Dark Saint [Romano Brotherhood, #1]

49 | Nina

"They sent you in here, unarmed. You put yourself in extreme danger. That is fucking unacceptable. You can't—"

"I can," I interject, a little wildly. "Don't tell me I can't. You would have done the same damn thing. You wouldn't have sat back and waited if you could try to save me."

"Of course," he frowns. "I would give my life for you to have yours, Nina. It doesn't work the other way around. You don't get to risk your life to save mine. It's not fucking worth it. I need you to live."

I dig my fingers into his forearms, trying to retain my sanity. "It's completely unfair of you to expect that of me."

"I don't deserve to—"

"I get why you think of yourself like that, but it's not true. The only thing you're guilty of is having parents who shouldn't have been parents. That's not your fault."

His jaw pulses. "I don't know what you think you know—"

"I know everything," I say boldly, "and it hasn't changed a thing."

"Everything." He says the word incredulously. "I've done things that even my brothers don't know about, bad things to good people who didn't deserve it. You think I'm some sort of vigilante, that it's okay since at least what I do isn't the worst? At least we don't kidnap and sell children, right? There's always going to be someone worse. It's never going to make what I do okay."

We're coming at this conversation from two different angles, and I scramble to come up with a way to get my point across to him. 

"What if you had a son, and you treated him the same way your father treated you? Picture that. Now picture someone telling him that it's all his fault. Would they be right?"

His face is white as he takes in my words, and I can tell he's never thought of it this way. He's silent. 

"Would they?"

"No," he says through clenched teeth. 

"Exactly. You need to stop punishing yourself for the hand you were dealt. Your mother was sick. She didn't get the help she needed, and that's not your fault. Neither is your father being a literal psychopath."

"Regardless, I've made choices I didn't need to make," he chokes out. "I own my own fucking decisions."

"Even the ones that your father probably manipulated you into making when he was running Serpentine without your knowledge?"

His jaw clenches as he looks at me, clearly unmoved. "Even so. It's not like those things were that different from what I did before, Nina."

"And what you did before were the actions of someone who was forced to become a weapon in order to survive."

"Stop trying to make it better," he growls, clamping his hands around both my biceps to bring me closer. His eyes are two black holes. "It doesn't matter whose fault it is. The reality is still the same. I'm still the same person I was when I came into this world, and I won't change. I can't ask you to love that. I can never let you."

"Well, I could try to go find someone else," I muse, and he goes rigid. "You know, someone nice with a normal childhood. What do you think—maybe Russian? Irish? You Italians are so dramatic anywa—"

"You're Italian," he snaps. 

I shrug. "I've actually always been into guys whose moms didn't try to kill them when they were twelve."

"Do you think you're fucking funny?" 

I smirk at his tension-ridden face. "Kind of."

We're locked in a stalemate, me smiling and him glaring. He looks like he could kill me, which makes my insides bloom with warmth. This would be cause for concern if I wasn't me and he wasn't him.