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Cali stayed with me while I quickly got dressed. I’d showered sometime in the night with Ryan, but he’d only gotten me dirty all over again once we were back in bed. I should have taken another shower, but there wasn’t enough time. Mom and Anya had already been alone too long as it was.
Not exactly alone, though. When I entered the family room, Mom’s favorite room in the house, Dad and Cristiano were sitting beside their wives. The two of them were doing most of the talking, but from the set of their shoulders, I could tell they felt the tension between the two women.
Anya’s and Cristiano’s backs were turned to me, but Dad saw me as I entered the room, and his whole face transformed. I hadn’t spent much time with him the day before, but he’d more than made up for leaving me behind. With everything that had been going on at the time, everyone’s emotions were scattered. We were all damaged from what had happened, and I was learning that my experience was the lesser evil of the ordeal.
But while my experience might not have been as fucked up as what they had gone through, my emotional trauma had messed with my head and made me think that everyone abandoned me. Now I knew that if my d
ad had thought for even a moment that I was still alive, there wasn’t a force on this earth that would have kept him from getting to me. I didn’t know how Sheena had accomplished it, but she’d gotten even Ryan to believe that the girl he’d seen was me, and it was his belief in my death that had convinced my parents I was gone.
The change in Dad didn’t go unnoticed, and Cristiano shifted to follow his gaze. His eyes went to Cali first, and his brows pulled together until his dark eyes landed on me. Tears filled the mafioso’s eyes, his throat working hard as a choked noise left him. “Nova.”
The sound of something breaking drew my gaze to Anya. She sat there, her shaking hands no longer holding on to her coffee cup—that was now shattered into little pieces at her feet. Her face was pale, her eyes glazed with tears.
“You’re…” She jumped to her feet and took a hesitant step toward me. “Nova, you’re…”
“You trained her so well, Anya,” Mom said in a deceptively sweet tone. “How could you ever imagine any other outcome except for her survival?”
A painful knot squeezed my insides. Mom had hinted that she knew something when she’d sent me to retrieve Garret, but I’d tried to convince myself that she hadn’t guessed the full truth. Obviously, I’d only been fooling myself.
“She told you?” Anya asked weakly.
“No,” Mom denied, glaring up at the other woman. “But after what happened when she was thirteen, I had a theory. Nova came home with far too many bruises after her Paris trips for me not to wonder what the two of you were getting up to. Shopping is not a contact sport, after all.”
“What are you talking about?” Dad muttered beside her, his green gaze going back and forth between the two brunettes.
Mom ignored him, keeping her attention focused solely on Anya. “Raven taught her enough self-defense to get by, and between her father, uncles, and Ryan, I knew she could handle a gun. But a teenage girl taking on two grown men who outweigh her by at least a hundred pounds each—hired killers, no less—and her coming out the victor with nothing more than a knife wound? It makes a mother wonder. Then she magically comes back from the dead, is standing in my kitchen alive and well, with no visible marks on her? Between Guzman and Maria, I was able to put together what happened to her down in that basement. Raven sure as fuck didn’t teach her how to break a man’s neck with her thighs.”
“Fuck, Annie,” Cristiano groaned. “Tell me you didn’t spend your Christmas trips with Nova teaching her to be an assassin. Ryan will go ballistic.”
“Of course I didn’t teach her to be an assassin!” she denied adamantly. “I would never put that kind of life on her. I simply taught her how to take care of herself. I knew they would come for her, and I needed to protect Ryan by protecting her. And yes, I know he will go ballistic if he finds out. That’s why we kept it from everyone.”
Mom jumped to her feet. “If you trained her so well, then how could you think that whoever was on that table was her?”
“Sheena thought of everything.” Anya tried to defend herself. “The blond hair, the same outfit Nova wore out that night. But it was the necklace that convinced me. She never took it off. Never. I knew that someone would have to decapitate her before she willingly allowed it to leave her. And that’s what Sheena did!” She was breathing heavily, her small body shaking with emotion. “And then Ciana drove that assumption home by saying she saw it happen. She couldn’t take her eyes off what was left… She swore it was Nova.”
“Huh,” Cristiano said, his brows pulling together. “You know, I always wondered why that crazy bitch took her hands and feet. She hadn’t planned on Nova getting a tattoo. I guess she took them to freak Ryan out, but also to hide the lack of ink.”
“Keep your theories to yourself, moye zolto,” his wife advised, keeping her gaze locked cautiously on Mom. “We don’t need to think about that poor girl at the moment.”
“I’m just saying, Sheena wasn’t stupid.” He shrugged before taking another drink of his coffee. Standing, he placed the cup on the table between the two couches. As he approached, I felt my heart melt a little. Cristiano had always treated me as one of his own. I was just as much a daughter to him as Samara. The emotion on his face matched my dad’s from the day before when he’d first seen me. “I’m so happy to see you, figlia.”
He wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug and lifted me off my feet. I hugged him back, releasing a light laugh. “You’ve gotten even more beautiful than I remember.” He placed me on my feet and cupped one side of my face. “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.” I couldn’t help myself and hugged him again. “How was the flight? Have you been shown a room?”
“Don’t worry about us. Your parents have us taken care of.” He glanced at Cali then the empty doorway. “Has my son finally rolled out of bed yet? Now that I know he wasn’t out of his mind last night, I’m curious to know how he’s taking your rise from the dead.”
I still wasn’t sure what Ryan was thinking about everything. He’d been so caught up in…other things, that we hadn’t talked about anything important. Like how angry he was that I hadn’t come home to him right after killing Manuel. An angry Ryan sent people running for cover, but I’d never been a recipient of it. I didn’t know what was going to happen.
51
Ryan
The moment I opened my eyes, I knew Nova wasn’t beside me. My heart dropped, and I wondered if the night before had been nothing more than a dream after all. But then I shifted and felt the scratches on my back and knew it was reality. She’d been a lioness, her nails like claws raking over my flesh, marking me as thoroughly as I had her.
The need to see her, touch her—fucking hold on to her every second of the day—became too overwhelming. I jumped out of bed and jerked on clothes in a rush before going in search of my angel. Somehow I’d been given a miracle, and I wasn’t about to waste even a minute of having Nova back.
Retracing my steps from the night before, I found the family room where Felicity and Jet had been with Garret, but as I drew closer, I heard familiar voices. Glad my parents had arrived, I was already wondering how fast we could get a priest to the house when something Mom said caught my attention and had me pausing just outside the door. Instinct told me I wanted to hear what they were talking about without interrupting, so I fought the need to have Nova in my sights.
