Accardi (Genevieve and Matteo) by Allison Franklin novel Chapter 120

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

“Genevieve, you need to breathe,” Matteo said somewhere in the distance. “Weakness, look at me.”

She couldn’t. She kept rereading the wanted poster with her name on it. Her eyes became fixed on the photos they’d used. They were the mugshots from the last time she’d been taken in for assault, the one in which she stupidly hit the cop arresting her and she’d spent several nights in jail: her stepmother’s idea to try to get her to see the consequences of her actions. Cruel? Maybe. Effective? Most definitely. In the photos her eyes were bloodshot, her right ring finger was purple and swollen as she’d forgotten to take it off amid the chaos of her arrest and her clothes were ripped and muddy.

Matteo snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, yanking her back to the present. Her gaze flicked up and he balked at the expression of fear he saw there.

Gen stood up sharply and Matteo stumbled a step back to keep from falling on his ass.

“What is this? Are these real?” Gen asked, unsure what to even say.

“Yes, they’re…”

“I can’t believe this!” she shrieked. “Murder?! Murder, Matteo?! I can defend the others but that one?” Tears burned at the back of her eyes. She was a

murderer. She’d murdered Marco. There was no defense. There was no denial. She’d blackened her soul in the name of vengeance and the devil saw fit to

come and claim what was his. “How did they know?! Is there another mole?”

“They aren’t charging you for Marco’s death, Gen,” Matteo whispered, trying to take her hand.

She ripped it out of his grasp. “If not Marco then who? Who would they…” She gasped.

“Noah is pinning Becca’s murder on you, Weakness,” Matteo confirmed quietly.

“She was my friend!”

“I know.”

“This is…” She picked up the other papers and started to read through them more carefully. Each page flew from her hands and sailed down to the ground

with a violent thwick. “This is bullshit! I can’t believe… I didn’t… I knew… I can’t believe I thought I was untouchable!” She turned away, her disbelief

turning her words to acid the moment they left her lips.

“You are untouchable,” Matteo growled behind her, defiant and steadfast.

She spun back around and stared at him with wide, manic eyes. She walked back toward him, brandishing her wanted poster in the air with dramatic flare. “This…” Gen said waving the page in his face. “This is not untouchable, Matteo. This is very much… touchable!!” she yelled.

Matteo ripped the paper from her grasp and flung it behind him. “Breathe, Gen.”

“I’m fucking breathing! This is…” She tried to take in air but something had sucked the oxygen out of the area she stood. She glanced around at the beautiful scene in which she was supposed to get married. What if the FBI showed up tomorrow? What if they took her before she could finish her vows? “This is…” She put a hand to her stomach to try to calm down. Then the thought hit her. “The baby.” Gen looked around desperately, the urge to flee making her legs tingle. “I can’t…” She gripped Matteo’s forearms in a vice. “Matteo, we can’t have our baby in prison! They’ll take it away from us! We have to leave! We have to run! We have to…”

“Sit down,” Matteo said, his voice clipped and demanding like how he would speak to one of his men. He grabbed her by the upper arm and shoved her downward. “You’ve had your moment of understandable panic, now it’s time for you to sit the fuck down and let me tell you how I plan to fix this.” Again, Matteo dropped to one knee. He clasped his hands around her face and forced her to look at him. “I need to see you breathe.” She inhaled sharply. “Good. Again.” The next breath came easier, as it did the one after.

1/4

3:52 pm M

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

“Matteo… What are we going to do?” she asked, reaching up to place her hands over his.

His thumbs wiped away the tears from her cheeks that she didn’t realize had fallen. “I have a plan.”

“Okay… what is it?”

“I’m going to turn myself in.”

“What?!” Gen said, shoving him back so she could stand up again. Matteo grunted as he fell back onto his ass. “Are you fucking stupid!?”

“Sit down, Gen,” Matteo ordered, his voice as deadly as his glare.

“No, dammit! I am about to be your wife! You cannot command me like I’m fucking Frankie or Leo. If I want to stand, I’ll stand! Especially cause it looks like

I might not have that much more free will once I…”

Matteo finally stood to his full height and clapped a hand over her mouth. His other arm wrapped around her back, pulling her flush against him, completely silencing and immobilizing her in one fluid motion. She wiggled and squirmed but her panicked movements were no match for his determined strength.

“They can’t get to us while we’re in Italy. That’s one reason why I brought you here.”

Gen’s eyes narrowed as she yelled a muffled, “I thought we were here to get married!”

“I can’t understand you, Weakness. Shut the hell up and let me talk and then you’ll get your chance. I’ll turn myself over in exchange for letting you,

Frankie, Leo and Louis walk. I’m a big player. They don’t really care about you all. They just want to force my hand. They want me. If I give myself to them,

I can keep you safe.” Matteo’s hand around her back loosened and slid to her front. “Both of you,” he whispered. He hesitantly removed his hand from her

mouth.

“You turn yourself in and then what? Rot away for decades while I raise our baby alone?” she asked, her voice lower but her rage only just starting to

simmer.

“I need information from someone on the inside. I get it and get out.”

“Simple as that,” Gen mocked with feigned excitement and a twirl of her hand.

His eyes narrowed further. “I have judges in my pocket, senators, politicians high enough in the system to write me a pardon once I get what I need.”

Gen could feel her eyes widen at the revelation of the power he wielded. “Why not ask them for a favor now, get all of us acquitted, arrange a visit with this

person on the inside and call it a day?”

