Page 274 of Alessio

So, yeah. He was going to say nothing. Do nothing. He wouldn’t act on a damn thing—not his attraction, or his interest. He was going to get this fucking job done, and go back home to Alessio like he’d planned to from the start before he looked at Ginevra after she got in his car, and got that feeling.

That same feeling he had when he met Alessio for the first time. A feeling that said this is going to change everything for you. Because what else could he do? He’d already dug this fucking hole, he might as well keep digging until he was out of it, too.

“I’m just saying that I don’t like finding out shit from Dare instead of you,” Alessio said on the phone, bringing Corrado back to the conversation again. “And you know how Andino Marcello is—he doesn’t care what shit you step in for him, so are you sure this job is even on the up and up with him?”

“Les—”

“Since when do you hide shit from me, Corrado?”

Yeah.

Shit.

“I’m not hiding anything,” he said.

There was just nothing to tell.

Not yet.

Across the hall, Ginevra made another noise before she rolled to her back. He saw her eyes flutter open, and she stared up at the canopy above the four-poster bed.

“Corrado—”

“I have to let you go,” he said quickly. “I’ll call you back.”

He hung up the phone, and tossed it to the bedsheets without waiting for a goodbye from Alessio. His chest became tighter—that pain, growing sharper.

But he probably wouldn’t call back. Not when it meant needing to hide things from Alessio because now, Corrado just didn’t want to lie. That guilt was a killer.

Corrado still wasn’t sure how he got to this point simply by taking a goddamn job to pay back a favor. All he had to do was open up his fucking mouth. Tell Alessio the job was a woman. And because it wasn’t as simple as it seemed, his dick decided to get involved, and maybe his curiosity, too.

That was it.

That’s all he needed to do.

He was making it more complicated than it actually was, but he didn’t know how to fix it. Nothing was ever simple with him and Les, even if on the surface, it might seem like it. Those were lies, too. They’d made this complicated.

Corrado blamed himself for that, too.

Ginevra eyed the landline cordless phone charging on the counter as she stirred the sugar into her steaming coffee. It’d been a week, and not once had she considered using any one of the many phones throughout the penthouse to call out.

Except she was doing that now.

Maybe it was because she woke up, and realized this was the longest she had ever gone without speaking to her siblings. Even after she turned eighteen, and moved out of the house to begin classes at a community college, she still called them every single day. And her mama, too.

She’d made an effort not to think about it since coming here. She knew it was dangerous, and calls could easily be tracked. This morning, it was all she could think about.

Funny how that worked.

What was happening in New York, now?

Were her sisters safe?

Had Siena kept her promise?

What was happening?

Nothing could drive a person to do crazy things more than the unknown. She’d spent the last week acquainting herself with the penthouse, and the different things to do inside it. She bet Corrado paid a good amount for this place.