CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
“HEART FLUTTERS”

SCARLETT DEL GATO

I woke up the next morning with a pulsing headache.

It was morning because the smell of coffee, bacon and eggs filled my nostrils, and not to mention that the birds were chirping happily outside in the trees like every morning I woke up.

I’ve been out for a while because once the smell hit my nostrils, my stomach growled in response. I wanted nothing more than to feast on Amelia’s delicious breakfast right about now. Just thinking about her crispy bacon made my mouth water and my stomach grumble loudly.

I try to sit up but the sudden movement made my headache pulse again. I lift my hand to touch the sensitive skin right above my temple, the skin there was completely raw and it won’t even surprise me if it was bruised.

Damn Diablo. I thought.

I knew his intentions weren’t pure, but I always try to see the good in people even though it was buried very, very deep somewhere.

His words from yesterday came to mind: “If you tell the brothers that this happened, I’m going to kill your little friend Eden.”  

What was with everyone who threatened Eden if I opened my mouth?

First it was Giovanni who told me that he’d kill her if I ran away to go to her house. And now it was Diablo threatening her too if I told the brothers what he did in the car yesterday afternoon.

Just thinking about him bashing my head into his dashboard made me wince out loud. It’s like I could still feel how my head connected with the hard surface of his car’s dashboard.

I hear footsteps coming down the hallway. It sounded like a set of three pairs of footsteps. Giovanni’s, Vito’s and…

Oh shit.

I was so deep in thought about what Diablo did yesterday that I completely forgot that the Castiglione brother’s father was home.

Just thinking about him coming inside my room made my stomach fill with nervousness. My poor heart started to beat faster and faster until their footsteps stopped right outside my room.

I saw their shadows underneath the doorframe.

“La voglio fuori di casa.” He says. “End of discussion.”

I don’t know what he told his sons, but by the sound of his angry tone and how his words came out of his mouth told me that it couldn’t have been a warm welcome.

“She has nowhere else to go, Papà.” Giovanni says.

I can just imagine him running his fingers through his hair. He always did when he was frustrated with something, or in this case, with someone.

Giovanni didn’t lie when he said that he would do everything in his power to get me to stay once his father wants me out of his mansion. Giovanni was outside my room right now, fighting with his own flesh and blood for me to stay here even though I knew that his father won’t allow me to stay here.

“That girl is not welcome here.” His father said, spitting out the word ‘girl’ with so much disgust, it actually brought goosebumps to my flesh. “I want her out of my mansion and that is final.”

“But—” Vito starts, but his dad talks before he could finish his sentence.

“I am already respecting your wishes of not shooting her like I wanted to when I first saw her, but I want her out of my mansion before I change my mind.” There’s a pause before he speaks again. “Choose wisely, boys. You know I don’t like to be disobeyed or disrespected.”

His footsteps then recede down the hallway.

There were still two shadows underneath my doorframe.

The brothers.

But another set of footsteps recede down the hallway too not long after.

It was silent for a few seconds before I finally heard faint knocking coming from behind my door.

Giovanni doesn’t wait for my reply. He steps in the room instead. He smiles softly at me when he enters my room, closing the door behind him.

“You heard what he said, didn’t you?” He asks, coming over to the bed before he sits himself down on the foot of it.

I nod, sitting straight in my bed against the headboard. “I heard how you fought for me too.” I tell him. “But it’s okay, Giovanni. I’ve been a nuisance for too long now. I’ll leave in the morning to stay with Eden from now on.”

“Sul mio cadavere.” He says, the Italian side of him coming to the surface.

I frown at him, not understanding what the hell came out of his mouth.

He chuckles, shaking his head. “Sorry.” He apologizes. “My dad’s home so the Italian side is kicking in.”

I shrug it off. “What did it mean?”

“It means: over my dead body.” He says, playing with the ring on his finger.

I don’t know why my heart suddenly started to flutter hearing those words. He was actually going to fight his dad into letting me stay here with them?

“Giovanni—”

Giovanni tilts his head, frowning when he noticed the bruise on my head from where Diablo smashed my head against his dashboard yesterday. I guess he was too busy fighting with his dad to even notice my head.

Until now.

“What happened to your head?” He asks but he suddenly tenses. “Did he hit you? Did my father hit you?”

I shake my head quickly.

“No.” I chuckle nervously.

“If you tell the brothers that this happened, I’m going to kill your little friend Eden.”

“Uh, it must’ve been from when I passed out.” I tell him.

Giovanni chuckles, but it was humourless. “Bullshit.” He sputters. “If he hit you, you need to tell me right now, Scarlett.”

The longer I was silent, the angrier he got.

His nostrils were flared as he waited for an explanation to what happened to my face. His breathing was audible and his gaze intense, murderous. He even flexed is fingers trying to compose himself.

“I don’t know what you mean.” I lie. “I must’ve hit my head—”

“Did someone hurt you?”

I wasn’t going to get out of this one. I was knee-deep in my own grave.

