him and held on to his hand.
He shook me free and walked toward the door. He looked back at me and said, “I’m the only one that can fix this, Anabel. Stay here with your friends. Matteo will protect you. I love you,” and with that, he was gone, and I didn’t know if I would ever see him again alive.
Chapter 23
Luca
“And now the end is near,” I whispered to myself as I walked down the stairs. It’s all come to this. I knew what I had to do, and it pained me. It pained me because this was it. My whole life had come down to this moment, to this decision. And it was the only thing that I could do. I was just about to open the main door when I heard a noise. Someone else was coming down the steps. I frowned and turned around to see who it was.
“Luca, wait.” Anabel came running toward me, her hair flying behind her.
“What the fuck are you doing? Go back inside.” I glared at her. “You cannot be here, Anabel. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m not letting you go by yourself, Luca.” She shook her head. “That’s not going to happen.”
I grabbed her hand and tried to pull her back up the stairs. “We’re going back up. You’re going to stay with Matteo, Charlotte, and Emily. I want you to be safe and you’re going to live your life without me. You’ll meet a nice banker or something and you’ll get married and you’ll move to Connecticut. Okay? You hear me, Anabel? That’s what’s going to happen.”
“No, Luca. That’s not what’s going to happen.” She held still. “I’m not going back to that apartment. It’s you and me. We’re in this together.” She gave me a crooked little smile. “We’re like Bonnie and Clyde, only of the mafia world.”
“We’re not fucking Bonnie and Clyde, Anabel. This isn’t the fucking movies, okay? People are going to get hurt and I can’t afford for you to be one of those people.”
“I’m not going to get hurt, Luca.” She shook her head. “And I’m not just going to sit in that room and wait for you. Because what if you don’t come back?”
“Anabel, this is not your decision. You can’t help me, okay? You will be a liability if I have to worry about what’s happening to you.”
“I’m not letting you go by yourself, Luca. Get that into your thick head,” she shouted at me. “I don’t care what you have to say. I don’t care what you have to do. You are not leaving without me. So either you come back up to the room and you stay with me or we both go and do what you’ve got to do. Do you get it?”
“Anabel, do you get it? You could die, okay? I could die. I do not want you to see me die, okay?”
“I’m not letting you go if you think you can die, Luca.” She glared at me. “Do you think I’ve waited all these years for us to finally figure out what really happened and I’m just going to let you walk out on me? Do you think I’d be okay never seeing you again? No, that’s not going to happen.”
“Anabel, I’ve got a problem. And there’s only one way for me to fix the problem. I need to kill Enzo. I need to kill Giuliani.” My voice broke. “And I need to kill Giorgio.”
“You can’t do that, Luca. You can’t kill all those men.”
“You want to bet?”
“Isn’t there another way, Luca? Please, just give him Fabiano’s body. I don’t care. You know what? If my dad did cheat on my mom, then let him pay the price. Let her find out. I don’t care. This is not your cross to bear, Luca. It’s my dad’s. My dad is the one that should pay for this.”
“You love your dad, Anabel. You know when I met you, you were so young and innocent and sweet. Everything you did was what your parents wanted you to do. You didn’t date because your parents didn’t want you to date. You read the books your parents wanted you to read. You were going to Columbia because your parents wanted you to go to Columbia. You were going to be a lawyer or a doctor because that’s what your parents wanted. You had the best childhood. You look up to your parents. You love your parents. I didn’t want