Page 104 of Made in Love and Blood

“Hey, hey, hey,” he chanted alongside soft kisses to her damp cheeks. The salt of her tears danced across his lips each time. “That doesn’t matter—that’s never gonna matter between us again, do you hear me? I promise, Carina.”

Somehow, she just cried harder. He kissed her forehead, holding her close in hopes she would calm. She didn’t.

“You don’t even know why I did it to you,” she said, words broken and soft with her tears. “The one in Milan, and then down in Haiti. In Chicago...”

He squeezed her tighter, never moving an inch. “It doesn’t matter. They didn’t matter.”

Her body shook against him. The tears continued.

“Just think about it, Sal,” she practically begged.

He didn’t want to. Her infidelity had been such a sore spot between them that the best he’d ever been able to do was just live with it until he could see past it to see her again. It was almost like she couldn’t control it at first when it all began, and every time, she came home and told him. Every single time. The last one, a little over four years ago, had been the worst.

“Babe, I don’t know what you want from me here.”

She shook her head against his throat. “Every time I ever fucked another man, I felt so dirty. I didn’t want you to see me like that, so I’d go and do something I thought would hurt you worse, so I could be disgusting from that, and not—”

“Giorgio,” Salvatore realized aloud.

The low wail that fell from Carina hurt his heart.

She didn’t have to say it, then. He understood implicitly. Her affairs usually followed family events or things where she’d be put in the same room with her adopted father. They all paid a price, in different ways, and they all put on the mask when the time came.

“I hated that it felt like when you looked at me beside him, me smiling while people took pictures, you saw that,” she whispered, so quietly he strained to hear. “It’s all I ever thought about. Were you seeing what he did to me? What he’d done? I didn’t want you to see that. It all made me feel so—”

“I only ever saw you,” he interjected so she wouldn’t say that terrible, wrong word about herself again while feeling her grip on his shirt tighten. “I see you.”

Salvatore pulled Carina back with a hand at her jaw so that she couldn’t look away. Nothing else existed as emeralds met dark earth in their stares.

“But it didn’t feel—”

“That doesn’t matter anymore. None of that will ever matter from this moment forward. I love you.”

Her words silenced instantly. The trembling stopped. Little breaths burst like pants from between her parted lips, and she never looked away.

“You’ve never said that and meant it. You don’t mean that,” she whispered brokenly.

His tears started falling, too.

One. And then another.

Never had he cried in front of this woman. Years spent crying alone on shower floors and in dark, empty beds before she came along and long after killed the ability to feel just like pills numbed the pain.

“I do love you,” he mumbled through quivering lips. “And I’m really fucking sorry that I couldn’t be the man you needed me to be ten years ago and tell you it then. I had to build you a twenty-million-dollar closet and let you scream at me every time we were in a room together just so you wouldn’t run away from me again instead. I’m sorry that I am fucking scared of what it means to love yet another person that God could take away from me. But I do love you, and I am not sorry for that.”

Carina blinked; another tear fell. Her chest heaved hard on a hiccup.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated again, “for a lot. But not that.”

It took another ten seconds.

Her swallow was audible.

“Okay,” she eventually said.

“W-what?” he stammered.

She literally grabbed his arm to use the sleeve of his shirt to wipe her face. Blinking up at him after while he eyed damp silk, confused, she cleared her throat.