Page 29 of Violent Pawn

On our next spin, I release her hand. Except instead of returning into my arms, she continues, her feet a blur of motion as they take her three spins before she ends, one leg jutted in front of her, the other bent at a knee as she bows. When she straightens, the final dredges of a smile before it fades make this entire visit become everything.

A genuine smile. I’ll discover a way to make her smile like that again in the future.

“You must be a quick fighter. Your dancing skills make it easy to maneuver around.”

What I meant as a compliment shuts the smile down faster than when she walked into the mansion yesterday and found me having arrived from Italy. She turns away and not only rebuilds her brick wall, but enforces it with steel, making it impenetrable.

Fuck. Quick steps take me back to her side, reaching for her hand, her arm, her hip—any part of her—to bring her back to me and the moment we were sharing. “I don’t know what I said, but I’m sorry.”

She jerks away. We both stare where our hands are, but she’s the one who releases a long exhale before lifting widened eyes upwards. Not to my face, but onto my chest, as if unable to go higher.

“I-I’m sor—I didn’t mean to. I…” She tucks stray hairs behind her ear and looks nothing like the woman I’ve been coming to know. Not a single fucking part of her remains, but it’s worse than just losing those sides of her. It’s losing after not understanding how I’m at fault.

“What did I say?”

After a few seconds of no response, I tip her chin up. My chest clenches at the vulnerability found within her enforcements. If I were an asshole, I’d use it to get beneath her surface and locate her secrets.

I could. Should. But I don’t want to.

My thumb strokes her bottom lip, seemingly to wake her from her stupor. She moves her head away, and I let her, giving her the control. To the ground, she murmurs, “It wasn’t you.”

When she returns to gathering her things, it feels like a missed opportunity. I run through everything we talked about, trying to pull on even a single thread to end this in a better way—a way that doesn’t have her despising my guts.

“The Nutcracker—is your father coming to watch you?”

In other words, where are you hiding him?

Human behaviour is telling. It’s one of the first things trained into us within Cosa Nostra. How to read another person, to determine if they’re lying and if they’ll attack first or wait to defend.

Anastasia goes on the full defence. Her breaths sound so much louder in the suddenly awkwardly silent studio. Graveyard-level silence.

“Why are you asking?”

So I know where to find him. “I’ll visit mine during the holidays, as usual. Consider me making conversation. It was only a question.”

“As if we know each other so well.” She yanks up her bag, flinging it offensively through the air and showing me a sense of how she’d toss me around if given the chance.

I follow her to the door. “Ana, it was only a question.”

“That’s Anastasia to you, and it’s none of your business.”

“You’re my business. I want to know about your life.”

She whirls around with fire in her eyes, burning away whatever headway towards peace I made today. “Last night does not make us friends, Amato. What’s about to happen between our families doesn’t either. Give up.” She throws open the door, the glass shuddering as the November wind takes it farther wide. “For the record, my father can burn to death in a Christmas fire for all I care.”

She disappears so fast, she doesn’t catch my vindictive smirk. If Anastasia doesn’t care about her father, then making him pay for his crimes against Giovanni Mancini means she won’t hate me worse.

17

ANASTASIA

For a moment, I believed Nero to be different.

He’s like an injury. A festering wound that refuses to be cured. That itches but no salve in existence is potent enough to erase the discomfort. The ache no pills heal. It’s there, something to learn to live with.

I mean, he’s here. Right beside me at the long table Zeno booked at the restaurant while he and Vanessa announce their engagement by flashing the rock on her left hand. Acting cordial, as if Nero didn’t just break into my studio—thank you, Lev—demand me to dance with him, and then prod into my life for no reason other than his own assholery nosiness.

Maybe I’m overreacting. Perhaps I’m underreacting. But Nero pisses me off. Pretty-boy smile and questions as if he’s allowed to know anything about my life. He’s so much like the men from my background that I want to puke.