And when she was gone, Sia was the only light I held on to so I wouldn’t go insane. But she, too, was gone,” tears burst out of my eyes, “and all I had left was pain and loss and rage piling up for years.”
“Leo, Leo, take it easy, please. Try to calm down.”
“Then I heard her music… It was so soft and beautiful but louder than a bomb. Louder than the voices. Louder than the screams of agony burning my mind and soul.” I sniffled, peering at her. “I had to find her. I had to make her mine because without her…there’s nothing but the fucking screams.”
Her tears mirrored mine, and she nodded fervently. Did she understand me? Could she feel me? Or was she just trying to pacify me? To deceive me like everybody else?
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm. “What about the ex-girlfriend Nicole said you…? You never mentioned her.”
Hadn’t she figured it out already? “Ugh, I thought you were smart, Doc.”
Her frown stared at me. Then the revelation hit her. “Anastasia. She never died in the fire, did she?”