"This way, miss," Antoinette said, guiding Sofia through the Villa with ease, her heels thudding dully against the carpeted floor.
Sofia quietly followed behind the petite, sophisticated woman.
An hour or so after the whole camera incident, Antoinette, the caretaker of the place had come into Sofia's room, telling her that Vincenzo wanted her to undergo a medical check up as was required of all his employees. Sofia had thought that Vincenzo had wanted her to rest, but maybe the whole fiasco with the cameras had changed his mind about it. She wasn't complaining, though. It wasn't like she was going to sleep, anyway. Her work had been such that she was used to staying up all night long and then sleeping during the day.
Antoinette stopped at a door at the end of the hallway with the word infirmary written at the top in bold. "Miss Sofia is here," she said loudly before knocking on the door, as if Sofia was incapable of doing it for herself.
"Come in," a raspy male voice called out from inside.
Antoinette turned to Sofia then, giving her a smile. "You can go on in. You must go meet Vincenzo after you're done here. His office is the first on the right upstairs. Do you want me to accompany you or—"
Sofia cut the caretaker off with a smile of her own. "I think I can find my way there," she said, and Antoinette nodded with a smile before leaving. Sofia figured some alone time would be difficult to get while she was here and she should cherish however much of it she could get.
Pulling the door open, she stepped inside, the sterile, white walls of the room a stark contrast to the dark theme outside.
The doctor who seemed to be well in his fifties was sitting behind his desk, a stethoscope hanging around his neck. Giving Sofia a kind smile, he motioned for her to sit.
"I'm Dr Richard. I'll be asking you a few general questions about your health. Answer as honestly as possible," he told her.
Sofia nodded and for the next ten minutes, he asked her questions regarding her family medical history, any diseases she'd suffered in the past, vaccinations done and such. The old man was completely professional with his questions, jotting her answers down with ease.
That was until he asked, "Are you a virgin?"
"Excuse me?" Sofia asked, incredulous.
"Are you a virgin, Miss Sofia?" He repeated himself, completely unfazed.
"Is that a standard medical question?" Sofia couldn't help but ask. She had a feeling it wasn't the doctor asking her. It was Vincenzo Moretti who wanted to know, not him.
"Yes," came Dr Richard's firm reply, his expression neutral. The man had been trained to school his features expertly. There was no point arguing here.
"No. I'm not a virgin," she bit out.
The doctor nodded, scribbling something down. Then, "Are you on the pill?"
Sofia scoffed. "Are you kidding me? If Mr Moretti wanted to know all this, he could've asked me himself."
A ghost of a smile played on Dr Richard's lips at her words but he didn't say anything. The man sure was loyal to his employer.
Shaking her head, Sofia replied, "No. I use condoms. Anything else?"
"When was your last sexual encounter?"
The question had her blood boiling. "For fuck's sake, I'm a stripper, not a hooker!"
"That does not answer my question," the doctor's clinical voice irked her even more.
"You can tell Vincenzo I fucked a random man on my way over. He can check the CCTV footage if he wants to," she all but spat out, stunning the doctor into silence.
After a beat, he said, "I take it you're joking."
"Am I?" Sofia shot back, still fired up over the kind of questions being asked.
The doctor simply shook his head in reply.
"We're finished. You may leave now," he said next, his tone the same monotone it had been through the entire procedure.
Giving him a stiff nod, Sofia left the room, making her way up the staircase to get to Vincenzo's office like Antoinette had told her to, using the short walk to clear her head and calm down.
Once outside, she knocked once. "Come in," came Vincenzo's voice from inside.
Sofia twisted the handle before entering his lavish office. The large, sleek wooden desk and fancy chairs gave it a modern look while the built-in wooden book shelves off to the side were in tune with the vintage esthetic of the rest of the estate.
Without thinking, Sofia's feet carried her towards the bookshelf, distracting her. "You read?"
"Whenever I have the time to, yes," came Vincenzo's voice, followed by his footsteps as he came to stand next to Sofia.
