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Righteous.

I slammed the front door to Edgemont House behind me, ignoring the way it rattled the paintings on the walls, and stormed up the stairs to my room.

“Fia,” Bonnie said, scuttling after me with worry etched into her features. She had assumed the maternal role effortlessly, and her concern warmed the small corner of my heart not totally consumed by fury. “Are you okay?”

“Okay?” I echoed, still stalking through the house. “Am I okay after being taken by Russian mobsters and kept in a hovel for days?”

My voice sounded unusual, my accent heavy, pinching the words off in the wrong places. I was, I realized distantly, on the edge of going into shock.

“Do I even know why those stronzi took me?” I asked rhetorically as I burst into my room and immediately started to peel my dirty clothes from my skin. “Burn these, Bonnie, I don’t want to see them again.”

She trailed after me, picking up my laundry as I moved into the bathroom and cranked the shower on to scalding hot.

“Did my husband even come to collect me?” I asked, louder, almost manic.

My breath felt thin in my lungs as if the oxygen had been stripped out of it.

“Does he even care that I could have been killed?” I asked, naked now, staring at my flushed body in the mirror, at the swelling, already purpling skin on my cheek where Afansay had hit me.

Did Dario even care? The question churned like poison through my veins.

“No,” I answered for myself as I raked a brush through my hair. I hissed when the bristles passed over the sensitive area of my scalp I’d hit against the wall. “No, of course, my husband does not care.”

“Fia, you know that’s not true,” Bonnie tried to argue, but I was done with my one-sided conversation, done with feeling like a discarded piece of trash.

I stepped into the walk-in shower and slammed the door so hard the glass shook ominously.

Bonnie stood there for a long moment, staring at me as I set to work soaping every inch of my body, but eventually, she let out a sigh I could hear even over the rush of water before turning on her heel to leave.

I was grateful, because it gave me the privacy I needed to cry.

Cry.

Like a child.

Like someone who had been terrorized because they had no fucking idea what was going on in their own life.

Had Dario known they would come for me? Had he received threats beforehand and dismissed them as unimportant?

How had he reacted when the blackmail notice arrived? Obviously, he had decided not to pay it.

Not to pay for the safe return of the wife he didn’t want.

A sob bubbled in my throat and burst against the wet wall of the shower.

Dio mio, it had been so long since I felt loved.

Could I even remember the sensation?

Because it was easy, now, years later and removed to imagine that my father and brothers had loved me better than they really had when I was a young girl in Sicily. They had cared, of course, but they didn’t nurture or praise. Their love was something I assumed because they were my family, because they protected me even when it felt I wore that protection as a straitjacket.

It wasn’t so very different from the way Dario treated me.

But I had to believe, if I had ever been taken, that Papà, Ricco, and Beppe would have moved heaven and earth to get me back.

They would have, I decided, as I blinked away the last of my tears.

I just wasn’t sure if it would have been because they loved me too much to lose me or if it would have been to protect their own precious reputations and authority.