Page 127 of Made in Love and Blood

“Listen, if at eighteen, some beautiful, broken boy punched someone in the face because of something they said to or about me, and that boy was torn up about it...I’m just saying, if he told me he loved me, and I thought it would be the only way to be free, to be with him, I would’ve done it.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. Also, we don’t know that any of that happened. You just came up with that story right now.”

“Wasn’t that what you and Delilah practically did?”

“We were slightly older, thank you.”

“Not by much, Sal, come on. And you did elope, baby. The tighter people closed around you two, the more they tried to keep you apart, it just drove you both back together. You’ve told me, so don’t rewrite history now. You eloped. They could, too.”

“She’s not you, or me, or her mother, for that matter.”

Carina snorted. “Who are you trying to convince? Salvatore, if I had been that eighteen-year-old girl in the kitchen hearing my father tell me I couldn’t have sex under his roof unless I was married, guess the first thing I would have done. Guess, please. You know how much I love it when you entertain me.”

“I really need you to stop.”

“No, what you need is to stop looking at the clock. Stop trying to make sense of teenage choices and hormones. Stop before you give yourself a fucking stroke.”

“Her phone goes right to voicemail,” he muttered then.

Carina arched an eyebrow. “How many times have you tried calling?”

“Too many.”

“And his?”

“Same.”

“You called the same—”

“No, I called him once.”

That was all he ever needed to do to get a hold of Nico who knew to answer the phone if Salvatore’s number came up. If he couldn’t, then he called back the very moment he had the chance.

“And it went to voicemail, too?” she asked of Nico’s phone.

He nodded.

“So, the phones are off.”

“Likely,” he admitted. “None of the messages are being read. I just...”

He rocked back in the chair, slumping there and rubbing at his face as he groaned. A part of him wanted to murder something. Another part wanted to cry, as sad as that fucking was. The rest of him simply wished he had handled the driveway incident better.

Shit, he should have told Giorgio to keep his oldest son far away from the party. Marco really had no reason to attend in the first place, and things had always been a little too raw between the Russo brothers.

“Ew,” Carina murmured, still leaning in the doorway watching him, “I can practically feel your guilt from over here.”

“I could have...made better choices,” he replied.

“What, like stopped Marco from poking at Nico, as he’s always done? Or maybe you mean you could have locked all the bathrooms in the upstairs?”

Salvatore straightened in the chair once more, eyeing her curiously. “How do you know about a bathroom?”

She chewed on her bottom lip and avoided his stare. “Well, didn’t you say Marco said—”

“First—I said nothing about a bathroom to you. Secondly, you weren’t close enough to hear what Marco said in the driveway that started it all, Carina.”

“I...”