I wasn’t going to go down without a fight, though. He can still believe my lies even though it was a long shot.

“No.”

“Scarlett—”

“I sat in the empty parking lot for almost three hours, Giovanni.” I change the subject, briefly. “I was waiting for you to pick me up but I eventually stopped waiting and I started to walk. I cut through the woods, slipped and hit my head on a dead tree log.”

Please be believable. Please be believable. Please be believable.

His chin dips to his chest, his posture slumping.

It was believable after all.

“I’m sorry about that.” He says. “I should’ve told you that my dad was back, but I forgot because Vito and I were trying to figure out how we were going to tell him about you. I thought you would’ve gotten a ride with Eden.”

I throw my arms across my chest, folding it. “I thought she wasn’t supposed to know about all of this.”

“You might’ve fooled Vito, Scarlett, but you sure as hell didn’t fool me.” He says, looking at me again. “I know you already told her about us.”

I can only bite my lower lip.

I was backed into a corner.

There were lies left and right and if I open my mouth to object, I was going to dig my grave even deeper than it already was.

“But to get back on the topic…” He trails off, eyeing the bruise on my head again. “And don’t lie to me this time or change the subject. I know someone did that to you. You didn’t fall in the woods.”

I tap my forefinger and my thumb together.

I definitely wasn’t going to get out of this one.

“Someone at school didn’t like my return very much.” I tell him, but I quickly speak before he gets a chance to. “But before you say or do something...Jeremiah was there to, uh, deal with it.”

Giovanni’s pupils constrict and he goes rigid.

He was even more pissed than before he knew the truth.

“Who?” He forces the words through clenched teeth. “Who did that to you and don’t lie to me.”

“I—Giovanni… It’s nothing. Okay? I am fine and he won’t bother me again.”

“He?”

Shit.

“Please,” I beg, “please just let it go. It’s nothing.”

I wanted to take his hand to calm him down, but he slips it from my grasp. He shakes his head furiously. “Nobody touches you and gets away with it.”

He moves to get up from my bed, but I managed to pull him down again.

“I won’t forgive you if you take matters into your own hands.” I tell him before I could stop myself. “I will not forgive you if you do something stupid, Giovanni.”

He looks at my hand around his wrist from when I pulled him down for a few seconds before he just smirks. “Sometimes we have to sin to protect the people we care about.” He says, looking at my hand. “So if you won’t forgive me for sticking up for you… so be it. I can live with it.”

“Giovanni—”

“But I’m going to let it go for now.” He adds. “But don’t think for a second that I will forget about this because I won’t. I’m letting it go because I have something else to worry about.”

“Your dad?”

He nods. “I have to convince him to let you stay here.”

“What if you can’t convince him?” I ask him. “You know I have to leave then, right?”

He lifts his hand, squeezing mine still wrapped around his wrist. “I won’t allow that to happen.”

My heart swells.

He was actually trying to keep me here.

“If you don’t manage to keep me here… I still admire you for trying.”

“He’ll come around.” He says. “If not, I’ll leave with you because I will not allow him to throw you out of this house with nowhere else to go.”

With that, he gets up from my bed and leaves my room.

• • •

The headaches finally subsided a few hours later after the talk Giovanni and I had this morning.

I didn’t go to school today. Giovanni didn’t want to take any chances with the headaches I’ve been having, so he brought me some painkillers and let me rest for most of the time.

But after a while of staying in my room, it started to become boring.

I also didn’t want to leave my room because I don’t want to risk running into their father, so I stayed put the entire morning. It was twelve pm now.

I had enough of the four walls already.

I inhale deeply, wanting to do something I haven’t thought about doing since Diablo mentioned my brother yesterday. Going home.

I grab my phone from the bedside table and decided to leave the mansion for a little while until things calm down.

I get out of the bed and leave my room.

The brothers were nowhere in sight, and so was their dad.

When I didn’t see anyone lingering in the living room, I ran to the front door, leaving the mansion without being spotted once.

I see Mikael standing by the front gate, smoking a cigarette.

He practically rolls his eyes when he sees me.

He exhales the smoke in my face and I cough, swatting the air in front of my face to get rid of the smoke.

Once I was over my coughing fit, I glare at him.

“I’m leaving for a while.” I tell him, beckoning for the guard behind him to open the gate.

The guard nods and presses a button to open the gate. It screeches open and I make my way toward it but Mikael stops me by grabbing me around the wrist pulling me to an abrupt halt.

“Do the brothers know that you’re leaving?” He asks, the cigarette dangling from his slightly parted lips.

“Yeah, they do.” I lie, before slipping past him after I pulled my wrist out of his grasp.

I leave the front gates and practically run away from the mansion.

I didn’t know my destination until I stood in front of my house.

The not-so-burnt-down house.

• • •

VITTORIO CASTIGLIONE

“My dad is out for the evening, so it’s safe to join us in the livi—”

I pause mid-sentence when I saw Scarlett’s unmade bed.

She wasn’t inside of it, or in the bathroom, or in any other room.

She was gone.

Shit.

