Chapter 9
Aldo
I couldn’t look away from her long, graceful fingers on the needle. My blood stained their tips red, but she didn’t pause. Didn’t flinch away. Didn’t so much as ask for gloves.
She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
My Layla. The words made their way into my mind without my beckoning. Because it was true—she was every bit the woman I’d fallen in love with, married, called mine.
She was every bit that woman, and so much more.
The years had only made her more beautiful. More independent. More alive. Stronger, surer, fiercer.
My Layla. Always. Was it truly any surprise Carlo had misunderstood our relationship, sent her to my room? I could lie with words, but not in the way I looked at her.
Not in my memory.
In that moment, eight years ago, when I’d stood beside our mantle, met her blue eyes, and held out the divorce paperwork for her to sign, something inside me had broken. Died, even. Something I could never get back.
She was my eternal regret.
And yet, here she was. Beside me where she belonged—where I’d never expected her to be again. Where she shouldn’t be. Where I wanted her.
“I’d like to be alone now.” Her fingers lifted from the fresh bandage. And what else could I do with such a dismissal?
I stood. “Of course.”
Carlo had been in the wrong, sending her to my room. But she would be safer here, thanks to the bulletproof glass and soundproof walls, double-locking door. So I’d let her stay.
But before I could step away, I couldn’t help but ask, “Why didn’t you ever marry Eli’s father?”
Her fingers bore no indication of a ring: no indents, no tan lines, no discolored skin.
She huffed a cold, sardonic laugh. And her response left me chilled. I was still such an impulsive child.
Was it the barely hidden jab she’d lanced through the words—I was an impulsive child to have married you—or was it the deeper meaning behind them. That she and Marco, truly, weren’t right. Weren’t in love.
I didn’t matter, I reminded myself. None of this mattered. She was safe, and it was time for me to leave.
“Good night, Layla,” I said, the name a whisper on my tongue. And I walked through my own bedroom door without a backward glance. My feet fell silent against the hardwood of the hallway.
Many times over the last eight years, I thought I’d forgotten her. Or at least that I’d put enough space between us for the wound in my heart to heal. For me to move on.
But always, she returned to my thoughts. Sometimes simply when my mind quieted. Other times in the heat of battle, my darkest hours, she was the light that kept me from drowning in the black.
I’d have lost myself to my own brutal nature, to the brutal necessity of life in the Mafia, if she hadn’t been the anchor that kept me from sinking too far.
And yet, as I paced down that long, empty hall, I knew I would have to leave her again. She wasn’t the woman meant for me. There could be no further intersection between our lives.
So I forced down anything I’d felt, anything I’d imagined, anything I’d remembered, behind my cold mask of the Mafia king.
My feet made no sound as I approached my study. Unlike my glossy penthouse office, this was a dark, cozy space—wood-paneled walls lined in shelves of textbooks and manuals, sprawling leather armchairs, a massive block of a desk, a bearskin rug.
I hated it.
But it was the center of my business here at the estate, so it was no surprise to find Carlo perched behind the desk, peering at a stack of papers.
He looked up as I entered. “Vas—”
“You sent Dr. Bennett to my room.”
His brows pulled low in confusion. “Yes. I thought—”
“You thought she was my lover.” My words weren’t a question; they lacked all inflection, any emotion. “When I was simply giving her a safe space after the shooting.”
“You’re so familiar around each other. I just assumed—”
“Your assumption,” I snarled, “was disrespectful to the doctor who saved your life.”
Carlo’s eyes went wide and round with surprise. It was rare I spoke to him so harshly, but in this I wanted him to know the error of his ways.
“You will apologize to her.”
He watched me a beat too long before he bowed his head in deference. “Of course.”
He made it halfway across the room before I stopped him. “Carlo.”
“Yes, Aldo?” His use of my assumed name didn’t escape my attention.
“I want you to look into someone for me.”
He turned, brows furrowed again, in curiosity this time. “Who?”
