He spoke as if he wasn’t in the room with her. A wall surrounded him, reminding her of a pod who spoke human and acted human but owned no soul. “I told you from the beginning I wasn’t good at this. I think spending so much time together, and being married, blurred the lines. I don’t think you’re in love with me, Julietta. If we take a step back and concentrate on why we did this in the first place, we can go back to the way things were. I can’t risk Purity because of emotions that aren’t even real.”

Her temper snapped. She closed the distance, moved past the wall, and made bodily contact. He jerked as she grabbed his biceps and dug her fingernails into his jacket.

“Don’t you dare patronize me about my own emotions,”

she hissed. “Do you think I throw words like that around? I love you. It’s not going away, and it’s not neat and tidy. Now, cut the bullshit and tell me what happened. Did something from the past come up?” She paused. “or someone?”

The surprised gleam in his eye confirmed her suspicions.

“exactly what I thought. If it was that bastard who put those marks on you, I’ll kill him myself. What happened? Did he or she dredge up the past? remind you of all the reasons you don’t deserve to be happy?”

She struck a nerve. rage and grief battled for domi-nance, and he grabbed her arms, shaking her slightly. “Why are you doing this? I’m not good for you, never was. Don’t ruin this between us. Let’s step back, get our footing, and try to focus on why we did this in the first place. To settle a debt. To make your mama happy. To solidify La Dolce Famiglia.”

“Fuck that,” she growled. He was in front of her but hovered on the edge of nothingness. Julietta was afraid if she let him slip over, she’d never get him back. “I don’t care about work or La Dolce Famiglia or anything I once believed in. right now, all I want is you. Now tell me the truth.”

“My foster father contacted me. From prison.”

The words were ripped out of his mouth in a snarl. He let go of her and stepped back, as if he couldn’t stand the thought of touching her. He shook his head and rubbed his forehead. “Tell me,” she said softly. “I deserve to know, don’t you think?”

“The bastard’s up for parole, and he wants me to write a recommendation on his behalf. If I don’t, he said he’d leak out to the press what happened, who I once was.”

The air pulsed with electricity as if a tornado hovered, ready to strike. In the quiet of the center of the storm, she took a deep breath. “And who were you?”

“I lost my parents when I was nine. Went into the sys-tem. Got picked up by him and his alcoholic wife. They liked to take the older ones since no one wanted them. Always had a few kids going in and out, but I became his favorite.

He liked to beat the pride out of me, as he used to say. I learned early not to tell, or the others got hurt. It’s funny when you hear stories like that: The first reaction from people is always the same. Just tell the social worker. But a lot of them aren’t like in the movies, where they want to help.

Many of them just need to get their placements done and turn a blind eye to a bruise now and then.

“Anyway, there was a little boy named Danny. Looked up to me. As I grew older, Dickhead liked to use the younger ones as bait. you know, if I didn’t do what he asked, he’d beat the shit out of them instead of me. I could take being beaten, but they couldn’t. I counted the days till I was eighteen and legally free. By that time, I’d promised Danny I’d take him away. But I needed to get myself fixed up with a job and a place first. I told him to wait for me.”

An agony of grief poured through her, but she kept her tone even. “Is that when you found Jerry?”

“No. There’s no job for an eighteen-year-old with no di-ploma and no money. The shelters were almost worse than the foster home. Almost. I started to learn the rules of the street. Found places to sleep, people to steal from, restaurants to haunt. I learned the gangs who ruled and how to survive. But Danny was getting restless, and he didn’t want to wait any longer. I stopped checking in with him as much, and I think he thought I’d abandoned him.”

A shattering silence fell over the room. “What happened?”

“He came looking for me. Packed his shit and snuck out at night. But he didn’t know where to find me. Gossip came from the street that there was a young boy who tried stealing food from a rival gang. They beat him to a pulp. He didn’t survive. I found out it was Danny.”

Julietta closed her eyes, fighting the nausea that ripped at her stomach. “Did your foster father get blamed?”

“Nah. He told the worker Danny ran away and that I sicced the gang on him. They found me and brought me in for questioning. I saw it in their faces, the knowledge that I’d killed him by not keeping my word. I promised I’d get him out, keep him safe. Instead, I killed him.”

The woman who loved him wanted to cry and rage and comfort. But he was past that and spiraling down a pit of blame he’d been nurturing since his foster father planted the idea in his head. She snapped her voice like a whiplash.

“And how is that your fault, Sawyer? Did you beat him up?

Did you deliver him to the gang who killed him?”

“No. But if I had gotten him a message beforehand, he would’ve waited.”

“Bullshit. His father was beating him daily. He would’ve tried to run away before he did, and I don’t think any message of yours would have stopped him. He’d had enough, and he ran into the wrong crowd, and he got killed. But you didn’t kill him.” He stared as if surprised she was still there.

