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Detectives Davis and Ansley went thin lipped with displeasure.

“Unless you have a warrant, I think I’ll have to ask you and your associates to get off my son’s lawn and leave his wife alone,” he continued in that aloof, cold tone that his twin sons had obviously learned from him.

Without waiting for their response, Lando looked down at me as he gave me a squeeze. “Why don’t you go pack a bag, cara? I think it would be best if you stayed with us until Dario gets home.”

I nodded dumbly like the little doll I was meant to play and cast one last look at the annoyed cops before I ducked inside and up the stairs to my bedroom.

I closed the door behind me and slumped against it, closing my eyes to drag a deep breath through my mouth. Cerberus whined lightly and stepped up with his hands on my chest to lick at my chin in an effort to soothe me. I laughed wetly and pressed my forehead to his, taking the offered comfort.

The brothers were gone, escaped through the tunnel they had carved out beneath the house for exactly these circumstances, but I couldn’t help the unease that shivered through my blood.

Everything felt on the precise edge of a cliff. If we didn’t figure out how to take a step back, our lives as we knew them would end.

I sucked in another breath, kissed Cerberus’s brow, then went into my bathroom to have a quick shower before I packed my bag. Staying with Lando, as much as I disliked him, was a good idea. I didn’t know who I could trust if my own best friend and assistant, Alessia, had turned against us.

I shivered, cold through to the bone, as I turned on the water and shed my clothes. The robe had hidden the blood that had seeped onto my forearm from when I’d slashed out the knee of the guard at the church.

I watched it wash down the drain as I stepped under the spray.

A moment later, I tried to scream when the door to the shower opened and someone pushed me into the wall, covering my mouth before I could let out a noise.

Why hadn’t Cerberus stopped the intruder?

“Hush,” a familiar voice said. “It’s only me.”

Only me.

Not Luca, I thought as my heart raced with fear. I wasn’t sure how I could tell when they sounded so similar, only that it was a sixth sense.

Slowly, Dario turned me around to face him and removed his hand.

I knew by the state of his cleaned but wounded face that I had guessed correctly. He was naked in the shower with me, his brutalized body totally exposed.

“Oh, Dario,” I hissed in sympathy, automatically reaching out to trail light fingers over his bruised ribs. “I hate that this happened to you.”

But Dario wasn’t interested in my sympathy.

He grasped my chin in one hand to lift my gaze to his, and I found his absolutely raging, an inferno written in ice blue.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as he pressed himself tightly to my body, my spine flattening against the wall. “Where is Luca?”

His eyes flashed, and his mouth flexed into a flat line. “He’s setting up a safe place for us to lie low. I said I would make sure you were safe. He didn’t like that, but he’s in a better position to act than I am right now.”

“You’re right,” I said, swallowing thickly as I felt the ridge of his half-aroused cock against my hip. “You should be lying down.”

“I did enough sitting around in the fucking church,” he growled. “And when I wasn’t thinking of revenge against whatever fuckers had come for me, I was planning all the ways I’d take my wife when I escaped. You can imagine my surprise that she was one of the people who rescued me.”

“Dario,” I gasped when he dipped his head to fix his mouth to my throat. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

It was so fucking confusing having him like this. He looked like Luca but so clearly wasn’t. He wasn’t the one who made me feel flayed alive and broken into pieces so every part of me was exposed to his gaze and none of me was found wanting.

But he was the man I’d spent most of the last six years with, forming a different kind of intimacy.

He had taken care of me, in his own way.

Loved me, maybe in his own way as I did in mine.

He wasn’t the echo of my soul, like my mad, bad Luca.