“Marco Ricci. He’s a doctor at the hospital where”—I caught the words where Dr. Bennett works before they could escape into the open—“where the attack was.”
If Carlo noticed my hesitation, he didn’t comment. Merely bowed his head again. “I’ll find out everything there is to know.”
I didn’t sleep that night.
I tossed and turned in an unfamiliar room, on an unfamiliar mattress, beneath unfamiliar sheets—but those minor inconveniences were hardly what kept me from unconsciousness.
I kept seeing that face.
Her blue eyes.
Her long, lean fingers stained red with my blood as they tugged the needle through my skin. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t stop seeing her. Couldn’t stop smelling the soft scent of her skin.
Couldn’t stop wanting her.
Sleep still dragged at my bones when I made the trek to my office the next morning. Carlo, of course, was already there. Already attending to business while I attempted to find my rationality.
“Dr. Bennett wants to go to work today,” he said by way of greeting. “She said, how did she phrase it, emergencies won’t wait just because my life’s been turned upside down.”
He lifted his voice into a lightly feminine pitch on the last phrase. Smiled, tilted his head up to watch my face for expression, playing friend instead of subordinate.
I resisted the urge to flinch at the barbed words. So similar to the ones she’d spoken last night. Instead, I waved a hand in dismissal. “She can go. But send a bodyguard with her.”
Carlo bobbed his head, returning to my professional second in command. “I’ll do that. And I’ll have Marco’s file on your desk in a few hours.”
“Can hardly wait.” I let a bit of my true self filter into my tone—not the Mafia don, but the man, teh boy, the one Carlo had grown up with. Friend, not boss.
His shoulders relaxed visibly. “Maybe one day you’ll tell me what’s going on?”
“Unlikely.” But I gave him half a smile. “Now go, before I change my mind and put you on bodyguard duty.”
Marco Ricci’s file arrived, as promised, by the afternoon. But family matters kept me busy, followed by a few hours in the boxing gym despite the ache in my shoulder. So, it wasn’t until later in the evening that I finally got the chance to look. Glass of whiskey in hand, I reclined in my oversized leather armchair, the papers sprawled across my lap.
At a glance, Marco appeared the perfect match for Layla. My teeth clenched together so hard, I feared one might crack. A match made in heaven, weren’t they.
And yet …
A rap at my door had me sweeping the file closed in a flourish. “Come in.”
“Vas?” Carlo poked his head through the doorway. “Marco Ricci is at our gate. Says he wants to visit his son? I wasn’t sure if …”
His brows pulled low in confusion—in question—again. I almost felt guilty, for keeping him in the dark through all this.
He didn’t understand why Layla was really here. Why I was looking into a doctor at her hospital. Why the very same man had come to call.
“I wasn’t sure if I should allow him onto the estate,” Carlo continued when I didn’t speak, jarring me from my thoughts.
Should he? Should I? It was a good question. If he were anyone else—if she were anyone else—I wouldn’t have allowed it. I knew that. And yet …
“Have them meet in the guest house,” I instructed Carlo. “I don’t want any outsiders knowing Layla and Eli’s exact location.”
He bobbed his head and retreated from the room. As the door clicked closed, I lifted the file again—but I already knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. As much as I told myself, over and over and over again, that I needed to forget her, I knew I’d be thinking of them.
I tossed the file onto my desk and swept from the room.
The first thing I heard as I approached the guesthouse was Layla’s carefree laughter. Like a dagger to my chest, it struck hard and fast. Damaging.
That laugh. Once it had been my whole world. My entire universe, like she was the sun and everything I was rotated around her. That damned laugh.
I never thought I’d hear it again.
They’d left the door to the guest house open, so I got a firsthand view of the scene inside.
Layla and Marco stood intimately close, his hand on her wrist, her fingers brushing his hair away from a flower she must have tucked behind his ear.
A wide, white grin split her face as she laughed. Marco smiled back, handsome and caring. But from that briefest of glances, I knew.
This man did not love Layla.
