“What the hell was all that back there?” I asked, realizing that perhaps the entire bizarre scenario had been staged. “Salvatore has never raised a voice or hand to me in all my life. Why did he order me dragged out of my home by my hair?”
“Fear is a powerful too, Cosima,” he told me, a curl of white smoke rolling sensuously between his full lips.
His mouth was redder than Alexander’s, but the shape was the same.
The impulse to kiss him was shocking and disgusting, but I could feel it in my limbs like a drug.
Dante’s smile was just as slow and curling as the cigarette smoke. “You of all people should know that. Living in the underworld, you learn to take every opportunity to strike fear into the hearts of your would-be enemies.”
“I doubt ancient Signora Moretti or the Bianchi sisters are eager to start a gang to oppose your own,” I said with an eye roll.
There was something about this man, something enough like Alexander to make my spirit buzz and something enough like me to put me at ease that made me feel reckless and brave.
He chuckled and took another drag. “No, I doubt it. Sometimes you have to look closer to home for your true enemies though.”
I caught the edge of his piercing look and deflected it by pulling through my tangled hair as if it fascinated me.
He was speaking of Pearl Hall, of his ex-brother and ex-father, of things he shouldn’t know because he didn’t live there.
“Rocco has been trying to outmaneuver Salvatore for years now. If he knew about your real relationship, it would not signal good things for Tore, or for you and Seb,” he continued. “Personally, I thought the hair pulling was a nice theatrical addition.”
“You’re crazy.”
Dante shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe. You’re a product of your upbringing, as much as any of us try to hide it, and mine was crazy enough for most.”
“I don’t understand what the motivation is here. Why are you in this car talking to me, why did you come to Pearl Hall after all these years and then save me from Ashcroft at The Hunt? What am I to?” I asked.
I didn’t have a good track record with getting my questions answered, but I was alone in a car with one of the many men who seemed to be pulling the strings of my life like a master puppeteer and it wasn’t like we had anything else to discuss.
Dante stared at me for a long moment with his undeniably gorgeous obsidian eyes and then when he spoke, it was in a voice more British than he normally seemed to allow.
“Let me tell you a story. It takes place in a home that is like a castle, but it is not about a beautiful princess and her prince. Instead, it’s about a man of great power who seduced a woman into marriage with false promises and then ruled like a tyrant over her for the entirety of her life. The only joy she ever had was her two sons, two boys she made a promise to herself would never turn out like their cruel father.
“She enlisted the help of her childhood best friend, a male influence to teach them about the difference between right and wrong, an important lesson they wouldn’t learn in the world of power their father ruled from.
“For a time, everything was bearable and then, the woman discovered an awful secret that changed her entire world. She vowed to take the boys and runaway with the aid of her friend. Only, her husband found out and before she could run, he killed her.”
I blinked at him. “That doesn’t sound like any childhood fairy tale I’ve ever head of before.”
“It wouldn’t.”
“Listen, I understand that you think Noel is a cruel man. In my personal experience, I haven’t seen much of that. He was kind to me when I lived at Pearl Hall. Alexander obviously has his own issues with his father and in the end, we weren’t allowed to spend time together, but I don’t see him as this awful villain. And I do not believe that he killed your mother. Not when she was at Salvatore’s house with you when she died.”
Dante’s amiable façade vanished like the plume of smoke out the open window. His eyes went black as sin and his rough-hewn faced went taught with rage.
“I was there so I should know what really happened. Mum had taken me with her to Salvatore’s to plan how we might get away from Noel. Alexander wasn’t there because he was the heir, mum worried he felt too much of the family obligation and was already too much like him to understand how dangerous it was to stay at Pearl Hall. We weren’t kids anymore. He was twenty-six and I was twenty-one, we didn’t have to blindly follow anyone anymore. But I followed her, and Alexander stayed at home.”
“Why did she decide to run after all those years?” I asked, invested in the story despite myself.
This was the great mystery. This was the reason Alexander had allied himself with a father he hated and was using the Order to find answers to his mother’s death.
If I could find the answers for him, maybe everything would be different.
The car slowed and I realized we were stopping. Outside my side window a field of poppies stretched as far as the eye could see and before us stood a huge stucco home the colour of daffodils.
The door opened for me but I didn’t get out because Dante was staring at me, his face so solemn I wondered if we were arriving at the place of my own death.
“She ran because she knew discovered what Noel had been doing all those years with the slave girls he took and didn’t hide from her.”
“What did he do?” I asked as Salvatore appeared at the opening to my door and stoically offered me his hand to help get out.
I didn’t take it.
“He killed them,” Dante said. “Just like he killed my mum.”
After a brief reprieve to wash my face and gather my thoughts in a spare bedroom in Salvatore’s home, I was led by a man with a gun strapped to his arm to a red flagstone patio off the back of the villa. Salvatore and Dante sat at a round wood table laden with a charcuterie feast and a huge flagon of red wine, talking animatedly in hushed voices. It was dark, the stars blazing in velvet blue sky as they can only do in the countryside. The air had cooled enough to feel gentle against my skin and the sweet scent of acacia blooms lingered on the breeze as it swept through the outdoor kitchen.