“How did you get your scar?”

He rubbed his cheek. A small smile touched his lips. “I went after the gang. It was me against six, but I managed to put three in the hospital. They knifed me. It never healed right.” The energy seeped out of him, bone by bone, and all she glimpsed was a man who had surrendered his hope.

“The next two years were a blur until I finally found my way to Jerry. There was a little girl, Molly, who I also tried to help. She ended up hooking on the streets rather than live with him. ended up dead of an overdose before I could get to her. you know the rest.”

“And your foster father? How did he finally go to jail?”

“I finally went after him. All those years, he’d poisoned me to believe no one would think I told the truth. I was worried about the others. After Danny and Molly, nothing mattered. I just knew I couldn’t let him hurt any more kids.

one social worker listened to me. I exposed the truth and testified in court. of course, it was too late for the ones he had already ruined, but at least they locked him up for a long time.”

Julietta gathered all her strength and walked over. Tilted her head to gaze up at him. His beautiful face looked down at her in puzzlement, not understanding why she wasn’t leaving him or cringing in disgust. She didn’t know if he’d ever heal his wounded soul, but she refused to walk until she knew this man couldn’t give her the love he held tightly under wraps in the mistaken impression he’d hurt someone he cared about.

She traced the line of the scar with tenderness.

“This scar reminds me of your bravery. That you’re a man who protects the people who belong to him. A man who will fight for what he believes in and what is right, even against the odds. This is a man who deserves everything.

Happiness. A home. Me. Wolfe. A family. That’s what I want with you, Sawyer Wells. your broken past means nothing to me; it only reminds me of what you’ve become in spite of everything that tried to rip you down. you’re not getting rid of me. Until you can look me in the eye and tell me I mean nothing to you, I’m fighting for both of us.” She raised herself on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his lips. “I want you to come to Mama’s tonight. My family’s leaving soon, and it’s a good-bye dinner. They all want you there because you’re a part of us now.

“I love you. Deal with it.”

She left him with her words echoing in the air.

…

He wasn’t coming.

Julietta stared at the door with a sinking heart. Wolfe stretched out next to her, stroking Dante’s back as the cat purred madly. The kids sat in a circle playing with a puzzle, the twins rolling and giggling while Lily played the little mother and kept them in line. Alexa was in the kitchen with Mama helping to clean up, and Maggie and Michael had escaped for a walk. The house had been full of cousins and uncles and relatives. Now, the last of the guests trickled out, leaving an exhausted clean-up crew and a quiet vibration through the villa.

Julietta refused to accept defeat. She’d spent her whole life hiding from anything messy or real. It was finally time to fight for her future, but Sawyer might not be ready. The first test had failed. The path ahead might be a losing battle, but she wasn’t going to step neatly aside and let the man she loved isolate himself because he was afraid he had no emotions left to give.

Screw that.

Wolfe watched her face with a deep worry she ached to soothe. each step Sawyer took away from them, the boy suffered. They’d formed a bond within this short time pe-riod, and she sensed Wolfe’s constant premonition that anything good would eventually be destroyed. Julietta swore if Sawyer walked away from them, she’d never let Wolfe go.

She’d cling to him like a fierce mama bear and spend the rest of her days proving her devotion.

Max took a seat next to her. “I haven’t seen Sawyer since our night out. Working round the clock?”

Julietta slid a glance over to Wolfe and pasted on a bright smile. “yeah, the opening for Purity is coming close.

We’re all putting in extra hours to make sure we don’t miss the deadline.”

Wolfe paused midstroke. His gaze assessed her face as if he knew there was a deeper problem. Dante sensed something amiss and pushed his head into the boy’s palm, bump-ing his attention back to the task at hand. Wolfe looked down at the demanding cat and gave a half smile. “Pain in the ass,” he muttered under his breath. “Want some milk?”

Dante jumped down in perfect understanding and stalked toward the kitchen, not bothering to look back to confirm Wolfe followed. She watched the boy disappear and turned toward her brother-in-law. “Something’s wrong, Max. Do you know anything about his past?”

Max shook his head. “No, it’s obviously a closed subject.

I never pried.”

Julietta struggled between needing help and not wanting to disrespect her husband’s privacy. “There’s someone who’s come back from his childhood. It’s dredged up a mess of memories, and he’s distancing himself from us.”

“Do you think he just needs some time to process?”

She clenched her fists. “Maybe. But my gut says the more space I give him, the more he’ll slip away from us.

This person is trying to blackmail him.”

“Bad stuff?”

“yeah. Nothing that he did wrong, though. But he doesn’t believe that.”

“Sawyer doesn’t take crap from anyone. He’d never buckle from a threat. I’ll visit him tomorrow.”