He sighed, “I can call in the favors but it takes time. The man I need to speak with won’t give in easily either. It’ll take a few days to get him to trust me enough to talk. Plus I’ll need for Michele and Bennett to think they’ve won if the next phase of my plan is to work.”

“Next phase?” she asked, crossing her arms. Talking was helping quiet her fears.

He took her hand. “Frankie, Leo and Louis will stay back to help you take over.”

“Take… over…” she repeated, not fully comprehending.

Matteo smirked down at the hand he was playing with and the large ring she wore. “Tomorrow, if you’ll still have me, when we get married you’ll become my Donna. When I turn myself in, you’ll take over the business and I’ll need your help to make sure it all goes smoothly.”

3:52 pm M

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

“How? What will you need me to do? Do I need to write it down?”

Matteo gave her that same puzzling look he’d given her during moments when she seemed to take him by surprise. He tentatively reached a hand out to run his fingers down her upper arm. She took a step into him and he brushed his knuckles over her cheek before he kissed her.

“Why are you not telling me you want to be as far away from me as physically possible, Weakness?” he asked against her lips.

She scoffed, a very unladylike sound. She raised a brow up at him. “Do you not remember what you told me in that dinghy supply closet where you specifically warned me about the FBI?” she asked.

He groaned low and stepped impossibly closer. “I remember that kiss. I remember feeling proud when I saw Paul’s eyes widen at how you looked like you’d just been fucked. I remember wanting to claim you right there on the table in front of him and your dad.”

She rolled her eyes but blushed nonetheless and he smiled, knowing he was cracking through her fear–induced armor. “You have given me every chance to walk away from you. I am under no illusions as to who you are or what you do. You warned me before I climbed into that bed. I chose this life, Matteo. I chose you…” She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I just didn’t think…”

“I know… I’m sorry.”

“I did it,” she whispered, looking down at the ground. “I killed someone. Whether he deserved it or not it still eats away at me at times. I took someone from this Earth, Matteo. And I thought I could get away with it?” She shook her head. “When?” she asked.

“When?”

“When will you enact this plan?” she asked, sitting down in the nearest chair with a weighted sigh of defeat. She looked up after a moment of silence. His

hands were shoved deep in his pockets and he was switching his weight from one foot to the other. “Matteo.”

“The day after tomorrow.”

Gen stared up at him. “You mean the day after we get married?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?” Her voice was low, dangerous, a warning.

“Weakness…”

“You’re marrying me, making me your Donna, consummating our marriage, if I fucking let you at this point, and leaving me the next fucking day?”

“There are a lot of moving parts. The longer we wait, the more damage can be done to your reputation. Your accounting firm will be ransacked, Gen. Charlotte’s name will be dragged into it, you could lose…”

“I could lose you!” she screamed.

Matteo grabbed her roughly by the upper arm. “Look, here, woman, I have one fucking objective in my life and that is to keep my family safe. My family. That’s you and the life we’ve created. That’s it. That’s all I’m fucking responsible for. I dropped the ball once and it cost me everything. Everything! If you think I am willing to take that risk again. If you think you have any actual say in me laying my life down for you and our baby, let me set the record straight now.” He hauled her closer. “There’s you and there’s this,” he growled, his palm flattening over her stomach. “If I have to stand in front of a firing squad to make sure you have air to breathe, I’ll do it.” He loosened his grip slightly. “That’s not going to happen. I’ll be gone a week, tops. I have it under control. You just have to trust me and listen to the guys. Can you do that?”

Gen stared up into his defiant eyes. They seemed nearly black, echoing the dark sky around them. He was daring her to say no. He was terrified she would

3/4

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

say no.

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she asked, a stray tear escaping, a result of the frustration she felt bone–deep.

“You deserved a few perfect days,” he whispered, his voice low, desperate.

“Why not wait til after the wedding then?”

“I could not, with a clear conscience, stand in front of you tomorrow vowing honesty before God while holding this truth from you.”

“Five days.”

“What?”

“You’ll give me five days before you leave,” she decided with a nod.

He smirked and shook his head. “Things will move quickly, Gen, I’ll need…”

“I will take no less than four. That’ll give us time to negotiate with Bennett because you sure as fuck are not just going to hop across the pond and hope for the best. We’ll get it in writing. We’ll have it negotiated by top lawyers. I’m assuming Alessio has a few we can use?” Matteo stared at her open–mouthed. After a moment he nodded. “Good. We can negotiate and work out a plan that we can both be satisfied with. I can know it frontwards and backwards before you leave so there’s nothing left to chance. I’ll talk with Charlotte so she knows what is coming. She can prep. Her husband’s a lawyer, too, so he can help us with our business side of things if it comes to that. We can call in some of your other guys too so they can…”

Matteo’s mouth sealed over hers, stopping her tangent. His hands tangled in her hair as his mouth conveyed what his words could not. He backed her into a table and she placed a palm against it to keep him from laying her down over it as their lips connected, their teeth scraped and their tongues battled. He pulled back and pressed his forehead against hers while they both caught their breath.

“It’s late… We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow. I had Alessio set up a room for me in another wing of the house. I know it’s tradition that…”

Gen fisted his shirt in her hands and hauled him down for another kiss. When she finally let him up for air she admired how bruised his lips looked. She kissed him softly once again, keeping a tight hold of him so he couldn’t pull away. She shook her head. “If you want to wait to finish this conversation later, that’s fine. But if you think I’m letting you sleep anywhere but beside me tonight, you’re sorely mistaken, Matteo Accardi.”

3:52 pm M

Accardi