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A christening for the woman I had become over the years as a Mafia wife and an underworld dealer in my own right.

To have taken his blood after he had first taken my virgin’s blood so many years ago felt like a rightening, a balancing of the scales.

It made me feel as if we were one finally.

Together in a way that transcended marriage certificates and business agreements.

Yet Luca wasn’t my husband.

And the feelings that surged through my chest had to be capped like lava churning beneath a mountain, because there was simply no place for them to go.

I was not his and he was not mine.

No matter what we had exchanged the night before.

Guilt seeped in around the edges of my thoughts.

I was lying in bed under Luca’s sleep-heavy body while Dario was out there somewhere maimed and tortured.

Carefully, I slipped out from under Luca, noting the stark-white bandage around his upper right arm, thankful he’d had it seen to before passing out. Reminded of his bloody footprints on the cement floor of the basement, I peeled the covers back to check his feet and found them washed, raw in places from running barefoot through the park. My brows drew together at the sight of dozens of scars uniformly lined up in rows down the soles of each foot, little dashes like white soldiers.

Tally marks.

I wondered what they accounted for and didn’t have to reach far to surmise they might have numbered the lives Luca took as Lo Spettro.

It should have disturbed me, to see the way he’d maimed himself to remind himself of their deaths or that he had taken so many in the first place. Instead, I felt a curious tenderness as understanding washed through me. He was honoring them, I thought, in his own way with the marks. He was also honoring his sacrifice. These tally marks were the sum total accounting of the life he was forced to live. He didn’t have friends or accolades or family who cared.

He just had the souls he ferried to the underworld.

And me.

I stood there for an indeterminate amount of time staring at the vulnerable undersides of his feet before I gathered my composure enough to turn away from him.

The house was quiet even though the sun was bright through the windows as I climbed down the stairs, Cerberus uncurling from his bed to join me as I made my way to the office. The door was open, everything neat as a pin.

I sat behind the computer in my nightgown and stared at the password-protected screen before I pulled out the thumb drive from the pocket of my robe.

I inserted it into the computer and waited for Curtain’s programming to crack through the security.

Moments later, the desktop came to life with a whir, and the home screen blinked into wakefulness.

The photo behind the icons caused me to suck a sharp breath in through my mouth.

A photo I had never seen before.

In it, I was sleeping in a tangle of red-orange sheets in my bed, my hair a corona of golden-brown curls around my head, my face soft and young with sleep. I was naked, only a small section of the sheet curled up over my hip, my breasts exposed to the camera.

It was like something a Renaissance painter might have modeled their work after, shockingly beautiful in its intimate simplicity.

And Dario had it set as his computer background.

I swallowed thickly.

Did he care for me more than I’d ever imagined?

Maybe not like Luca, who seemed more like a rabid dog who had found his first taste of something lovely and kind in me.

But like a man who had stopped believing in the goodness of people and found a good woman thrust upon him.