role. I gave every ounce of myself to it, even convinced myself I was in love with my wife-to-be because…well because if I wasn’t in love then maybe I had to admit that our arranged marriage was just a big fucking farce that we were both partaking in to please everyone but ourselves. I mean, I didn’t not love her, I just wasn’t…”
In love? I offered.
“Yeah,” he grunted. Silence fell and I finished cutting his hair, shaving it in shorter at the sides than at the top.
Then I moved around the table, setting the clippers down and climbing up to sit cross-legged in front of him to do his beard. I was pretty sure he smirked at me, but it was hard to tell beneath all that hair. Unfortunately for him, I was about to take away his mask so he could no longer hide.
I started trimming, my gaze fixing on my work as he went on with his story.
“I got her back eventually. But everything had changed. She’d fallen in love with a Romero,” he half laughed at the ridiculousness of it and I looked up at him in surprise. “I guess she had her own desires, her own secrets. Just like I did.”
I wet my lips then reached out, tracing a word across his chest. Secrets?
His eyes glinted darkly as he nodded and he lowered his voice as he spoke even though it was just us two and Tyson for miles around. “I never wanted that life, baby doll. Deep down, there was always something missing. My mask was welded onto my skin so tight that even I forgot that for a while.”
What happened next? I wrote, grabbing the clippers and starting to shave in his beard.
“That was about the time when things went from shit to fucking catastrophic. Sloan’s father found out about her affair with a Romero and he decided she was better off dead than in the arms of his enemy. So he tried to kill her – almost fucking did – but we got there in time.”
We? I asked.
“Me and Rocco Romero, her kidnapper, lover. Now her fucking husband. But I didn’t hang around to witness much of that. After I found out the truth, I left.”
What truth?
“That my whole life had been a dirty fucking lie,” he snarled so furiously that I sat back for a moment.
He reached out, resting a hand on my knee like he didn’t want me to run, but I wasn’t going to. Not this time. That anger in him was as sharp as my own. It stared back at me in his eyes like the barrel of a high calibre gun. And I wanted to see what happened when someone pulled the trigger.
“Sloan’s father took me in as a boy, spun me some bullshit story about me being an orphan kid he’d taken mercy on. But fuck him. It turned out, I wasn’t just any child. I was Angelo Romero. Rocco’s brother, Frankie’s, Enzo’s. I’d been pitted against my own flesh and blood my whole life. The man I’d seen as a father figure, respected, loved, had murdered the Romeros’ mother -my mother- in cold blood, stolen me away and raised me as his own in some twisted revenge plot against my real father. Martello Romero.” His shoulders were shaking and I captured his chin as I placed the clippers down, forcing him to look up at me. His gaze bled into my own and I felt all the torture he’d been through. It was an entirely different kind to mine, but was still just as pure and as real as the type that drew blood.
He sighed, breaking my gaze. “So that’s what I’m doing up here, baby doll. I’m trying to leave all that behind. Trying to stop the Romero brothers from finding me.”
Why? I painted on his chest, the word almost coming to my lips with how much I wanted to ask it. He had a family hunting for him, didn’t he want to be a part of that? If I knew I had a family looking for me, I would have dived into them with open arms. I’d wondered too many times what my mother and father looked like, if I had any siblings…if they missed me.
“They’ve been my enemies since before I can remember. I’ve killed members of their family, Winter. I’ve spilled the blood of my own people. I was Giuseppe Calabresi’s weapon and knowing the truth can’t take any of that back.