They both paused when they noticed me in the door, their eyes sweeping up and down my body in simultaneously.
Dante’s gaze was filled with male interest and admiration.
Salvatore’s was harder to discern but there was a slight smile on his lips that he couldn’t quite compress that made me think he liked to see me standing in his home.
I frowned and stalked forward, taking the seat the gunman pulled out for me and crossing my legs in a business-like manner.
“Well gentleman, the hour for explanations has arrived,” I declared.
Dante didn’t even try to curb the boyish delight in his smile, but Salvatore bit his grin back and nodded solemnly.
I pointed a finger at him. “Don’t mock me. You may not have killed Chiara Davenport, but you abandoned my mother, brother and me, then to makes matters worse, you sold me. So, you are still the villain here.”
Any humour or pleasure lingering in Salvatore’s patrician face snuffed out and when he leaned forward to speak to me it was in the low, unspeakably powerful voice of an Italian mafia capo.
“Don’t speak about something you know nothing about, girl. If you want to cast stones before you know the true story, I’ll send you back to your mother and you can return to England empty-handed.”
I felt like a chastened child as I sat there struggling not to pout and glare in equal turn. Finally, I crossed my arms tightly over anxious chest and tilted my chin at him to go on.
Dante chuckled. “She looks just like you doing that.”
We both shot him glares that made him hold up his hands in surrender even though his eyes danced.
Salvatore turned back to me, his eyes scouring my face like an artist ready to commit me to paper.
“I won’t get into the backstory with Caprice. Your mother and I met when we were both very youn
g. She already had two children by your father, but I was infatuated with her beauty and her mind. I wanted to take her and the girls away with me, but for many reasons, that wasn’t to be. I didn’t even know you and Seb were born until years after our tryst. I’d moved to Venice to join an outfit there and I was moving up in the ranks when an old friend sent me a picture of you and Sebastian. You must have been only three years old, but you looked so much like me, I knew it the moment I set eyes on you.”
“I can’t believe Mama wouldn’t have told you,” I protested because the woman I knew was not duplicitous or immoral.
She went to church every Sunday and prayed before bed each night, sometimes so fervently I wondered what kind of conversations she held daily with her God.
“She didn’t tell because she knew what kind of man I was,” Salvatore said, his voice raised with passion. “If I had known she was pregnant I would have spirited her away where Seamus could never find us.”
His fist hit the table with a clatter as he dislodged a plate filled with cheeses and bowl of olives shattered on the flagstones below us.
“When I found out, I flew back to Napoli but Caprice refused to acknowledge my paternity and it was obvious even Seamus had no idea. I moved back and tried to become as much a part of your lives as she and my job would let me.”
“It wasn’t enough,” I said quietly.
I could read the tragedy in the set of his shoulder and the opaque helplessness in his eyes, but I only had so much sympathy for an adulater, a mafia man and the person who sold me.
“Caprice would only accept money when she didn’t have enough to put food on the table for you kids.” He shook his head in frustration, but there was a glimmer of pride in his smile. “She was always so stubborn. And I kept Seamus from being murdered time after time, so often that uncomfortable questions were raised about why I cared so much for him and his fate.”
“Another black mark against you,” I said. “We would have been better off if he was dead.”
“That’s not true. It was the only time your mother begged me for anything, the first time Seamus was brought before me to be killed. She showed up at my compound with your little hand in hers and she promised I could visit sometimes if I promised to save her husbands life.” His smile was self-depreciating. “I agreed on the spot.”
“That doesn’t explain why you allowed me to be sold for his gambling debts,” I retorted.
I needed to latch on to something concrete as the world shifted beneath my feet like quick sand.
Dante grinned. “I think I can help with that one. You see, Alexander has been convinced that Tore killed mum for years because Noel told him so. He’s set Interpol, MI6 and Polizia di Stato on us like fucking leeches and he’s even tried to get people in our organization. We’ve had an alert set up in case anyone searches your name or Sebastian’s for year and when he found out who you were last August, it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“I don’t understand,” I breathed, my lungs two wrung out dish towels in my chest.
Because I thought I did understand.
Alexander had bought me to infiltrate the Camorra.
But the Camorra had sold me to infiltrate Pearl Hall.
My mind spun, filled with dirty water circling a clogged drain.
“We sold you to Alexander so you could find out the Davenport secrets and we could finally prove that Noel was the one to kill Chiara,” Dante explained, so excited about his master mind plan that he failed to note how pale I was.
“And what about Alexander? Do you want to implicate him in any crimes as well?”
“The entire fucked up Order of Dionysus needs to be dismantled. They covered up Chiara’s death and the deaths of all the other poor women Noel and the brothers used as slaves.” Finally, Dante hesitated, his eyes sharpening on my face. “Alexander is my brother, so I can understand your recalcitrance but he might just have to go down with the ship.”
