A Hunger for the Forbidden(46)

“What did he do to you, Matteo?” Her stomach felt sick now, and she pushed her bowl of food across the counter, making her way to where Matteo was standing.

“When I was fifteen he started showing me the ropes. The way things worked. He took me on collection calls. We went to visit people who owed him money. Now, my father was only ever involved on the calls where people owed him a lot of money. People who were in serious trouble with him. Otherwise, his men, his hired thugs, paid the visits.”

“And he took you on these … visits?”

Matteo nodded, his arms crossed over his bare chest. There was a blankness in his eyes that hurt, a total detachment that froze her inside.

“For the first few weeks I just got to watch. One quick hit to the legs. A warning. A bone-breaking warning, but much better than the kind of thing he and his thugs were willing to do.”

“Dio. You should never have … He should never have let you see …” She stopped talking then, because she knew there was more. And that it was worse. She could feel the anxiety coming off him in waves.

She took a step toward him, put her hand on his forearm. It was damp with sweat, his muscles shaking beneath her touch.

“One night he asked me to do it,” he said.

His words were heavy in the room, heavy on her. They settled over her skin, coating her, making her feel what he felt. Dirty. Ashamed. She didn’t know how she was so certain that was what he felt, but she was.

“What happened?” She tried to keep her voice steady, tried to sound ready to hear it. Tried to be ready to hear it. Because he needed to say it without fear of recrimination from her. Without fear of being told there was something wrong with him.

She knew that as deeply, as innately, as she knew his other feelings.

“I did it,” he said. “My father asked me to break a man’s legs because he owed the family money. And I did.”





CHAPTER TEN


MATTEO WAITED FOR the horror of his admission to sink in. Waited for Alessia to turn from him, to run away in utter terror and disgust. She should. He wouldn’t blame her.

He also desperately wanted her to stay.

“Matteo …”

“These hands,” he said, holding them out, palms up, “that have touched you, have been used in ways that a man should never use his hands.”

“But you aren’t like that.”

He shook his head. “Clearly I am.”

“But you didn’t enjoy it.”

“No. I didn’t enjoy it.” He could remember very vividly how it had felt, how the sweat had broken out on his skin. How he had vomited after. His father’s men had found that terribly amusing. “But I did it.”

“What would your father have done to you if you hadn’t?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does, Matteo, you were a boy.”

“I was a boy, but I was old enough to know that what my father did, what he was, was wrong.”

“And you were trapped in it.”

“Maybe. And maybe that would be an acceptable excuse for some people, but it’s not for me.”

“Why not? You were a boy and he abused you. Tell me, and be honest, what did he say he would do to you if you didn’t do it?”

Matteo was afraid for one moment that his stomach might rebel against him. “He told me if I couldn’t do it to a grown man, there were some children in the village I might practice on.”

Alessia’s face contorted with utter horror. “Would he have done that?”

“I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to find out, either.”

“He made you do it.”

“He manipulated me into doing it, but I did it.”

“How?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“It’s easy to do things, anything, when you can shut the emotion down inside yourself. I learned to do that. I learned that there was a place inside of myself as cold as any part of my father’s soul. If I went there, it wasn’t so hard to do.” It was only after that he had broken. In the end, it was both the brokenness, and the cold, that had saved him.

His father had decided he wasn’t ready. Didn’t want his oldest son, the one poised to take over his empire, undermining his position by showing such weakness.

And after, the way he’d dealt with the knowledge that he’d lived with a monster, the way he’d dealt with knowing that he was capable of the very same atrocities, was to freeze out every emotion. He would not allow himself to want, to crave power or money in the way his father did. Passion, need, greed, were the enemy.