“I don’t need your permission,” he said softly. “I can find a way. They’ll never even know, Robbie.”
Robert shook his head and released his brother’s hand. “You’ll never fool them or anyone else again, Silas. I’ll make sure of it.”
“And exactly how do you plan to do that? Kill me?”
“I’m leaving.” He’d spoken the words with pure determination. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it needed to be done. “I’m leaving, Silas. I informed Angelo Salerno before I made this trip, so there is nothing you can do to stop it. If you try to capture me again, throw me in a prison so that you can take my name and impersonate me, you will be killed. He knows that I plan to leave and he knows the exact date I’m leaving. No changing it.” Robert got in Silas’s face. “No more games,” he growled. “They are better off without you and me. I am letting them go, and so are you. Let go of this obsession, prove that you love them for once, and move on. You failed, it’s over. Let them be.”
Silas stared at him blankly. Robert didn’t speak either, nor did he regret his words. He didn’t particularly enjoy saying them, but they needed to be said.
Silas soon broke the silence. “Is that how you feel about me, Robbie, your own brother?” A pained expression flashed across his face as tears gathered in his eyes. “Seeing me is a betrayal. Loving me is a burden. You want me dead?”
Robert looked away from him. “Enough, Silas. Your tears will get you nowhere with me. Your crying is, and has always been, pointless. The answer is still no.”
“Pointless is my pain to my own brother? He does not care if he wounds me, rips my heart from my chest and tramples it under his feet. I am your family and you would treat me in such a manner?”
“I said enough, Silas!” Robert snapped. Slipping into insanity had always been Silas’s way, and Robert was sick of it. “I will no longer entertain your dramatics. If you continue this behavior, I’ll walk out that door and you’ll never see me again.”
“Then go,” he roared as his entire body began to shake with emotion. “Leave me like you did before, Robbie! Let me suffer, let me die alone. You go to
my
family now and be happy. Bed my wife, allow my daughter and son to call you their father, and forget about me. Forget about your blood, your brother. After all we’ve endured, you would hurt me like this again—”
Now pushed past his breaking point, Robert shot up from his seat. “
What about how you’ve hurt me?
” He had screamed the words in Silas’s face, rendering him speechless. A foreign emotion blanketed itself over Robert’s body, causing his voice to shake and heart to pound rapidly in his chest. “After everything we’ve been through! Being abducted when we were five years old, thrown into a house full of young boys where
we were raped by grown men until we bled
. Screaming and crying
in agony even though no one could hear us. No one could save us. Who did we have but each other? When Dmitry saved us from that wretched man, that cruel master, it was
you
that deserted
me
! You chose money, power, and lunacy over your own
flesh and blood
!
You betrayed me
.” Gripping Silas’s shirt, he jerked him forward until their foreheads touched. “You have done nothing but fill me with disappointment,
my brother, my blood
.”
Silas let out an enraged shout and slammed his fists against the wall. “
You disappoint me
!
My
brother.
My
blood!”
“This is it, Silas, I’m done. No more of this back and forth. This is the last time I will ever extend my hand for you to come with me, even though you do not deserve it. I will call you the day I leave and tell you where to meet me. If you do not show up this time, you are on your own.” He pointed his finger at Silas. “But
mark my words
. If you
ever
go back to New York in pursuit of
my daughter
, her mother, or her brother again … I will kill you, Silas. I don’t want to do it, but I will.
It is for my daughter that I would kill even my brother, whom I love.
”
“Well,” Silas shrugged, “why don’t we just test that promise, shall we?” Silas’s expression once again went blank, and his eyes went cold as he spat every word at Robert. “Let’s see if you can actually do it. I have a feeling that it is as easy for you to kill me as it is for me to kill you.”
“Don’t test me, Silas,” Robert warned.
“No worries, brother,” Silas smiled, “I would kill myself before I’d kill you. That is just how much I love you, how much I can’t live without you in this world with me, Robbie. You, Anastacia, Carterina, and Gabriel. The only four people I love in this world. The only four people that have ever loved me.”
“Carterina doesn’t know you, Silas.”
Silas chuckled. “She does. She wishes she didn’t, but she does. My little girl will reach out to me, you mark my words. I threw in a curve ball, and I’m expecting a call from her any day now.”
Robert let out a deadly growl. “Stay the fuck away from my daughter. I’m not warning you again.”
“Be real, Robbie. You have nothing to do with her existence. You can’t produce children, remember? Carterina is
my
daughter, and she’s Anastacia’s daughter; she is not yours.”
~*~
Present time . . .
The words, although true, had hurt Robert. After they were said Robert had left his brother, boarded the first flight home, and went straight to his daughter’s home, if only to assure himself that if no one else in this world belonged to him, she was still his. His fears and insecurities were put to rest when she saw him and called him daddy. Just daddy. A name she didn’t call Silas. A name she didn’t call anyone else but him. He was daddy, he was the man that raised her, loved her, and she was his greatest accomplishment, his greatest joy. His daughter, his baby girl.
He’d do anything to protect her, even if that meant limiting their communication to brief, infrequent phone calls.
“I’m leaving, Anastacia.”
A frown of confusion instantly fell over her pretty face. “Well, where are you going? When will you be back?”
Robert hesitated, finding the words difficult to say. Leaning forward, he sat his coffee on the table in front of them, then turned to face her.
“Anne, I’m not coming back. I’m leaving for good.”
She immediately began shaking her head and put her coffee down. “No. No you’re not. You’re home now, you’re alive, we’re happy, aren’t you happy? We have our baby girl, my son is with us now, and we have grandchildren. This is what we wanted. We are a family.”
