Sun of My Life

Chapter Five

Adrien

Don't you remember how it felt when you were his age?

At his age, I was training, working, fighting, and learning to be the next Capo leader of the Cartel. At his age, I didn't have someone to defend me, and if my mother dared to speak, he'd force her to their room for the rest of the day.

At his age, I was beaten down to a bloody pulp by my father's trainers so I could learn how to defend myself from future attacks. At his age, I would have fucking loved to run around, kicking a soccer ball around a wet grassy field, and drink lemonade with my mother.

At his age, I hated my father.

Another drink. Pour. Drink. It didn't help. My brain was clouded with anger, with hot anger, and it wasn't even directed at anyone specific. I was furious, and someone needed to pay, to die, to anything. I don't even know why I yelled at her.

She wasn't even doing anything wrong. She was playing some marble board game with him, and my son looked content. She was being a mother, a friend, someone he needed because I didn't know how to be that someone.

I wanted to. I wanted to sit with him, talk to him, and tell him that I hated myself. That I hated his grandfather for what he put me through, for what I'm putting him through, but every time I opened my mouth, a reprimand came out instead.

I downed another drink, the glass cup coming down with a rather loud thud on my desk, and I rubbed my face harshly. I couldn't get the image of her crying out of my goddamn head. Why do I care if she cried? Obviously, for some weird fucking reason, I did care.

All I remember is those emerald eyes brimming with tears, her chin trembling, her bottom lip turning, and that lonely tear that betrayed her confidence as he slipped down her cheek. I hadn't seen her since I dropped her off after our wedding ceremony, and what did I do the first time I saw her?

I shout at her. I make her cry. I hurt her, and the way she looked up at me in shock as if asking herself, what did I do? Nothing. You didn't do anything. I'm fucked in the head. So fucking fucked in the head. What was wrong with me?

Did she have such a supernatural effect on me that I became a pendejo around her? A yelling and shouting pendejo who didn't know how to take care of his son, so he took it out on his wife instead.

At ten years old, Chiara was kidnapped and stabbed to almost death. The thought that someone did that to her, to a child the same age as my son, had me livid and shaking.

I wondered if the people that killed her were still alive. A part of me wanted to find them if they weren't and kill them myself.

She experienced hell, death even, and yet she tried her hardest to be brave and strong so she could defend Antonio.

This woman didn't need to go out of her way and indulge my son or even speak to him, yet she did, and she did it without a care in the fucking world.

Seeing her with Antonio made my heart twist and turn inside me. It was a feeling I'd never felt before in my entire life.

Business, Adrien, she's a business deal.

I shook that demeaning thought away. She's also a human being. A person. A person that was living under my roof, in my house, with my last name and my ring on her finger.

Which made her mine in every aspect and in every way. Business deal or not, Chiara Bernardi belonged to me.

****

While Daniel checked on the legal aspect of my business, I dealt with the illegal part, the hands in the dirt part. Not because I had to, but because I could.