“No, I should have saved you the second you fell into my lap.”
“You couldn’t. Dante would have killed you.”
“No, I could have saved you. It would have ruined my relationship with Dante, sure, but I could have prevented every horrible thing from happening to you, and I didn’t because I was selfish.”
Gia scoots closer to me but doesn’t touch me as we both sit half naked on the edge of the oversized king bed. I never expected to spill my heart to a woman again, but here I am, ripping my own heart to shreds. Gia doesn’t say anything. She waits until I can speak again.
“I needed revenge more than I wanted to save you. You shouldn’t want to fuck me. I’m a bigger monster than Dante and Roman combined.”
She nods. “I know you could have saved me. I know you were torn and wanted to. Adela told me. At that moment, I hated you, but I knew you had to have a reason for not saving me. And last night I realized you were watching over me, making sure I never got hurt so badly I couldn’t recover. You saved me the second you could.”
“No!” I grab Gia’s face as tears stream down my face. “I let that disgusting excuse of a man hurt you. I let him touch you. I let him rape you, and I did nothing. There is no excuse good enough to let you go through that.”
Tears burn her eyes, but she doesn’t let them fall. “Just tell me why.”
“I had the perfect wife—”
She gasps when I say, wife. And then she realizes she shouldn’t act surprised and relaxes.
“I had the perfect wife. She was beautiful, smart, determined. She was a nurse. She devoted her life to helping kids that didn’t have any money to pay her. She only took enough money to feed and clothe herself. She was a saint.”
The tears will never stop now that I’ve started.
“She was my light. She kept me pure. She knew there was a darkness inside me, but she kept the darkness at bay.”
“She sounds wonderful.”
“She was. She was heavenly. Purer than an angel. She saved me, helped me find my purpose in providing security systems to protect the innocent from the evil.”
I can’t look at Gia as I talk about my wife. It’s too much. So I stare at my hands. Hands that have done so much wrong.
“But security isn’t pure. I got mixed into a world of evil. I tried to stay away, but it sucked me in like a vacuum I could get free of.
“We’d been married two years when she was taken in the middle of the night. My security system had failed us…failed her. Yesterday was the anniversary of her being taken.”
I roar out my anger needing the pain to go away. I’ve been numb for too long to be able to handle this pain now.
“I searched every day for her for a year. One year I searched. I found her, but it was too late. She was dead and gone, tossed out like trash. I brought her back to my home in the woods and buried her in the garden, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to get her revenge.”
Gia nods but keeps her hands in her lap, even though I can tell she wants to comfort me, she knows I won’t accept it right now.
“Dante Russo was the one who took her. I vowed the day I found her, I would torture and kill him the way he did her. I needed the best security system to get a way in. I needed a system he would want. So I became the best. And then I needed something Dante would truly mourn when I stole it.”
“Me,” Gia says.
I nod.
“I’m not valuable to him. I’m just a body he can fuck. He doesn’t care about me any more than he does any other woman.”
I shake my head. “I planned to install the system, watch him, and find his weakness. But the second I saw you run out of the car, I knew it was you. You would become his weakness because you instantly became mine.”
She sucks in a breath.
“I’ve watched him every day since I took you. He’s gone mad. He would do anything to get you back. And now that I’ve tortured him with your disappearance, can I kill him.”
Gia takes a second to herself and then grabs my cheeks, wiping my tears with her thumbs. “I forgive you.”
More tears fall. Of all the things she could say now, I never expected her to say that.