“That’s why you helped me in The Hunt and tried to step in at Pearl Hall,” I said as the domino pieces began to fall into place. “You were protecting me even as you were using me.”
“Exactly,” Dante said with a bright smile before looking at Salvatore. “She’s too smart to be your kid.”
I ignored him.
I ignored everything but the sound of my blood rushing through my ears and the dangerous thrum of my racing heart.
“Cosima,” Salvatore said firmly, catching my attention as he took my listless hand off the table and cupped it in his own. “I know this isn’t easy and it’s a lot to digest. Stay here with us for a few days, a couple of weeks and let’s get to know each other before we make any decisions. I know it seems like I’m using you, and I’m sorry for that, but it’s the nature of my job and the nature of fatherhood. I know I don’t have the right to say this, but I truly am doing what I must to keep you safe.”
“You have a decision to make,” Dante said, solemn once more. He looked like Salvatore’s side kick sitting there, just as dark and powerful, utterly in sync with the older man’s criminal thoughts and intentions. “You can help us take down a sect of terrible men and we can help you and your family set up a new life in America, free of the past and of the Davenport influence. Or, you can go back to Pearl Hall and the Master that will use you just as surely as we are, but toward a more bitter end.”
Three weeks later.
“Alexander, please come, I think he knows I’m here to spy on him.”
The words of my earlier phone call echoed in my head as I paced around the small sitting room in my hotel suite in Roma.
I’d called Alexander in a panic, begging him to get me because I feared Salvatore and his men were onto me.
Alexander had answered his phone on the first ring, was barking orders to bring the car around to someone, probably Riddick, in the background before I could finish my first sentence and the moment I stopped speaking, he promised he was on the next plane to Roma to bring me home safely.
Home.
Safely.
The two words were laughable.
My childhood home had never been safe with Seamus living there. Now it was no longer even ours because we had sold it and Mama and Elena were just now settling in Brooklyn, USA in their new home. One I wouldn’t be a part of, at least not for a long, long time.
Pearl Hall could never truly be my home although it was safe because I would never be anything more than a slave inside it’s walls.
Salvatore’s Roman country villa might have been my home for the past three weeks, but I was by no means ready to call it my home and him my father.
It was one of the reasons I was doing this.
I jumped when there was a loud banging against my door and then the sound of a key card sliding and clicking in the automatic lock.
My breath froze in my lungs as the door swung open to reveal Alexander.
His golden hair was a tousled mess from his anxious hands and a long plane ride, his handsome face creased with exhaustion and his expensive suit wrinkled beyond what he would normally ever allow.
But it was his eyes I couldn’t look away from.
They traced every inch of my body as I stood stock-still across from him, accounting for every new mark on my body or expression flickering across my eyes. It was the soulful search of a man who had been too long parted from a lover.
It was a look that made me want to cry.
He caught my expression and his face turned fierce as he dropped his bag inside the door and stalked across the room for me, walking over the top of the coffee table to get to me faster.
The second he snagged me around the middle and carted me into his arms, the tears I’d been battling won out and I burst into sobs.
Alexander squeezed me tightly for a moment and then used a hand in my hair to yank my head back. His eyes were darker than I’d ever seen then, pewter tarnished with regret and rusty with agony.
“Fuck,” he rasped. “I missed you more than I could manage.�
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And then his mouth was sealed over mine, his tongue sliding against my own in a sensual glide that had me moaning and fisting my own hands in his hair.
“Don’t ever make me leave again,” I begged before I could remember that it wasn’t part of the plan.
“Never,” he swore, the word so filled with promise it felt as final as his brand against my ass. “Never again.”
He kissed me again, so fiercely it bruised my lips but I didn’t care. I wanted to wear the blue of his passion and the purple of his possession on my mouth like lipstick.
“Where’s your bag?” he muttered against my lips. “As much as I want to fuck you right here on the floor, I want to get you out of the Godforsaken country even more.”
“In the bedroom,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut because this was where my plan could go very, very wrong.
And I really didn’t want anyone to get hurt, least of all Alexander.
He gave me one final, bruising kiss and then moved beyond me into the bedroom. The second he disappeared from sight, Salvatore appeared in the open doorway from the hall and raised a gun in the air.
Seconds later, I screamed blood murder and Alexander appeared in the living room holding my bag and, to my great surprise, his very own gun.
Salvatore’s was currently pressed to my temple, the cold barrel biting into my skin.
“Put the gun down, Alexander,” Salvatore ordered coldly, adjusting his chokehold so that it seemed even tighter against my airway. “We both know you won’t risk her getting hurt.”
“You’re really so evil that you’d kill your own daughter?” Alexander asked calmly, dropping my bag so that he could circle around slightly for a better angle at my biological father.
“You are such a fool. Your mother tried to teach you to think for yourself, but you remain brainwashed by your pernicious father and his precious Order. I did not kill Chiara. Why would I kill my best friend?”
“Why would you press your gun to the head of the daughter you abandoned at birth? Maybe you’re a psychopath.”
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