Page 300 of Niccolo

Vicari’s resentful exit –

Caterina’s tearful entrance from the confessional –

And a group wedding withfivedifferent couples at once?!

It nearly gave me a heart attack.Allof it.

It certainly made me want to kill my youngest brother.

I nearlydidkill him in the small Sicilian town where we had the reception.

It was only Dario ordering me to walk away that kept me from strangling Valentino.

However, what stood out most was how badly I had underestimated Caterina and Alessandra.

I remembered what I’d told Dario about Alessandra sending her best friend to Sicily:

It’s a fool’s errand. Caterina will never find Vicari’s compound, much less sneak onto it.

Turns out she didn’t need to.

She’d just enlisted the right ally.

I’ll confess, I’d snidely thought of them as a kitchen worker and a former waitress.

What could they possibly do to challengeme,aconsigliereof theCosa Nostra?

And yet, together they had undone every last one of my plans.

They had utterly humbled me.

Not only that, but they had done it for the right reasons:

Because Caterina was in love with Valentino…

And because Alessandra only wanted to help her best friend.

I realized I’d been trained by a chauvinist and a sociopath, and his arrogance had transferred onto me.

I wonder if Fausto was perhaps underestimating Sofia as woefully as I’d underestimated Cat and Alessandra.

I had a lot to fucking learn… especially from my newest sister-in-law.

Valentino had done his best to return every perceived slight and injury I’d dealt him –

But Caterina?

I had hurt her the most of all…

Yet when I apologized, she forgave me totally and completely.

When I told her, “I hope that one day in the future, you can forgive me… and that we can put this behind us…”

Her response was to tearfully smile and ask, “Why not put it behind us now?”

And she hugged me.

There was a goodness in Caterina that, I feared, was sadly lacking in me.

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