Marked For Love (Mob Romance) (15 page)

Chapter Seven: The Ties that Bind

Grace had never been outside of the United States. It was odd, as she’d always planned to visit the most exotic locales she could afford tickets to. She had been so caught up in contemplating ways to keep herself alive that she only just now stopped to realize that she had visited Italy.

She might not have seen much of it from the confines of the room she had been kept in, but she’d caught glimpses of it all the same.

And now, free of any bonds whatsoever, she was in the heart of the Czech Republic, the grave nature of their flight momentarily pushed from her mind by the wonders laid out before her.

Prague was an amazing city. She’d always imagined the capital of the Czech Republic covered in snow and ice, but in the middle of the summer, it was green and lush, bustling with life. People meandered about the city streets, in and out of tiny alleys winding their ways around castles, shops, quaint little inns and cafes.

The colors, sights and sounds were absolutely entrancing, awing her to the extent that she had to stop several times to take things in. By the time they finally arrived at their small, out of the way hostel, she was utterly enchanted.

The room was nothing like the others she’d been held in – there was no opulent wealth, no lavish accoutrement – merely the most basic of amenities.

Grace hadn’t felt so comfortable in ages.

With a sigh, she collapsed onto the bed, willing the tension to ease from her body. Behind her, Vicente dropped his bags on the floor with little ceremony before striding to the single small window to stare out of the blinds and down onto the crowded streets below.

Grace was lamenting being in such a glorious city where she probably wouldn’t be allowed out when her former captor spoke.

“Giorgio Acconci is my stepfather.”

Grace bolted upright, sure, for a moment, that she must have misheard him. She hadn’t expected Vicente to be very talkative at all – after all, they were running for their lives and she was sure he was exhausted from watching their asses constantly. She couldn’t be good company. She hadn’t a single idea of how to conceal herself and she was sure that if she’d been left to her own devices, she would have left a path of red flags for Acconci and his men to follow.

When Grace thought of Giorgio Acconci and what he wanted to do to her, a finger of ice wound its way around her spine, threatening to freeze her with fear. While it was evident that Vicente had chosen to dissolve all business ties with Acconci, there were apparently other ties that went far deeper.

“You…what?” Grace stared at him in disbelief, her eyes wide.

“You once asked me who I am.” Vicente

turned from the window to face the young woman, his expression unreadable. “And now I tell you: I’m the stepson of Giorgio Acconci.”

Holy
shit
.

Acconci’s own stepson had walked away from him. Grace had feared the man before, but with this new knowledge, it made her slightly ill contemplate what torture she might have endured at Giorgio’s hand if even his own kin fled from him. “Vicente…” she gazed at the man from across the room, unsure of what to say.

Without hesitation, he crossed the room to drop down onto the bed next to her, his entire stance stiff. For a moment, he stared devotedly at the wall and Grace wasn’t sure he was going to continue. The man wasn’t the best even when it came to small talk. Expecting him to divulge something emotionally sensitive...he who she’d once been certain didn’t have emotions?

She’d be better off not speaking to him at all.

But Grace didn’t have to say a single word. Vicente spoke anew without any coaxing on her part; for which she was relieved.

How on earth would she have forced Giorgio Acconci’s stepson and master assassin to tell her anything he didn’t want to divulge?

“When I was eight years old, my mother divorced my father. I don’t remember much of him, other than that he was a painter. He couldn’t support us – and he loved his art more than he did his own wife and son. So he left. Walked out one day, and never returned.” Vicente’s eyes were trained on the floor as he spoke in a halting, flat tone. “For two years, we were our own. While this made
me
happy, it had the opposite effect on my mother. There were days when her smile shone like the sun, and some she didn’t even want to leave her bed. Even as young as I was, I knew there was something wrong with that.

“Giorgio made her happy. He gave her everything that my father couldn’t. Clothes, jewels, houses. Most importantly, he gave her the love she’d been craving. He was obsessed with her. She was his everything.” Vicente exhaled, long and low, lost in visions of his past. “And I was a part of her so, naturally, Giorgio took an interest in me.

“He loved my mother. And I loved my mother…so I let myself believe that he truly cared for me. I did what he asked and he became the closest thing to a father I’ve ever had.” Vicente’s expression hardened and he paused for a moment, his fists clenching against the coverlet before he continued.

“He gave me my first gun at fifteen. Sent me out to kill at eighteen. We were family, and family was the glue that held the empire together. The harder I became, the more Giorgio loved me. The more he beat me…the more he stole away my humanity…the closer we became.

“My mother let him do these things to me. She let him show me how to kill. She said it was to protect us - to protect her. She was the only one who could ever calm his temper. The one person who could soften him. She kept me from hating him because she loved him.

“And then she died”

Grace’s heart twisted in her chest.

Dear sweet Jesus. If she’d thought her life was messed up, Vicente’s went far beyond anything she could ever imagine. When she’d first looked into the man’s eyes, she had seen utter emptiness. Now, she knew exactly what he had been trying to empty himself of.

An abusive, ruthless stepfather, his mother’s death, his own moral shortcomings…

It made her dad not paying her ransom seem a very minor matter.

“When she died, any possible chance of Giorgio’s redemption died with her. He became more violent and more cruel, and during this transformation, I stood by his side. I have killed…hundreds. Men and women…innocents, Grace.” Raising his hands, Vicente gazed over his palms and fingers as if he thought he might find the answer he sought in the pale skin there. “I have done monstrous things in my lifetime. And after a while, I stopped caring whether I killed or not. It became routine. The way I proved my loyalty to Giorgio was the bodies I piled on his doorstep.”

Grace winced at the bluntness of his statement.

