Wicked Fame: A mafia stalker romance (Wicked Men Book 2)
Wicked Fame: Chapter 23

Days blur into darkness, the beep of machines, then medicine, followed by an endless stretch of pain.

Between those, there are other images. Mom crying her eyes out, blubbering as she holds my hand in my hospital room.

Ethan and Ella both act way more emotionally than they usually do as they break down in front of me the moment I regain my consciousness after the surgery.

Ethan’s was the first face I saw when the anesthetics wore off. It made me feel calmer to know he was here for me because Ethan is the most responsible person I know. Yet part of me wished for a different set of dark eyes to sparkle at the sight of me. My heart squeezed at the memory of our last time together.

“Francesca, thank you for coming back to us,” Ethan said, quaking. He must have been worried sick.

My desperation must have silently urged him, because he added, “I’ll tell Gabriele you woke up. But no power in the world will change my mind about not letting him see you.”

“It’s not his fault,” I croaked, clinging to Ethan’s hand. “Don’t blame him.”

“You’re lucky the bullet didn’t hit close to your heart and penetrate too deep.” He patted my head gently. “Otherwise you’d be dead.”

“I survived, didn’t I?” I retorted.

Ethan wasn’t impressed. I doubt he and Gabriele will ever talk to each other again without him threatening legal action. That’s a shame. They’re both similar in many ways.

Elliot visited me every day once I was moved out of intensive care into my own private room. He even brought me flowers and chocolates I wasn’t allowed to eat since I was still being fed through a tube. He nibbled on them one by one while I watched.

“Mmmm, hazelnut praline is the best. Too bad you can’t taste it.”

Despite my situation, I coughed out a laugh. Elliot’s such an asshole but he’s the best at cheering me up.

I need all the cheer I can get right now.

“Your life has been eventful lately,” he says today, arranging the bouquet of sunflowers and daisies in a vase. I have no idea where he gets these from but they look luxe. “But honestly, Francesca, stop giving me a heart attack so often. I’m only twenty-seven and I need to marry the woman of my dreams before I shuffle off the mortal coil.”

“Who is the woman of your dreams?” I tease.

“Someone who’ll never look at me.” There’s a hopeless edge to his statement. Longing—and defeat—are imprinted inside his blue irises which are the same color as mine. Elliot’s so surface-level most of the time, seeing him be angsty is like seeing a snowstorm in the middle of a desert.

Spiteful as it sounds, his despair soothes my broken heart more than kind words could. I’m not the only one who feels like shit. I’m not the only one who can’t get the person I love to choose me. I feel less lonely, less like a failure, and less wrong when Elliot’s here because he’s like me.

Not seeing Gabriele for days has been brutal for my anxiety. Ethan deleted his number from my phone. Said it was a request from Gabriele himself. But I suspect he couldn’t stand to see me pining over the man he believes is a crook. He’s high-handed as ever.

“Elliot, you used to do drugs before, right?” I broach the subject as casually as I can. Ever since I woke up, I’ve been thinking about how much I’ve neglected my health.

When I was on the cusp of death, I realized I was terrified of dying. I imagined how my death could have occurred differently—with booze and pills. I couldn’t scrub away Gabriele’s mournful expression as he talked about his mother.

Terror saturated my blood. I felt the desire well up deep inside me—the desire to change.

I’ve been toying with the idea of going to rehab. I mean, I’m going to need to spend weeks in bed recovering from this gunshot wound. My career will have to be put on hold anyway. What’s a few more weeks?

I’ll never stop being an artist or wanting to be recognized but maybe I can take it slow.

I’m going to come out and tell my family about my issues, though. Their help will be vital to my long-term recovery. However, the prospect of being judged by them is more daunting than losing weeks or even months of my career to rehabilitation.

“Once or twice,” my brother confesses, with no trace of emotion. “But I haven’t touched anything for years now.”

I swallow, debating about spilling all the dark details. Ethan still doesn’t know about my substance issues. Ella is truly a loyal friend. Between my brothers, Elliot is less likely to judge me for it, so I blurt it out before courage deserts me. “How did you quit?”

“I lost interest. It wasn’t fun anymore.”

I blink, a mixture of shock and self-hate cascading down my spine. “Everything in life is just easy for you, isn’t it?”

“Not everything, Francesca.” There’s a meaningful pause at the end of that sentence. His expression warps into suspicion. “Why do you ask? Are you planning to give me another heart attack by doing drugs while you’re in the hospital? You could become addicted, Francesca.”

“I already am,” I yell. The tears I’ve been holding back all these days so I don’t worry my family erupts from my eyes, twin waterfalls. “Elliot, I’m already an addict.”

“What are you saying?” Confusion colors his face. “Are you confused? How many fingers?”

He holds up two fingers in front of my face. I tell him where he can stick them. “I’m completely sane.”

“Since when?”

My story starts with months of colorlessness, with a single visit to a seedy club in Manhattan, meeting a red-haired man with a slimy smile who offered me a way out of my shackles. It ends with falling in love with a criminal who forced me to confront the pain I was causing myself, and who made me realize I was greater than my demons.

I don’t leave out a single detail as I bare it all to Elliot. He’s the third person I’m telling after Ella, but the second who knows the true depth of my suffering.

“I had no idea,” Elliot whispers. “You always seemed passionate about art. So happy to be an artist. I’m sorry I never looked deeper beyond your mask.”

