Page 127 of Alessio

It still fucking hurt.

Corrado went cold all over.

Alessio’s hand tightened on his shirt. “It’s fine.”

No. Not at all.

Knowing something was different from it being your reality. Out of everything Ginevra learned since being put in the lives of Corrado and Alessio, that seemed to be the most important lesson to stick with her.

She’d known about many things before them. For life, about herself, and even the bad parts forced upon her. And then she met them—one by one, everything changed into something else.

About life.

Herself.

And even the bad parts.

Still, a piece of Ginevra had been hiding one aspect of who those men were and what it would mean to her. She understood what Alessio and Corrado did for a living—they were connected. They were more like the people who hurt her, and less like the boy who sat next to her during her first class of the morning at the community college.

She understood it, but knowing those things was different from seeing it. However, being shoved in her face, a man capable of violence that scared her and did it without retribution, reminded her she was not like these people.

Her life had been different.

She hadn’t seen their version of life through their eyes and experiences, and she’d been shaped differently because of it. And yet, she chose to turn her cheek.

That wasn’t right.

Even she got that.

And yet, that other part of her was clear, so much so it became impossible to ignore. Knowing might not be the same as seeing, sure, but she had still known and still stayed.

In fact, she wanted to stay.

Ginevra realized far too late, as she sat staring out the bay window of Marcus Guzzi’s beautiful townhome the morning after the night at the club, that she was not having an internal dilemma about Corrado and Alessio.

Of them, she was most sure.

Them, she wanted.

It stuck her in this dark place because of her own complex about who she thought she was, and how much changed. Ginevra never said she was a saint, but she had some morals. That in the end, she was the person who understood where right and wrong fit in her life.

The mafia came for her when she barely knew it existed.

She’d almost been forced into an arranged marriage.

Her mother had been murdered.

All those things meant Ginevra should have made the easy choice—with freedom at her fingertips, she should run from these people, and those like them, that had done to her what they did without as much as a blink about it.

Because they were made differently.

And somehow, Ginevra found herself inexplicably and irrevocably in love with men who, while they’d not done bad things to her, had done them to others. She overlooked it before, but not so much now. The man they killed, she bet like others in their business, said awful things—he was not a good man, and to some, he deserved to die for it, and for other reasons.

But to someone?

That man had probably been a father—maybe a good one. A husband. He’d been a son, perhaps a brother, a grandson, and more. He was a person.

Her dilemma in a nutshell