they had, she thought fondly, remembering him calling her one. “Are you sure there’s no Tylenol around here?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“S’ok.”
She studied him for a moment and came away with a weird take. Despite the fact that he’d come out on top, since she was there, he seemed defeated. At the moment, he looked a decade older than Gabriel when he was only a couple of years.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but—”
“If I told you I do mind, would you stop talking?”
A nervous laugh bubbled from her. “Probably not. I’m worried and scared. That’s makes me chatty.”
“Great,” he muttered.
She gave him another moment, then allowed her nerves out through her mouth. “I was going to say that you look tired.” He gave her a dry look. “I get it. I’m exhausted, too. With all of this. I obviously didn’t grow up around people like you, so this is new to me.” She waved a finger around to encompass her kidnapping.
Sighing deeply, he sat back in his chair. “Your file said it was just you and your mother.”
Her heart squeezed. “Yeah. My father left us when I was a couple of months old. I recently met him for the first time.” And might see him again if she could keep things friendly until Gabriel got there. If he really was on his way. “Like you, he wasn’t at all what I was expecting.”
“No?”
She carefully shook her head, uncaring that he was only half listening to her. “I also learned why he left me and my mom. It wasn’t what I’d thought. At all. I really misjudged the situation completely.”
He shifted, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “I can relate. With me and Gabe, I’ve…fuck.” He frowned then cleared his throat. “I think the position I put my brother in when we were growing up was unfair.”
Eva just stared at him as he looked at her like he was expecting her to know what to say to that. Was this happening? Or were the drugs fucking with her?
“Why did you do it then?”
His shoulder rolled in a shrug. “Maybe he was an easier target than the person I really wanted to hurt?” Another shrug. “I dunno.”
“Who did you want to hurt?”
“Albert Moretti.”
Their father? “Why?”
“He was an asshole.”
“Seems like we both have some daddy issues,” she allowed, thinking how normal he seemed to her just then. “My mom died a couple of months ago, and I just learned she was murdered because of some grudge against my father. Deep down, I know it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t issue the order to kill her. He loved her and retaliated on her behalf, but it’s still hard to separate his involvement from the loss I feel.” She looked up from the dirty table to see him watching her. “You probably understand that. I mean, Gabriel was the one who delivered the explosives that killed your girlfriend, but he was only following orders. Your father was the one pulling the strings.” Please see that and leave the man I love alone. “I know Gabriel would never have left that truck there had he known a woman was in that building.”
Stefano’s face darkened as he got up and started prowling around the room, running his fingers through his hair. “You think I don’t know that? But it doesn’t change the fact that, because Gabe was such a robot, never questioning his orders, he blew to shit my chance to get away from this fucking family.” He swiped out a hand to send a stack of warped Time magazines flying to the floor from their precarious position on a small bookshelf.
He turned on her, his face raw with emotion. “You were supposed to be my revenge for losing Adrianna. My way of making my brother suffer like I did. And it worked. I called him after Furio got you. The way he sounded when he realized he’d lost you…”
He seemed to deflate and came back to fall into his seat. He sat forward, hanging his head so that she couldn’t see his expression anymore. “The agony in his voice. I can’t get it out of my fuckin’ head.”
Agony. Because Gabriel felt responsible? Or because he felt something deeper for her?
“The fucked part? Even though the point of all this pissing around was to hurt him, succeeding didn’t do shit for me.”
He raised his head, and aside from confusion, Eva saw a marked difference in his eyes. Not just that they were brown where Gabriel’s were a