Around my rage.
Not only had Emberline stolen the cipher and snuck out, but she had also followed her uncle to the Draconi island. To a place I couldn’t reach her.
Couldn’t protect her.
“What if I went back out?” Emberline offered, a crescent of silver highlighting her dark eyes as she tracked the pendant swinging back and forth from my fingers. “Kept an eye on that portal? I know all my uncle’s usual routes, all his contacts. I could?—”
Fear knocked the air out of my lungs.
I was going to throttle her if she casually floated the idea of tracking her utter waste of an uncle around Venice as if she was following a lost dog, not the psychotic bastard who’d tried to kill her.
Correction—he had killed her, which was why she now had silver in her dark brown eyes, and all too often, I caught her blankly staring off into space.
It was my fucking job to keep her safe.Mine. A job I was failing at.
“Emberline.”
One sharp word and she clamped those lush, red lips tight, watching me like I was a powder keg about to explode. She was right. I was on the verge of either shaking her orkissing her; both would only make this situation worse. I carefully set the cipher on the dark wood mantle, deciding my next play.
Setting limits… I was only daring her to test me.
Locking her up was pointless; she always managed to escape.
If she hadn’t pissed me off so badly, I would have been impressed, but godsdamn it, if Giovanni discovered she was alive, he would kill her for real, and the very idea of losing this female had all the air evaporating from my lungs.
“I understand the impulse.” I forced my voice into a calm, even tone. “Believe me. There is not a day that passes that I don’t imagine walking into Giovanni’s sanctum and carving out his heart while he sleeps. For what he did to my brother. For what he did toyou.” That dark, raw ache crept out of my heart and into my voice as I imagined ending that fucker’s life.
“He should be dead,” she agreed quietly. “I hate that he’s walking around, free to plot and scheme while Dante is….” When her voice broke, I gripped the edge of the mantle so I didn’t do something supremely stupid, like pull her into my arms and tell her everything would be okay.
Everything was pretty much fucked right now, and she didn’t even know the half of it.
“Yes, your uncleshouldbe dead, but we need him alive.” I exhaled, but none of my tension lessened. We’d had this same conversation too many times already, and neither of us was happy about it.
“Giovanni is the only person who knows where my brother is.” I felt the need, once again, to point out the logistical reasons, because right now I was sorely tempted to just say fuck it and make him dead.
Poetic justice and all that shit.
Instead, I pulled in a breath, swamping my senses with citrus and lavender.
“Which means he stays alive, whether we like it or not. My father is ill, and Giovanni is busy gathering council support so he can replace Marcello. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for proof, and then we will bury them both.”
I didn’t tell her we were running out of time.
Didn’t let her see the panic driving me.
It was up to me to keep her safe. To find my brother. To outwit Giovanni in a constantly shifting political landscape where I was losing ground by the day.
“Afterwe get Dante back,” she said, “and they are both gone, then you can step up and become the next Don, and we’ll put this nightmare behind us.”
How I hoped that day would come, even though the odds were more in favor of me becoming worm food than ruling the Dynasty.
“Revenge is easy; justice is harder to come by.” I frowned. “Dante deserves both. Until he’s safe, we wait on your uncle. We focus on locating the Fossa.” My hand tightened involuntarily on the back of a chair. Nico hadn’t come up with a single lead. Three weeks ago, I’d been full of hope, now…
“You really believe he’s there,” she asked, blinking fast, as though she had something in her eye. Just the idea of Emberline crying sent my heart into some sort of apoplectic jitter, asking myself one final time…
Why hadn’t I killed Giovanni DiRavello a long fucking time ago and spared her all this grief?
“I’m sure. The Fossa is a convenient way to make your enemies disappear,” I pointed out the obvious. “It’s the logical answer. I heard my father and your uncle strike that deal. But I’ve searched every Dominico manifest from thepast fifty years, and there’s not a single mention of the prison.”
