Page 174 of Made in Love and Blood

Salvatore couldn’t name one time he yelled at Frankie the way he just did. He had made a great effort as a father to be different than the one which raised him. He wanted to be different.

Better. And he had been.

But goddammit...she needed that.

“You sit down, and you listen to me,” Salvatore told his daughter, forcing every word through clenched teeth while he locked eyes with her, “and you had better listen good.”

He kept her seated on the chair with a hand on both armrests. She pulled her legs up to her chest, soccer cleats dragging across the leather of the chair. Those cleats shouldn’t have made it inside the car let alone his house. He didn’t even give a shit.

“How dare you lay your hands on him or throw something at him,” Salvatore said, his tone making clear it was not a rhetorical question. His voice edged darkly. No, he wanted her to sit there and sit with the choice she had made, knowing what she did about Nico. She sunk further into herself, tears trickling and shoulders trembling. “Maybe you’ve seen me rage at my wife and heard her call me everything but fucking God on a good day, but you have never, ever known a home where we hit one another. And he has, so how dare you, Francesca Dove.”

Her big, sad eyes stared up at him hatefully, but guilt swam heavily there.

“He did the right thing,” Salvatore continued, “by coming here and sitting down like a man to speak with me. He didn’t do the thing he wanted to do; he did what he had to. At least one of you knows the fucking difference between those two things because I sure as shit can’t say that you do!”

“Sal,” Carina called behind him.

He glared at his daughter, wishing she could feel a single drop of the disbelief and rage he felt over literally everything. At this point, it couldn’t get worse.

“Salvatore, she did what she had to, as well,” his wife murmured.

“No yelling; it’s bad for us...for the baby,” Sal said after wetting his lips. He didn’t turn around, but he needed his wife to do the thing that they had agreed one morning in her bed together, because they were trying to be better. “That’s what we said. And I gotta yell, so I need you to leave, please. Leave.”

“I’m not gonna do that. I’ve sat there, I’ve been her; I’ve—”

“Get out,” Salvatore uttered.

Her soft hiccup followed the echo of her fading heels.

Not once had he looked away from his daughter.

“I am so fucking disappointed in you!” Salvatore hurled at her.

She’d gone quiet during his exchange with Carina. In fact, her tears almost entirely dried up at she stared up at him, so unsure and sad and tortured.

“You could’ve come to me.”

She shook her head.

He nodded.

“You could’ve told me.”

Those tears started up once more.

“You lied to me!”

“I did not, Daddy!” Frankie cried, small and shaking.

“You did! I asked if you were being safe!”

“And we were!”

“That’s not a from here on out, right here and now type of question; it is all encompassing! If you are in trouble, I am your father! It is my job to—”

“St-stop,” Nico mumbled hoarsely from his seat. “S-she can’t t-take that from you. She can’t. I can take that from you, Sal, b-but she can’t.”

Frankie cried even harder than Nico, and the agony in that room threatened to swallow Salvatore whole. He didn’t want his daughter to keep staring up at him like she had just found a monster. She dug at her fingernails and bit her lip so badly she’d cut through cracked skin.