Page 83 of Thin Lines (Donati Bloodlines 2)

Her words washed over him with a peaceful serenity.He’d needed to tell someone, and now that he had, he wasn’t sure what to do.Calisto was glad it had been Emma who figured out his secret. She had her ownto hide. He kept them for her, too. She wouldn’t tell his.

“My mother died,” Calisto said, ignoring the thicknessbuilding in his tone. “I was angry, grieving, and guilty. It was constant. Icouldn’t get away from it. I’d loved the man who hurt her—I idolized himwithout knowing the fear and pain he’d caused her for years. She let me grow upwithout ever having said a bad word about him; she never told me the truth.Instead, she let me need him, want to be him.”

“Do you know why?”

Calisto let out a bitter laugh, but it hurt.

Deep in his soul, burrowed in his heart, he hurt.

It would never go away now.

“Of course.”

Emma squeezed his hand. “Then why?”

“Because he would rather have a dead son than no sonat all, Emmy. That’s what he spent years telling my mother—his victim.”

Calisto

Emma reached up and cupped Calisto’s jaw in her hand.Her thumb swept under his eye softly, and she tilted her head a little to theside.

“How long has it been?” she asked.

Calisto wished the thickness in his throat wouldleave. “Since what?”

“Since you cried like this.”

He blinked, feeling the tears fall from his lashes.Never had he cried in front of someone else. Not even his mother after he hadgrown from a boy into a young man. In his anger and his grief, he pushed backhis tears and swallowed them down.

Calisto flinched away from Emma’s thumb when she wipedmore of his tears away. “Leave it, please.”

Hurt flickered across Emma’s features.

“I must have been a big ‘fuck you’, huh?”

Calisto froze. “I beg your pardon?”

“What we did together. Even now. It’s a way for you totell Affonso to go fuck—”

“No,” Calisto said quickly, and harshly.

Harsher than he intended, if Emma’s wince was anyindication.

“Never,” he added softer.

“I would understand if that’s all it was, Cal. Youdon’t have to save my feelings. It seems I’m getting used to being hurt byother people.”

Calisto’s lungs burned with every breath he took.

“This …” he trailed off, waving between their bodies,“… me and you, Emmy, has never been about him or my past. I hate him—every partof me hates him—but this isn’t about him. I was drawn to you when you defiedthe rules people were setting out for you. You were so strange to me, but itwas interesting, too. The more I was around you, the more I wanted to know.There hadn’t been a woman to turn my head in a long while. I had been stuck ina black hole for a year after my mother died, and then you came along. You weresupposed to be nothing more than this hired-bride. You were everything exceptwhat I expected. It was all you, he didn’t mean a thing.”

“No?”

“He still doesn’t,” Calisto said honestly.

Emma’s hand tightened in his. “What is this for you?You and me, what are we?”

Crazy.