Interesting. She'd never have pegged him for a reader. Pulling out a copy of the Catcher in the Rye, she flipped to the first page. "It's a first edition," she whispered. If she was amazed before, she was positively shocked now.
"Most of them are. You can take anything to read if you so wish."
Sofia nodded, keeping the book back in it's place carefully. "I will. Thank you," she said, turning to face him, only to find that he was already looking at her, his chocolate brown eyes dripping with curiosity.
He motioned for her to follow him towards his desk. "Sit," he told her, taking a seat himself.
"As you probably already know, I ran a background check on you—"
"Of course."
"—you were adopted as a baby. But there was no information about your birth parents anywhere. Do you know who they are?" Vincenzo asked her, cutting straight to the chase and paying no heed to her rather sour expression as she took a seat. Even though she knew he would've run a thorough background check on her—it was the Mafia after all— she did not like it all. She didn't like that he knew almost everything there was to know about her and she knew next to nothing about him, at least nothing that he had told her himself.
Speaking of her birth parents, though, Sofia shook her head. "No. I couldn't find out anything about them either. The orphanage said that someone just left me in the crib outside and didn't even ring the bell. They found me the next morning, crying like anything."
Vincenzo's gaze softened at her words. "I'm sure they had their reasons."
Sofia couldn't help but roll her eyes. "That's what I've been telling myself all these years, but it's not very convincing."
And that was true. She hadn't thought too much about her birth parents when she was little. It was after her adoptive father remarried and his new wife started treating her like shit that she began to wish more and more for her birth parents to come and whisk her away. At least they wouldn't have discriminated against her.
That was when she had tried to find out who they were. But there was absolutely nothing to go on, not even a crumb. So she had given up, but over time, her resentment towards her birth parents had grown. Why had they left her? And if they couldn't have afforded to raise her, why did they have her in the first place anyway?
"I'll try and find more about them," Vincenzo offered but Sofia was shaking her head even before he had finished the sentence.
"That ship sailed a long time ago. I don't want to find out who they are or whatever. I don't care."
Vincenzo raised a brow. "Doesn't look like it."
Sofia let out a breath of frustration. She didn't want to talk about this anymore. "If that's all, I have some questions of my own to ask you."
Vincenzo's brow raised higher, somehow making him look sexier than he already was. Damn him. Why did he have to make everything he did so hot?
"I'm not done yet," was his reply.
Sofia nodded at him to go on.
"Why did you drop out of college?"
His question had her freezing on her spot. Had he found out the truth? Was this a trick question? Or was her secret safe and he was genuinely curious about the answer because he hadn't been able to find a suitable one himself?
To lie or not to lie?
Then again, he had told the doctor to ask her if she was a virgin. Deciding that it was probably better to go with the story she was supposed to, she said, "Because my adoptive father stopped paying my tuition fees and I couldn't afford to pay for it on my own."
Vincenzo frowned. "Why?"
Sofia let out a breath. Okay. She was safe. He hadn't found out the truth or he wouldn't be so calm.
He didn't know she had dropped out because she had gotten pregnant from a one night stand. And she had to keep it that way.
"His wife somehow convinced him that I was partying my way through college and spending his hard earned money on booze instead of studying. I stayed with him for a few months after that but then I moved in with a friend and ended up becoming a stripper," Sofia explained.
"Partying comes with being a college student," Vincenzo muttered more to himself than her, shaking his head a little in annoyance.
She smiled at his words. It did. But she'd been a reckless idiot. She wouldn't be in this situation if she hadn't. But nothing could be done now. "Did you attend college?" She couldn't help but ask.
Vincenzo shook his head. "My siblings and I had been homeschooled all our lives, and what the teacher didn't teach us, our father did," he replied, chuckling to himself, almost as if recalling a particularly fond memory.
"Your father seems like a good dad."
"He is," Vincenzo agreed with a smile, one that made him look almost boyish. It was cute. "Anyway, that was all I wanted to ask. The rest I know."
Sofia nodded. "My turn now."
Vincenzo smirked, motioning for her to go on. "You can ask what you want. I will only answer what you need to know."
Right. Here it goes then.