Page 40 of Blind Devotion
“I don’t want to rehash the past. It happened. I moved on.”
“Except you didn’t. You avoided it. You ignored it. You suffered quietly. Until Persetta came around. Suddenly, you were smiling and playing again. You wrote to her and entertained her when she visited. You went to see her. You hugged her. You loved her.”
“I didn’t.”
“Quietly, you did, and god, I hated her so fucking much for it.” Alizé wiped a tear roughly off her face. “With her, you were almost whole again. But not with me, never with me. My young, stupid brain thought she’d stolen you from me, and I wanted her gone.”
I held perfectly still.
“She was innocent.”
“I know that now, but I was young and hurting and looking for someone to blame. And Yannick, he made it so much worse. After the car crash, he screwed with my head, you know.”
I frowned. The T-bone car crash Alizé and her best friend Lea were in at seventeen was an unfortunate event she couldn’t have prevented.
“Yannick knew the words to say and how to push to make me feel worthless and ugly and bitter. I was already blaming myself for Lea’s death, and he just piled on the guilt and hatred, and you weren’t there for me. Only for her. Maman and Papa never even realized how low I got because all their focus was always on how to make Yannick and you better. He liked to use my deepest darkest secrets against me, and I didn’t even know that’s what he was doing at the time. It didn’t matter how old I got. I felt trapped, day in and day out, with no one else to talk to.
“I didn’t know what Yannick had planned that day. I swear. I had no idea that he would transform my confessions intohis own twisted fantasies against her. I never would’ve said anything had I known how much he hated you and that he planned to take it out on Persetta as revenge.”
“She could have died.”
She nodded. “I know. I’ve regretted every word so many times.”
“Mais bordel, you were twenty-three! You should have known better.”
“It was only supposed to be a conversation.”
“More than a fucking conversation happened!”
“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped. “I do. I know. I’ve paid my dues for my part in that mess.”
Through her arranged marriage, she meant. When Yannick tried to stab Persetta that day, I fended my older brother off the best I could, but I was also trying to keep the peace, throwing him off without ever trying to hurt him. He was my brother—sane or not—and I was a big reason he became the way he was.
If I had just killed that man as my father had ordered me to, the man’s brother would have been too late. Papa and our men would never have been distracted. Yannick and I never would have been kidnapped and tortured for a month.
That made Yannick’s attack on Persy my responsibility. No matter what I told him, no matter how many times I shoved him off, he kept on coming at her. His eyes gleamed with hate and rage. He would have killed her. Renzo Iannelli saw it and did what I couldn’t. He stepped in and snapped his neck.
The promise of war between the De Villiers and the Iannellis was declared. Had we lived on the same continent, it would have come to a head with more than just a few failed assassination attempts to show for the conflict. My father didn’t wait for the worst to happen. Instead, he planned against it by arranging Alizé’s marriage to the heir of the Boston Irish mob.
“I always wondered why you never put up more of a fight.”
She winced and shrugged. “Hindsight and all.”
The marriage, in the end, served no purpose, with neither our father nor Elio Iannelli pursuing the war. Her Irish husband wanted little to do with a twenty-three-year-old bride who wasn’t even a virgin—the dark age bastards—and she even less with him. What it had done was restrict the part she could play in the family.
The Milieu wasn’t patriarchal, but the Irish were, meaning she couldn’t inherit a share without the mob believing it was theirs. It left her mostly out of the businesses, except for her chemical company, where she concocted perfumes for commercial use and poisons and explosives as a side business contribution to the Milieu.
I massaged my temple, an ache from my sleepless night, and now this trot through memory lane that I had no wish to ever revisit.
“This doesn’t explain your interest in the girl.”
“Wom-an. She’s got all the curves in all the right places.”
“This a game to you?”
“Is it so difficult to understand I only want you happy?”
“Ah.” I pinched my lips into a thin line, finally understanding her ploy to play matchmaker, probably with our mother’s encouragement. If only she knew the threat our guest was. Slipping my phone out of my pocket, I caught the time. Nine forty-two. Cutting it close to my next meeting.