“Giovanni!” I yell, loud enough for the entire mansion to hear. “Giovanni!”

I see him running up the staircase before he stops right beside me, staring into the empty room in front of us.

He scratches the skin behind his neck and mutters a string of curse words under his breath.

I sigh, shaking my head at him. “What did you say to upset her this time?”

“I didn’t say anything to her.” He defends. “We were on good terms when I left her room this morning.”

I wanted to sigh again, but I remembered the tracking device I had put in her phone right before I gave her new phone to her the other day.

“It’s a good damn thing that we had a tracker put inside her phone.” I tell him before fishing out my phone from my pocket.

I open the tracking app and see where the red dot was going, but both of our eyes widen simultaneously when we see where she’s heading.

This is not good. This is not good at all.

“Shit.” I mutter under my breath.

“We need to go.” Giovanni says. “Now.” He says before he turns on his heels and runs out of Scarlett’s room.

I follow close behind him.

He grabs his keys from the bowl on the fireplace and I follow him out of the house. We nearly bump into Mikael in the process.

“How could you let her leave, dammit!?” Giovanni shoves him, but not hard enough for him to fall to the ground, just hard enough for him to lose his balance.

“She told me that you approved!” Mikael says, smoothing down his shirt where Giovanni had shoved him moments ago.

“Maybe you should come to us first—”

I tug Giovanni’s arm. “We don’t have time, brother. We need to go.”

He shakes his head before he makes his way to his Maserati.

Once we were in the car and already on our way to the house, I see Giovanni’s hands clutching the steering wheel, so hard that his knuckles turned ghostly white.

“We shouldn’t have lied about the house, Giovanni. Now she’s going to think that we’re keeping her at the mansion. But it’s just a house anyways.” I add, trying to brighten the mood just a little bit.

“It’s not just a house, Vito.” Giovanni says, briefly glancing at me before his gaze drifts back to the road in front of him. “It was her home. She’s going to be pissed. She’s going to hate us all over again.”

Giovanni steps on the gas, letting the car speed up.

We drove in silence for another few minutes before Giovanni slams on the brakes just across Scarlett’s house. He slams his hands against the steering wheel, muttering something inaudible under his breath when he saw that her front door was open and her porch light was on, and so were the lights in the living room too.

She was here, after all.

Once Giovanni calmed himself down, the both of us get out of the car. He didn’t even bother to take the keys out of the ignition. He only took the gun out of the waistband of his pants and reloaded it.

He pauses when we hear a very familiar voice coming from inside the house.

“Get the hell off me!” Scarlett’s voice comes from inside the house.

Giovanni rushes to the front door before he enters first, holding his gun up and ready in case someone came at him with a gun too.

“Ahh!”

Her screaming was coming from the kitchen.

Giovanni didn’t even care about the police tape all over or the shards of glass lying on the hardwood floors as he stepped over it, the glass scrunching underneath his shoes.

Once we were in the kitchen, we saw someone grabbing Scarlett, trying to lift her up from the ground, but she was trying so hard to fight him off.

Giovanni didn’t hesitate when he shot the guy in the shoulder, careful not to shoot her anywhere trying to help her fight the guy off.

The guy screams out in pain and falls to the ground, clutching his bleeding shoulder, but it didn’t help because blood pooled through his fingers, dripping onto the floor right beside his injured arm.

I spot a white pistol tattoo on his upper arm.

It was one of them: The White Pistols.

“What happened?” Giovanni asks Scarlett, stepping over the guy who was lying on the floor with a bleeding shoulder.

“I don’t know… I… I came here trying to find answers but he cornered me and started to say things like ‘she can’t know the truth’ and all of that crap.” Scarlett says, wiping tiny blood droplets from her face.

Giovanni growls before turning around to crouch down beside the man lying on the floor. “What truth?”

The more the guy struggled to stop the bleeding, the more it spread on the hardwood floors, but he also didn’t answer Giovanni’s question.

“WHAT TRUTH?!” He yells, a lot louder this time, but the guy barely flinched.

“Leave him, Giovanni.” Scarlett says. “Let’s just go… I don’t want to be here anymore.” She says, tugging his arm.

His face softens and he finally stands back up again.

“He’s a White Pistol.” I tell Giovanni, jerking my head toward his pistol tattoo he had on his upper arm.

“Tell your boss that if any of you ever touch or come near her ever again, I’ll personally kill all of you.” Giovanni says before he kicks the guy in the face, making him black out instantly at the contact.

Once we were outside again, Scarlett turns to look at the both of us, but she was not happy at all. She was disappointed, just like we thought she would be for lying to her.

“You guys lied to me.” She whispers, wiping tears that ran down her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You made me believe that I was homeless and that I had to stay with you because I had nowhere else to go.”

“We had no choice—”

“Oh let me guess…” She cuts him off. “You wanted to protect me.”

“That’s all we ever wanted to do, Scarlett.” Giovanni says, stepping closer to her, but she takes a step back and another when she glares at him.

“Don’t come close to me.”