“Did you like the park mio bellissimo ragazzo?” Athena crooned while lifting Brogue from the holder strapped in the front seat of her red Chevelle.
“Did you have fun, my beauty?” She held Brogue up high, laughing when the baby babbled and giggled. She drew him to her then, “Let’s get you a nice bath and a nap before lunch, si?” She turned for the front porch then. Despite the elation her grandson inspired, anger took root when she saw the front door gaping open.
“Carla?” Athena’s steps quickened as she hurried forward, calling the head downstairs maid. “Carla?!”
“Si? Si Signora Tesano?” The woman appeared scurrying into the foyer shortly after being summoned.
“Why is the front door flying open?” Athena stopped when she spotted the cluster of finely made suitcases just inside the entryway. “Carla, what-?”
“It’s alright, Carla,” Liam said when he too appeared in the lofty gray and white checkered foyer. “Take my grandson to the nursery, please.”
“Si, Signor Tesano,” the flustered maid seemed grateful for the task. With a dutiful bow toward Liam, she quickly took Brogue from his grandmother and trotted up the front staircase.
“I didn’t know you had a business trip planned.” Athena said.
“I don’t.”
“Clearly, you have something planned and I’m not in the mood for guessing games. Brogue and I had an active morning and I want a bath while he’s napping.”
“Games,” The word lingered on the air as Liam took the corridor that led to his study. “Funny you’d say that.”
Intrigued, despite her annoyance, Athena followed.
“I feel like our entire life has been a game. You the player, me the piece.”
Athena huffed, lashes fluttering around her lilac eyes. She brought her hands to the waistband of the teal capris she wore with white Keds. “I assume there’s a point to your cryptic remarks?”
“There is,” Liam merely nodded toward the high table near the door.
Athena saw an envelope lying beneath the large glass lamp there. She waved it toward Liam, he waved in return.
“Please,” he said.
Sighing, Athena reached into the legal sized envelope and withdrew several glossy sheets. A quick, sharp cry left her lips after she’d studied them for only a few seconds. The sheets drifted to the floor. Photos.
Liam went to the bar just down from the high table. “I was happy to see Bianca Marsala when she came to my office last week. I hardly see anyone from the old neighborhood anymore.” She told me Franco was too ill to make the trip down from the Upstate. She says he hasn’t been well for several years now.”
Athena side stepped the photos as though they carried some dangerous substance she couldn’t abide touching, “Liam-”
“Bianca said she couldn’t stay away any longer,” he cut in while pouring two fingers of Kentucky bourbon. “She said what they did for you has eaten away at them like acid.”
“Liam, I can expl-”
“She said she needed me to know about my grandchild and its mother. Rosella.” Liam went to the high table and knelt to retrieve one of the pictures Bianca Marsala had brought with her to his office.
“Liam you must let me speak.”
“No need. Bianca told me everything.”
“And you would believe her over me?!”
“I’d believe a viper over you!”
Athena stumbled back at Liam’s uncharacteristic bellow. She kept retreating until she came up against the back of one of the suede chairs facing the fireplace.
Liam’s dark eyes virtually blazed with menace. His voice though, his voice carried a kind of quiet bewilderment. “How could you do such a thing?” He asked her and then grimaced. “Don’t bother to answer. I’m a fool to even be surprised by this. Your brother Alcide tried to warn me, after all. Hmph, even your father tried to tell me all those years ago.” Liam’s dark gaze raked his wife’s body with chilly remembrance.
“I couldn’t see past the...perfection of you. The package, the radiance that blinds a man to everything. Even the truth that’s right under his nose. That’s all my fault, I guess. I let my cock do the thinking for me.”
Fury darkened her face. “You speak to me like I’m a-”
“Lying whore?”
Her tears welled and spurted, making her eyes blaze a violet fire. Quickly, she squeezed them shut to dash the water away.
Liam slammed down his unfinished drink, unmindful of the liquid wetting the face of the silver timepiece at his wrist.
“Don’t I even get the chance to share my side, Liam?”
“Your side,” he smiled harshly while rolling his shirt sleeves over copper toned forearms that were still powerfully chorded with muscle. “Which is? That you tricked that poor child into thinking her parents would put her out on the street because she was pregnant out of marriage?”
“It was the truth!”
“It was nonsense!” Liam hit the glass with the back of his fist and sent it crashing into a far wall. “You terrified her! Then you held her prisoner! You kept her from people who loved her. Then she was gone, bled to death in some house in the woods instead of being taken to a hospital for proper treatment. And after all that, you make up some bullshit story about her being killed in Canada to save your own ass! If Stone hadn’t died, would you have ever told him?”
He erupted with a brutal laugh when she gasped. “Don’t bother to answer that either.”
A timid, quick knock fell to the study door.