I shake my head. “Don’t get me wrong, I did have fun. Or maybe I desperately tried to have fun because the only other option was to sink into the abyss. I was always reaching for thrills, for love, for pleasure, for something good because my mind was full of unhappiness and self-hate. But forcing myself to replace happiness only increased my awareness of my misery. The harder I tried, the more obvious it became why I was trying.”

A sharp burst of pain tickles my bandaged wound. It exerts pressure on my muscles to talk so much. Moving around hurts. They stitched up my chest but even with painkillers, the agony is ceaseless.

A loud, regretful sigh from my brother silences that pain momentarily.

Elliot’s forehead is marred by lines. He dumps his hands into his pockets.

“Francesca, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I was afraid you’d judge me. I thought I’d stop once I got my creative inspiration back. But I’m afraid my elusive muse will never return to me. I’m going to have to push through self-doubt and anxiety for as long as I paint.” My long, greedy fingers curl and uncurl in my lap, the familiar wave of anxiety rising in my chest. “I don’t think I want to paint anymore. I realized this as I was dying that I want to be happy more than anything. Success or fame doesn’t mean anything when you’re always scared. I just want to get out of the darkness. But I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if the darkness is something that surrounds me…” I hiccup, the searing pain of the sudden muscle movement tearing my chest apart. “…of if it is me.”

Elliot’s chest balloons as he inhales. The muted sounds from outside the room’s window envelop us. My brother who always has a dry quip for everything is struggling to speak. Never thought I’d live to see this day.

Everything is obvious to me now. My mind is clear. Worst-case scenarios are still curling at the edges of my consciousness, but I can no longer avoid what I’ve been avoiding all this time. After all, I said it myself.

I’m trapped in an endless loop of unhappiness every day. In the past, I blamed it on a lack of success. I thought it was due to not being validated. Not being talented. Not being productive. Not being famous. Because if I can’t tie it to something I lack, that means my unhappiness has no reason. It just is. I had to make it a problem so I could solve it. But there is no solution, no problem, no cause, and no effect—only an emotion that never fades.

“You deserve happiness, Francesca,” Elliot says at last. “I may not understand you because I was consumed by my own demons for so long, but I know that once you put your mind to something, you achieve it. Even if it takes decades, I believe you will figure it out.”

There’s a sharp stabbing at the back of my eyes. “I wish I believed in myself as much as you do.”

“Someday, you will.” Elliot’s reply is so soft, so gentle, I wonder if it’s really my sharp-tongued brother. His hand curls over mine and I sink my fingers into the softness of his palm. “Be patient until then.”

The hope lounging inside me rises. “Thanks, Elliot. Though I wonder if I should be taking advice from someone who is five million dollars deep in debt and whose greatest accomplishment is having partied his life away.”

Sarcasm is supposed to be his strong point, not mine. But I suppose all of us excel at it.

“You’re not wrong,” Elliot admits. “I’m more like you than you realize. I felt empty and dissatisfied most of my life, too. I had no passion, no goals, no desires. I chased fun and pleasure because it was easy. But one day, I saw someone and it made me aware of what I needed.”

“Which was what?”

“I needed to be useful. Not desirable, rich, successful, or adored. I just needed to be of service to at least one person in the world who appreciated me. So, Francesca, what do you need?”

“I need to be free. Free to express my darker emotions and to have them appreciated.” I grasp his fingers tighter. He used to have soft hands before but now they’re rougher. “Ever since I was young, I was aware of the dark, turbulent emotions inside me. They would’ve broken me if I didn’t have a way of letting them out. Art was my release, a vent for those complex, intense feelings I couldn’t express in words. As long as I drew, the emotions were more manageable. Which is why, when I could no longer paint, I started to suffocate.”

“Yeah, you were always really sensitive and emotional. You felt things deeply. It didn’t take much to make you cry or smile when you were a child,” Elliot agrees.

“I think the obsession with success was simply the desire to have my suffering recognized,” I continue. “I buried my feelings for so long. I thought I didn’t want anybody to see that part of me. Turns out, subconsciously, I wanted the whole world to acknowledge that side of me—because my art was filled with the truth even when I was filled with lies.”

Elliot’s other hand moves up my hair, stroking it gently. My whole head feels pinched. I press my head into his stomach.

“It makes sense,” Elliot says. “Why you were so obsessive about art. Because it allowed you to be yourself—all parts of yourself. In a small way, it healed your pain.”

An electric awareness sneaks through my veins. The stabbing at the back of my eyes sharpens. Tears rush forth, running in cold trails down my cheeks.

“Yeah, I think it did,” I sob. “That’s why I was terrified of losing it.”

I began to replace it with other things like alcohol and drugs. But they didn’t let me release my feelings, only numb them. I started to get worse. More stifled. More desperate. More volatile.

Gabriele’s dark, probing eyes float into my mind like a sudden dream.

Except then, I met Gabriele. When I was with him, I felt the same sense of liberation. He accepted…no, he demanded to see all the sides of me, especially the sad, miserable parts. And he loved and desired them. He made me face my demons again, he made me replace a new way of expressing myself with art.

Spending time with him was profoundly healing.

Perhaps that’s why, when we were in Italy, my whole body froze up at the idea of losing him. He’s the one who made me real, who ripped away my lies and loved my darkness. He was the place where I could be all parts of myself.

Even if we cannot be together anymore, I will always be grateful for everything he did for me.

For all the ways he changed my life and made me aware of who I was on the inside.

His question from the last time we had sex surfaces in my thoughts.

And what will you remember me as?

As the person who changed my life.