Kon (Trassato Crime Family Book 2)(63)
“What about my family? You can’t control them. You don’t have any leverage over them.”
“Fuck your family. They’ll come around, and if they don’t, they don’t deserve your love.”
“No. I can’t gamble away my family.” He didn’t understand what they meant to me. Evie told me her parents never married and their dad was absent most of their lives. My family held tight and never let go unless you crossed them, and then you were dead to them. “Things will never work. You know it, and I know it. We have the chance to end this while we’re still on good terms without any hard feelings. We should take it. It’s the best we could have hoped for.”
I clutched my chest, my words literally shattering my soul into a million pieces. While I hurt when Rocco died, giving up Kon somehow felt worse. Death ripped Rocco from my life and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. With Kon, though, I was pushing him out of my life, and I would have to live the rest of my days knowing he was out there somewhere, yet forever out of my reach, hating me and resenting every second he wasted on me.
He jumped off the bed and shoved his legs into his jeans, with a hard, low chuckle. “No hard feelings, huh? It sure as fuck doesn’t feel that way right now.”
“Kon, don’t be like that.”
He scooped up my dress from the floor and tossed it on the bed. “You need to go.”
“Kon—”
He tugged on the ends of his messy blond hair like he was losing his mind. “Go. I can’t look at you right now.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Nothing wrong? So you think it was okay to meet up with me for one more fuck before you broke things off between us for good?”
I pulled my dress over my head and came to my feet. “You make it sound like I used you.”
“If the shoe fits…”
Cries crawled up my throat and no amount of swallowing reversed their course.
“You’re not being fair, Kon. What are you promising me? Do you want us to get married? Or is this a fling that lasts until we’re sick of each other?”
“I don’t fucking know, Carmela. If you have your way, we’ll never know.”
“And yet you’re pushing me to walk away from my family and everything I’ve known without any assurances? Without a plan?”
“You need a plan? Don’t give up. Figure out a way to buy us more time.”
“More time for you to decide if I’m more than a quick fuck while hiding in the shadows, dodging my family?”
He ground his teeth together, his head tipped to the ceiling, refusing to answer.
I jammed my feet into my shoes and headed to the door. “I can’t wait around for you to figure this out. My family won’t wait. Dominick won’t back down.”
“What about you? You’re doing the same damn thing to me. You’re giving me an ultimatum, telling me you plan to marry another man unless I commit right here and right now. What is that about?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think. I’m so confused, Kon.” I gulped hard. “And I’m scared. So fucking scared and confused, I can’t think straight. Dominick threatened to kill you, Kon, and I’m freaking out. I want to fight for us. I really do, but I’d die if something happened to you because of me.”
He strode across the room and pulled me into his arms in a matter of seconds. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself, and I’m not demanding you fight for us. You need to fight for yourself and what you want first.”
“You have to see how hard I’m trying.”
“You’ve lost a lot over the last few years. I get it, but I know you’re strong enough. I remember the first time I saw you. That woman would stand up for herself. She wouldn’t marry a man she didn’t love.”
“You mean when you came to my parents’ house with your dad to talk about Evie?”
“No.” His hands framed my face so I couldn’t look away. “I saw you at a restaurant with Rocco, and that version of Carmela had fire. You laughed too loud. You smiled too big. I loved it. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you, and my ex lost her mind.”
“Oh,” I whispered, my heart breaking a little. I missed that version of me too. Sure, I caught glimpses of her once in a while, more since being with Kon, but for the most part, she was a stranger to me.
“After Rocco died I saw you every once in a while when I was keeping tabs on Evie. You still had that fire then. It had dimmed a little, but it was still in there somewhere. You put a shit-eating grin on my face for a solid twenty-four hours the time I overheard you sticking up for my sister when her ex berated her. Right then, I knew I wanted you. I wanted to taste that fire. That passion. When my dad came up with that bullshit plan, I agreed to it because without it, I’d never get a chance to touch you or be near you. Your family held you too close.”