But there was a room full of grown men out there expecting me to act more than my sixteen years, so I rinsed my mouth in the filthy pedestal sink and took several deep breaths. I needed to pull myself together and go back out there.

I had been in too much of a hurry to turn on the light, so when I glanced to my side at the small window, I could see easily into the darkness outside. There, beneath a streetlamp in the rocky parking lot, was Sal, shaking hands with Enzo Genovese.

An icy chill engulfed my body.

Who exactly was he in all of this? I detected a clear undertone of superiority coming from Enzo. If I had to bet, I would have said that Enzo outranked Sal. If Sal was the underboss, that could only mean that Enzo Genovese was the boss of the Lucciano crime family.

Holy shit.

Did Sofia know about her father? No, I couldn’t imagine she did. We told each other everything. There’s no way she would have left that out after all these years. I wasn’t sure how he’d done it, but Enzo had kept his children in the dark.

For a moment, I wondered if that meant there was hope for us. If he’d kept the two lives separate, maybe I could too. Then images of the man I’d beaten surfaced in my mind and dashed away that hope. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put her in that kind of danger. I couldn’t sit across the kitchen table from her day after day and lie to her face. I wasn’t allowed to tell her the truth, nor did I want to.

The evening had only solidified in my mind the conclusion I’d come to the night before.

I had to walk away.

I’d told myself for years that no excuse was valid enough to justify what Nico had done to me. No matter what he had been facing or whatever had happened, there had been a better way to handle the situation. After hearing him finally fill in all the blanks from that night seven years before, I began to doubt that conviction.

My gentle giant—I couldn’t fathom what it took for him to kill a man with his bare fists. He was the boy who had been sensitive enough to spend day after day drawing a traumatized girl out of her shell. He was the boy who texted me about new piano pieces he had mastered. He was the boy who had given me a pendant of the Eiffel Tower with the promise of seeing the world.

He wasn’t a killer.

Or at least, he hadn’t been.

One glance at his gnarled and scarred knuckles told me he’d been living in a world of violence since pushing me away. He’d said he was a boxer, but just how much deadly violence had those hands known outside the boxing ring?