Page 85 of Giovanna
“I know.” They’re the first words she’s spoken and they come out in a soft rasp. “Please don’t let me go,” she pleads.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Francesca
“Here you go,” Giovanna says softly, depositing me on the large leather sofa in her office. “I’m just going to make you a sweet tea, okay?”
Alarm must show on my face because she crouches down in front of me and presses a kiss to my forehead. “I’ll be just downstairs. Five minutes max. I promise.”
I nod, not wanting to seem clingy or like a baby. But, dread seeps through me as she walks away. Being wrapped in her arms made me feel safe and held all the terrified pieces of me together. For the first time in a long time, I felt protected and like I was something to be treasured.
Notwithstanding my mafia heritage, I’m not a violent person. I have shied away from the violence rife in ourFamigliaand community. But I can’t deny that seeing Giovanna obliterate the man who held a knife to my throat felt reassuring. She didn’t flinch as she shot him so many times I lost count.
The first shots made me feel saved, rescued, but the rest were delivered with the satisfying tang of retribution. ‘Do not fuck with us’, the shots said.Do not fuck with our girl.
I thought I knew what Giovanna looked like in mafia mode, but it turns out I didn't. Not until today. Until I saw her kill a man with all the confidence and calm of someone who does this kind of thinga lot.
Underneath my terror and horror at witnessing a body being blasted apart, her sheer dominance and power made me fall for her even more. Something in her energy calls to me and her violence doesn’t detract from it. If anything, I can’t help but want her more because she has spilled blood for me.
Elio again proved why we shouldn’t be marrying each other. He froze, seeming to lack the motivation to negotiate for my life, and if Giovanna hadn’t stepped in, I wonder if I would have been the one to die, my throat cut wide open.
Thinking about our stupid engagement only frustrates me and I push it from my mind. It isn’t something I need to think about right now. Elio is simply getting in the way of the magnetic pull I feel toward Giovanna. I’d rather bathe in that.
Giovanna has dropped her tightly controlled barbed-wire fence. The moment I had a knife to my throat, I saw the fear in her expression and then the resolve to save me.
Even in my state of shock, when she called me ‘darling’ and scooped me up my soul sighed in relief. Her tenderness and protectiveness are like a soothing balm and I’m dreading the moment when the barbed wire goes back up and she tries to palm me off to Elio again.
Wrapped in a blanket that smells like Giovanna’s androgynous perfume and curled into the corner of the sofa, her absence has me feeling very alone and fragile all of a sudden. Everything in me aches for her to touch me again.Please don’t pull away.
When she reappears with my cup of tea and some chocolate biscuits, I can’t help but sit up expectantly. I know my eyes will be giving away my desperation for her to come back to me, but it isn’t like I have been subtle with my feelings up to this point.
“Doc is about 15 minutes away. She’ll have a look at your neck. Drink up and get some sugar in you for the shock.” She carefully passes me the steaming mug and watches as I nibble on aTim Tam.
“Will you stay with me?” I ask weakly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she looks me dead in the eye and whatever she sees there has her asking, “Do you want a cuddle?”
When I nod, she takes back the cup of tea and gets me to scoot over so she can sit in the corner of the sofa. “Come,” she opens her arms and I crawl back into her lap and sip the tea.
One of her arms wraps across my body holding me to her while she strokes my back and hair with the other hand. My body melts into her, limbs relaxing and tension ebbing away. If I was a cat I would be purring as loud as a freight train.
“How’s your neck?” she murmurs, pulling my hair away so she can look at it.
“I feel kinda numb. It should hurt, but it doesn’t.”
“Mmm, that'll be the shock.”
Draining the last of my tea, I reach out and set it on the coffee table. I’m feeling less like I could faint at any second and the quiver in my hands is more to do with my proximity to Giovanna than shock.
I could have died. We all could have died. The entire future of the MarinoFamigliawiped out in one night.
What would any of the stupid mafia politics have mattered then?
The man I’m supposed to marry in order to consolidate his power nearly watched me have my throat slit this evening. As harsh as it may seem, if I am neither physically nor emotionally safe with Elio, what incentive is there beyond power and wealth for me to become his wife?
Until tonight I didn’t realise how important it is to me to feel protected and like I am someone of value worth fighting for. I mean, I knew I liked those things and I knew I was hopelessly infatuated with Giovanna, but after tonight? My feelings for her have expanded at a meteoric pace like air filling a gigantic balloon. They feel too big for my body and I’m afraid they’ll spill out or burst.
My childhood puppy-like obsession with Giovanna is joked about by the family and the two of us have shared plenty of moments lately that make me certain that she at the very least returns my physical attraction to her. But, I haven’t expressed my feelings explicitly. I haven’t told her the truth of the depth of them or that I would marry her, instead of her brother, in a heartbeat.