Thankfully she didn’t say anything more, just gave me a strange look which I caught out the side of my eye before changing the subject. I felt guilty at the relief I felt after passing her off to my sisters. That was too close and, again, very selfish on my part. There’s nothing stopping me from telling her the truth now, other than the fact that I don’t want to mess this up for her. I want her to enjoy the ball and her trip and all the things they have planned while in Europe.
I’d feel like even more of a jerk if I messed things up for her now. But how fair is it that I know I’ll be crushing her in a few days when she’s not even prepared? I’ve tried okay, tried putting space between us, tried pulling back. But each time I did, she’d get this look on her face, a look of loneliness and betrayal that guts me.
I didn’t think anything would ever be this hard, never expected anything to shake the foundation of what I am and what I’ve known I had to be since the night Ma told me her story. If I let myself, I could just say fuck it, stay here, be with her, build a life together. I can see it. But there’s always that thought in the back of my mind that she deserves better. Better than the son of a monster.
GABRIEL
Paris! What’s not to love? I already had my plans mapped out before we even left the states because I knew I would be playing it close. Even though the flights in between the two cities are relatively short, especially by private plane, the drive out to the convent where the runaway was supposed to be would bite into my time.
I hadn’t had time to find an airport or landing strip close to where she is because a lot of Sicily is still old school, it seems like, and the place she’s at is like stepping back in time, at least that’s what it looks like on paper. So, knowing my family and their personalities, I set things in motion through well-placed hints and suggestions.
I knew the girls would hit the ground running, which works out perfectly for me. The whole family had decided to get involved, and Gianna’s grandmother, due to her reconnection with my nana and wanting to be there for her granddaughter’s first coming out ball, was no exception.
Pop was nervous as hell from the jump, almost as if he expected me to take a connecting flight to Sicily as soon as we landed. I knew his game, so my first order of business was getting his snitches on my side. Lancelot wasn’t too hard. He loses his shit in a new city, so it would be easy to keep him preoccupied with touristy bullshit that my sisters were going to drag him off to anyway. As I said, I know all of them and could pretty much write a blueprint for what was going to happen once we got here.
Ma and Stella were already zoning out high-end shopping areas and the best restaurants in the city because that’s their thing. Gramps was busy catching up with some old friends, so everyone had their own thing going on, except me. I, of course, had a smokescreen in place to throw Pop off the scent; the catacombs.
I chose this venue, of course, because Ma and the twins wouldn’t be caught dead down there, Pop has a touch of claustrophobia, and Lancelot is a snob who wouldn’t be caught dead walking through the Parisian underground surrounded by dead bodies, some cop he’s going to be.
That wasn’t for another couple of days, though, so in the meantime, I had some groundwork to do. No one else seemed as edgy as Pop, and I knew he would be keeping his eye on me the whole time, so to put his mind at ease and not have him put a wrench in my plans, I had come up with a sophisticated plot of sorts.
It was the morning of our first day there, and the girls barely had time for anything other than their last-minute debutant crap, so I chose now to take the first step in my plans for my upcoming solo outing. No, I wasn’t jetting off to Sicily right now; I have other plans for that. But this little trip had two purposes.
One, it would give me time to put the finishing touches on my plans, and two, it would show Pop that I wasn’t about to go anywhere, which is a lie, but to give him peace of mind, it was worth it to go to the trouble.
I went in search of the twins Marcus and Matthew and their cohorts Robert and Denver. My family, instead of getting hotels or renting a private villa as planned, had ended up accepting an invitation from Gianna’s grandmother to stay at her family estate just outside of Paris. The place is crazy, like nobility crazy. There was room for everyone, including the security teams, which Gianna’s family didn’t even blink at, and who Pop would die before he let us travel without.