“It was a role I had to fill. In a strange way, I needed Giorgio just as he needed me. For a time, I wanted to fill the role he had set out for me. I wanted to be his son.” Slowly, Vicente shook his head. “I now realize how wrong that was.”

Twining his long fingers together, the man leaned forward, his face cast into the shadow. “I should not have let my mother dictate my life for me…no matter how much I loved her. And I shouldn’t have let Giorgio turn me into what I am.”

“You were a child.” It was the first thing she had said since he’d begun to speak. The young woman hadn’t intended on interrupting but she suddenly found herself unable to remain silent. Vicente was sitting here, taking the blame for individuals who had each had a part in creating him as he was in that moment, without considering how young he’d been when he’d first been indoctrinated. “Vicente, children are young and impressionable. And it sounds like your love for your mother drove you to try and impress your stepfather.”

“And still I went along with the things he asked.” The assassin hissed lowly. “I might have been a child but I was old enough to know right from wrong. I could have chosen not to steal. Not to torture…not to kill.”

“And risked the anger of a man like Giorgio Acconci? Vicente, for a fifteen year old to be brave or stupid enough to do that would be insane.”

The man’s head jerked up to fix her with a steel gaze so intense Grace’s breath caught. “To allow him to steal away what I might have been, Grace…that was insane.”

The young woman swallowed thickly, choosing her next words carefully as she felt stirrings of sympathy for the conflicted man tightening her chest. “I agree.” She nodded. “It was. Have you forgiven your mother for allowing it?”

Vicente bolted to his feet, eyes shining with sudden, frightening anger. “How
dare
you insult her. She never wanted such a thing.”

Grace should have kept silent. That would have been the safe thing to do. However, she couldn’t let the man who had saved her life – against everything he had formerly stood for – believe for another minute that he was entirely responsible for what he’d become. It wouldn’t be fair. This shit had obviously been eating at him for decades, and if he could leave behind an organization that was an integral part of him for her sake, then she could try to convince him of what lay plain before his eyes.

“Vicente , I don’t want to speak ill of your mother: but she was exactly that – your mother. A mother shouldn’t choose to put her child in the danger that she introduced you too. As a mother, you’re supposed to put your child before anything else – even the love you might feel for someone else. For her to have brought you to Acconci like that…to allow you to be indoctrinated to the extent that you were…it was wrong of her.”

The assassin was shaking his head almost violently, his face reddening in frustrated denial. “You have no idea of what you speak.”

“But I do!” Grace burst almost desperately. “Look at where you are Vicente…who you
are.
If your mother and you had remained alone…if she had never decided it was ok to bring you into that man’s fold…where would you be now? I’m not saying you should hate or resent her, but the fact of the matter remains that you are here, in part, for decisions she made. And accepting that…forgiving her…it’s tantamount to forgiving yourself.”

In a trice, the man had drawn his Glock and was levelling it at her head. Grace inhaled sharply, but didn’t move, staring up at him.

For the first time ever, she noticed a slight tremor in his hand.

He was frightened. Of all the things in the world to frighten a man like Vicente, what got to him most, she realized, was coming to terms with the events that comprised his person. Giorgio Acconci could have spoken to his stepson about his dreams and aspirations; could have driven him in any other direction than the one the Don himself wanted. Vicente’s mother, too, had done much the same thing.

And now, here he was, hating one of his parents while denying the other had done anything wrong. It was a dangerous existence.

Grace felt for him – like she had no other man before. The boys she dated worried about petty things like impressing girls, expensive suits and complicated hotrods. They went out for beers with the guys, drank themselves into oblivion and then fucked women they didn’t remember the next day.

Vicente, she would wager, could do none of that comfortably – it wasn’t who he was. And he didn’t know who he was because he had never been allowed the chance to discover it. For she, a woman who prided herself on being someone her parents couldn’t, the knowledge pained her heart so acutely she found herself struggling to draw a decent breath.

“You did not know my mother.” The assassin’s voice trembled slightly as he spoke. “You don’t know how deeply she loved. How she hid from me the disease that ravaged her and took her life because she wanted nothing more than my happiness.”

“If she wanted your happiness, Vicente…” Grace’s words were barely whispered as she stared down the barrel of the gun pointed at her, “She would have let go of her pride. She would have told you and she would have let you help her because she knew how much you loved her.”

“
Merda
!” The Italian epithet exploded from Vicente’s lips a moment before the dark-haired man’s hand moved to the trigger of the gun. There, it hovered for what seemed like an eternity, before finally, he lowered the weapon, allowing it to drop to the floor with a heavy thud.

Grace watched his shoulders sag as the anger left his eyes. He stood there, in the center of their small room, stiff and defeated, and Grace felt the guilt of having led him to a revelation that may have hurt him far more than any physical injury.

Slowly, she rose from the bed, moving towards him a step at a time. Vicente’s eyes were trained on the ground, his breath coming in shallow inhalations. Carefully, she reached up to cup his face between her palms, ready for him to strike her – shake her –
anything
that he felt might alleviate the pain he felt.

Instead, he merely raised his gaze to hers, the gray eyes glimmering in indecision.

Grace wrapped her arms around him, drawing the man against her with a soft, low sound of encouragement. He went limp, sagging down onto her smaller form, his face buried in her shoulder. He didn’t make a single sound, only allowing her to hold him.

Grace relished the warmth of his hard form. Not that she was in any particular position to counsel her own kidnapper, but if she could help Vicente come to terms with his demons, perhaps she was one step closer to facing her own.

For the next day, Vicente didn’t speak to her at all. Grace couldn’t call him listless, as the man didn’t for a moment neglect his duties scouting the perimeter of the block on which they stayed or surveilling the property. When he wasn’t otherwise occupied, however, he sat in the corner of the room on the only armchair, cleaning his gun aimlessly, his eyes lost in some far-away place.