“Anne, I always planned to leave after I reunited you with your children, I never meant to stay with you.” The confession was hard, but a long time in coming. Robert didn’t want her to hate him, so he explained. “Silas enjoys using our resemblance to manipulate. We’ve both been doing it since childhood. I mean to prevent him from doing this to you and your children ever again. This is for your protection. I trust that the City is being watched closely, but Silas has less of a chance to use his trickery to infiltrate your lives if I am gone. I’m doing this for you, for our baby girl, and for your son. I am doing this for my grandchildren, whom I do love very, very much. Please understand this love. I need you. This won’t be easy to explain to our daughter, I need you by side. Please.”
The moment he stopped speaking, Anastacia’s expression tightened and tears gathered in her eyes. Robert clenched his jaw tight, fighting to remain strong, fighting not to give in. It had never been easy for him to see Anastacia cry. She was a woman of hard exterior; she detested emotion, hated weakness. So in the rare times when she fell into depression, into sadness, it was a real indicator that something had truly devastated her, had hurt her greatly.
Robert held her in his arms, whispering soft apologies in her ear.
“Stop,” she whispered. Her tears slowly made their trek down her cheeks, but she quickly wiped them from her eyes. “No apologizing, Robert. Just stay.”
“I can’t, Anastacia.”
“But you just got back!” She cupped his face. “Is it Silas? Did he say something?”
Robert sighed sadly. “This is not about Silas. This about doing what I must to keep him away. Come here.” She climbed into his lap and rested her head on his shoulder. “I need to do this for you, for the twins … and for me. While I travel, I’m going to try and locate where Silas and I came from. I want to know about our lives before we were taken, our family, maybe even our real names. This is something I’ve always wanted to do but never got a chance to, being a single father and all.”
Anastacia nodded and dried her eyes. “I understand. You deserve this journey. You deserve to know where you came from. I would never want to hold you back from that, and neither would our daughter.” She placed a gentle hand on his face. “I just want you to know how much I love you.”
“Shh,” he kissed her lips, “I love
you
. I love you, too.”
He only did it because he had to. He had to feel it, he had to remember how it felt before he left. He kissed her. His mouth tentatively sought hers and she met him halfway. He followed her movements with his mouth and soon became lost in the passion of their kiss. This was love for him, this was making love, and it was everything he needed.
Chapter 22: Father & Daughter. . .
It had taken forever, but Nathan had finally fallen to sleep after they’d made love. Carter had been waiting patiently, fighting her own fatigue so that she could sneak out of bed after he was out. Carefully she tried to slip from under his arm, but paused when he began to stir, tightening his hold around her.
“Where are you going?” he mumbled, his deep voice vibrating against her ear.
“I need to pump. I’m getting a little full,” she whispered, hoping he’d let her go before he fell back asleep. If he’d already fallen back to sleep, she was pretty much stuck.
When his hold loosened, Carter released a relieved sigh. Slowly she slipped from the bed and tiptoed to the bathroom.
“Hurry back, baby. You know I don’t sleep well without you.”
“Ten minutes, honey, that’s all,” she assured as she closed the bathroom door behind her.
When she entered the bathroom, she went straight for the drawer where she kept them. Opening it, she pulled out all eight of the letter’s Silas had sent her since the night she gave birth to the babies. Every week since that night, a letter had arrived at S.O. from Silas to Carter. Luckily Aniyah was there to intercept the letters and give them directly to her. She didn’t want to worry Daddy Angelo or Nathan with letters, nor did she want them to know that sometimes … she anticipated reading them.
She hated that she did, but it was the truth. In the letters Silas talked about their times together. He talked about the good times he had with Gabriel, and with her mother. He even talked about his dreams and how he wished things could have been for them, for their family. Silas’s view of the world—of life—fascinated Carter. There were times when she’d stare at the phone, hoping that Aniyah would call and tell her another letter had been sent. It was all very … pathetic of her.
Yes, pathetic. Carter felt like a pathetic, naïve kid, especially now. She’d been trying to listen to her mother and Gabriel about Silas’s manipulations, but it had been hard. She’d been so confused because the Silas everyone told her about, the Silas that she’d encountered on more than one occasion, wasn’t the Silas that wrote those letters. The letters were gentle, kind, and loving. They were the words of a father to his daughter. But they were fake. Nothing about the letters were real. They just couldn’t be.
Silas’s world was a fantasy world, and Carter had fallen so easily into it. She shouldn’t have, but she did. It was beautiful in Silas’s world. There were no worries, no cares, and no enemies … well, not until reality hit that was. His fantasy
world of dreams
only existed until it was obliterated by the true man himself: Silas. He had done Carter a favor by threatening her husband today. He had pulled her back into reality. He reminded her that he wasn’t her father. He was the man that hurt her mother and brother, he was the man that took her father for six years, he was the man that sold human beings for money, and worst of all, he was the man that had killed her bubby’s mother.
Carter stared at the number on the bottom of the most recent note Silas had sent her. She reached up, retrieved her cell from the counter, and dialed the number before she could psych herself out.
It only took three rings. “This is Silas.”
Carter paused, suddenly forgetting what she needed to say.
“Whoever this is, you have five seconds to say something or this call is over.” He’d said the words with a huge amount of outrage, as if he were meaning to make the caller feel low for wasting his precious time.
After another moment of hesitation, Carter spoke. “Hi, Silas.” She kept her voice steady and strong. She would show this man no weakness. He wasn’t her family; he was the enemy.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Carterina Salerno. Robert’s daughter.” She made sure to separate herself from him immediately. She wanted to let him know from the start that she was not calling to accept him as her father. She already had a father, and she loved him dearly. She didn’t need another one.