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How had that happened?
How had I let it happen?
I wanted to prove Molly Greene to be savvy and capable. But this felt like playing fast and loose with her life. Being raised a Varasso, I used to excel at hiding how I felt most of the time. Exposing fear or a lack of confidence could get me or my family killed otherwise. Yet keeping up my usual barriers around this woman seemed more challenging than it should be.
Maybe because her hardy exterior concealed her inner vulnerability, feelings long asleep within me were being awakened every time I went around her. And she had noticed. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or not.
“Tara, it’s me. Can you pick up?” she spoke into the line, and I held my breath. Alessandro had tapped this phone, recording every word she uttered. “Please pick up.” She paused for a beat. “I’m going to be away from home and out of touch for a while. I quit my job with the Bentons and need some time to reflect. Don’t worry about me, though. Take care of yourself.”
She ended the call without one word about us.
I closed my eyes in relief. She’d cleared the first hurdle. Christ.
I could swear my heart had climbed out of my rib cage to take up residence in my throat. An odd sensation to say the least. It took two full minutes for my heart to settle back down and my pulse to return to normal. Only then was I able to put on the façade of nonchalance. “Feel better now?”
“A little bit. I wish she would’ve picked up, though. I’d hoped to hear her voice.”
“Next time,” I assured her, and though she’d been looking at her knees during the call, now she focused on me.
“There’s going to be a next time?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Her whiskey brown eyes gazed into mine. We stood about five feet apart, and I felt this yearning to close the distance. As if of their own accord, my feet took a step forward. Then another. Her spicy cinnamon essence reached out to me like a siren call, encouraging me to move faster. And amazingly, she didn’t move away.
We were within inches of one another when an outburst of noise echoed from upstairs, the reports of multiple gunshots. I stopped and jerked my head to gape at the closed door; my baby girl was on the third floor. Pulling my nine-millimeter from my waistband, I thundered up the stairwell, the bleachy taste of terror coating my tongue.
It wasn’t until I sprinted across the length of the kitchen that I registered that Molly had followed me out of the room. I tossed her an assessing glance.
“Hey, we’re supposed to be a team now, right?” she provided, and I didn’t take the time to inquire about her motives. I had to make certain my daughter was safe.
With Molly in my wake, I hurried past our now unused formal dining room with my mother’s monstrosity of an oak table and ran full tilt toward our master staircase. The staircase led to the upper floors and lay just inside of the main entrance to the house. As I entered the marble-tiled foyer, I heard voices.
Catching a flash of movement, I slowed to investigate it. Aiming my weapon, I turned a blind corner. What I found as I crossed the threshold was a nightmare of epic proportions.
At least twenty men had infiltrated our mansion, and most of them had their weapons trained on me.
Recognition dawned as my gazed flitted over them. The Bianchi family. They were a rival mafia family who controlled a section of the city we’d agreed decades before to avoid. Preserving separate territories and respecting those boundaries ensured a fair cut of the funds across the board, and we all worked to maintain the delicate balance of power.
They’d managed to either restrain or incapacitate each of my brothers.
Knocked out, Marco rested against the balustrade, his leg pumping copious amounts of blood onto the priceless oriental rug beneath him. Alessandro was slumped unconscious at the foot of the stairs, and Gabriel, looking as pissed as I’d ever seen him, struggled within the arms of two men more than twice his size.
The sight that brought all my senses to a screeching halt, though, was the one of my father. He lay spread eagle on the mat inside the front double doors, a bullet hole visible at his temple. His eyes were open but fixed, the pool of blood beneath his skull staining more and more of the white marble floor.
Angelo Varasso was dead.
“Ah, the Crown Prince makes an appearance.” This came from Donovan Bianchi, the patriarch of their clan.
“You fucking son of a bitch!” I shouted at him, feeling the frosty tendrils of shock needling its way through my bones like the tremors of an earthquake.
“No,” Donovan boomed, his voice nearly as enraged as mine as he pointed at my father. “That’s the son of a bitch.”
“What’re you…”
But he didn’t allow me to finish my question. “Angelo double-crossed us. He’s been sending runners into our midst, siphoning funds from the establishments we’ve had control over for more than thirty years.”
“Lies,” Gabriel yelled, but Donovan didn’t offer him so much as a glance.
