Page 143 of The Mafia's Broken Vows

Dante makes to stand, but I tighten my hand over his thigh. “Stay?”

“Baby, I’ll be in the next room.” He cocks his head toward the adjoining room, a door with a glass panel in the top half of it.

Knowing he’ll be close and watching gives me the layer of comfort I need, so I nod.

Dante presses a lingering kiss to my temple then stands. “Shall we go, Bianca?” he says in a tone that brooks no argument, then goes round the table to help her out of her seat.

Bianca’s head snaps up, her eyes flickering between Orlando and me. “I thought—”

“Give me a minute, Bi,” Orlando interrupts her, his voice like cold steel, his eyes never leaving my face.

For a moment, I see a flash of . . . something in her eyes. Pain? Annoyance? It’s gone before I can fully decipher it. Still, her jaw clenches as if ready to argue, as though she wants to hear the story too.

As I continue to study her face, I realize she looks more than just annoyed—she looks shaken.

Could it be that she didn’t know about me? That she wasn’t aware of her husband’s affair with Naomi Ritter all this time?

If that’s the case, she’s taking this remarkably well.

Bianca hesitates for a moment longer, then stands and takes Dante’s arm. “Of course,” she says, her voice carefully controlled. “I’ll be in the garden if you need anything.”

As Dante and Bianca leave the room, I feel a momentary panic. Dante’s presence has been my anchor since this whole ordeal began, and now I’m alone with a man who is both a stranger and my father.

I hear the door close with a soft click, and silence falls over the room. Orlando leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped tightly together. He takes a deep breath, as if steeling himself.

“Your mother,” he begins, his voice rough with emotion, “was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Not just physically, though she was stunning. Her soul . . . it shone through her eyes.”

I lean in, hungry for every detail. “How did you meet?”

A small, sad smile plays on Orlando’s lips. “Naomi was running from her past, just like I was running from my future. She came to Chicago and started going by the name Ritter. She rented a small shop in my part of town—Brackendown Street—and turned it into a bookstore. Then she rented the apartment on top of the store and lived there. She opened early and closed late. She didn’t make a lot of money, but she didn’t seem to care. She loved books.

At first, I watched her from afar. Every day for a whole year, I had a ritual. I had to get a glimpse of her. It was easy because she was always there. And then it wasn’t enough anymore.”

He pauses, lost in the memory. “One night, I went in disguised. The moment our eyes met . . . it was like being struck by lightning. I knew, in that instant, that I was in love with her.”

“What happened?” I prompt softly when he falls silent.

Orlando’s eyes refocus on me, and the love and pain I see there make my heart ache. “I confessed who I was that very night. And to my surprise, she admitted who she really was too. We were in impossible situations, both of us. But we couldn’t stay away from each other.”

He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture so familiar it startles me. I do the same thing when I’m stressed or emotional.

“We loved in secret,” he continues. “It was hard, and I didn’t get to see her as often as I wanted. But our connection . . . it never faded. We’d meet out of the country once a month, steal a few days together. Back in Chicago, we pretended we didn’t know each other existed.”

I nod, trying to imagine the strain of such a relationship. “And then . . .?”

Orlando’s face crumples, the weight of his past bearing down on him. “I made a choice that will haunt me for as long as I live. I had to choose between love and survival. I chose survival.”

“Bianca?” I state, the name slipping from my lips before I can stop it.

He nods, his voice heavy with regret. “You think that as a man in this world, you can handle anything, survive anything. I saw Vito as weak for choosing love. I resented him for it. I thought he wasn’t fit to lead and that the Outfit would collapse if we didn’t take the Rinaldi deal.” He shakes his head, pain etched into the lines of his face. “How blind and stupid I was.”

Fresh tears sting my eyes. “You couldn’t have known.” Dante told me Orlando grew up homeless on the streets, without love or a family. He wouldn’t have fully understood what he was giving up.

“It wasn’t even a year before I slumped into depression. I couldn’t function—at home or at work. People were dying because of me. I knew I had to go back to Naomi. It was hard for her to let me back in, but I fought for us. And then unexpectedly . . . she got pregnant.”

He pauses, his voice trembling with emotion. “I thought I understood everything about love, about wanting to protect someone, about giving everything to them. And then I saw all eight pounds of you, red-haired, red-faced, and screaming at the top of your lungs. And it was that lightning bolt all over again.”

His words wash over me and tears blur my vision as a knot tightens in my chest.

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