Page 62 of Savage Proposal

“Did you tell her? When you got back?”

Lorenzo laughed. “No, it would take me months to actually say the words, and when I finally did, Sienna teased me for it. I had to beg her to say it back.”

I giggled at the thought. “She sounds wonderful,” I told him.

He hummed in agreement, and then his expression went grim. “Falling in love with her was her death sentence. I’ll never forgive myself for it.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t answer me right away. He was quiet for so long that I thought the conversation was going to end entirely. I wasn’t going to push him anymore if that was the case. I had already gotten way more information than I ever thought I would get. I got to imagine what Lorenzo would look like if he were a fool in love. It filled my chest with something that felt a lot like hope.

Not that I had any reason to hope…or any desire for it either. Lorenzo had never given me any indication that what we had was romantic, and it wasn’t like I was rushing to put a label on whatever was between us either.

“Damian hasn’t always been myvicecapo,” Lorenzo said, surprising me. “A cousin of mine, Francis, was my second; he was my father’s choice, and we’d argued about him, but I had to admit that he was good at the job. I trusted him to run my businesses and run the security here when I couldn’t.”

A chill ran down my spine. His voice had become detached, and I could see in the way that he was stiffening against me that he was trying to shove whatever he was feeling away. “He betrayed you?”

Lorenzo nodded. “He killed her and left her in our bed for me to find.”

My stomach rolled at the thought. I could imagine how afraid she must have been, how she must have prayed for Lorenzo to come and save her. “Why would he do that?”

“Traitors are fairly common in this life,” he said. “I killed him before I got his exact reason, but I imagine he wanted what I had and knew that she was my weakness.”

“But you don’t know that for sure because you killed him before you could get an explanation.”

Lorenzo was quiet for a moment, and then hummed. “I know that he didn’t act alone. He wouldn’t have dared to move against me like that unless someone was pulling his strings.”

“You never found out who.” It wasn’t a question, but Lorenzo shook his head anyway.

“They hid their identity well,” he said. “No matter who I squeezed for information, I couldn’t get a whiff of a hint.”

I could feel my forehead wrinkling. “But if you didn’t find the answer, why did you stop?”

Lorenzo pinned me with a stare that made me shiver. “The Cosa Nostra doesn’t wait for a broken man to put the pieces back together. I had business to attend to, so I had to put it away.”

I wanted to tell him that I was sorry, but the words died in my throat. Nothing I could say would make any of this better, after all, and it would only come across as trite. Instead, I leaned up and pressed my lips to the underside of his jaw. “I don’t think loving Sienna made you weak,” I said finally. “I think she made you strong.”

His eyes were stormy. “Then why did I lose her?”

“Because a weak man was afraid of your strength, and he wanted to break you.” I kissed him again, on the point of his chin this time. “But you didn’t break, did you? You experienced profound loss, but you didn’t fall to pieces like he was hoping.”

“I still failed her.”

I shook my head. “If you thought, for even a second, that Francis would harm her in any way, would you have ever left them alone together?”

“Of course not.”

“You were blindsided by someone that you were supposed to trust. That’s not a failure of yours. That’s a betrayal, and you can’t plan for that.”

Lorenzo’s eyebrows wrinkled inward, like he was trying to figure something out and couldn’t. “It’s my job to plan for everything,” he said eventually.

I reached up and touched his cheek. “That sounds incredibly lonely.”

CHAPTER 38

Lorenzo

Ikissed her before she could say anything else. Isabella had no idea what she was talking about, and I couldn’t have her filling my head with such thoughts. Of course, it was my fault that Sienna was gone. If I had been more careful, more aware of my people, she would still be here.

---