‘If you’re going to fucking kill me, just do it.’ Dante’s slurred voice pulled me out of my thoughts. Defiant, insolent and full of the same rage which had once filled me.
‘Look at me, you coward,’ I snarled, letting my anger towards him show. I was damned if I was going to make this easy for him.
But when he raised his head, and I saw his face up close for the first time in twenty years, the compassion I’d tried so hard to deny welled up inside me.
One eye was swollen shut, but the other was the same sky blue as my own. Would my son inherit that colour too? If he did, and I murdered Dante now, how would I look at my son and not see Dante again?
His face was swollen, fresh blood smeared across his lips, and new bruises were purpling on his jaw. But beneath the swelling, I could see so much of what I saw in the mirror each morning—and also so much of that boy who had followed me around on this island, chatting away aimlessly about anything and everything, that mongrel puppy trailing behind him, until I hadn’t been able to stop myself from bonding with him. From loving him like a brother.
Funny to think we had always looked more like full brothers than half brothers, the only real difference being his darker skin—a result of his mother’s Moroccan grandfather, I suspected.
‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ he sneered, goading me now.
Yeah, he was still a hothead, still a threat. But I’d be damned if I’d allow him to destroy what I had with Mia.
I sighed.
I could not be soft on Dante. He had done something unforgiveable, and he deserved to be punished. And if I was not going to kill him, I also knew I could not set him free. Until I knew he would no longer be a threat, because now I had so much more to protect.
So I would have to find another way to end this blood feud my father had started. The man who had chosen to discard one son while saving another.
I got off the chair, kicked it away, and then knelt beside him and gripped his hair.
He hissed, his swollen jaw clenching as I yanked his head back to glare into his eyes.
‘If you were anyone but my brother, you would be dead already,’ I said, and meant it.
But something flickered in his eyes, something that looked like shock before he could mask it… And suddenly I wondered, had he really meant to kill me that night?
No one had died.Whyhad no one died? I’d thought at the time it was because our firepower was greater, but what the guard had said came back to me now.
‘He does not know when he is beaten.’
And I could still remember the eight-year-old boy who had kept punching, kept fighting, even as my father had slapped him down over and over again before killing his dog.
Dante would have fought to the death to kill me that night if that had been his intention.
‘So, we’re brothers again, are we?’ he sneered, but I heard the weariness and pain he was trying so hard to hide, as well as the anger.
‘We never stopped being brothers,idiota,’ I murmured.
I let go of his hair, satisfied I had got my point across when his head hit the wall with a solid thunk.
He was cursing me, telling me to kill him and get it over with, as I walked out of the cell without looking back and locked the door.
Figuring out what to do with that dumb bastard was a problem for another day. He could rot in this hole for a long while for all I cared. It would give him time to consider his actions. But I had something much bigger and more important to figure out first.
I bounded up the stairs, suddenly desperate to see Mia, to hold her, to take the devastated look out of her eyes, the terrible hope making my heart pound and my ribs hurt.
I was a bad man, a bad person, and I would still do bad things, but tonight I had to find a way to prove to her she would always be an oasis of good in me. That I wanted the lightness she had brought into my life. That I loved it—and her.
And I had a bad feeling that meant, for the first time in my life, I was going to have to beg.
When I got to our bedroom, though, and she wasn’t waiting for me as I had demanded, I had to clamp down on the swift surge of fury…and panic.
As I searched the villa’s rooms unable to find her, the panic turned to fear. But as I raced back through the house, ready to initiate a search of the island, I spotted a moonlit figure in the cove below.
Mia.
