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I’d taken a class in deviant sociology once, one of those electives people take in high school just to pad the schedule. But I remembered my teacher saying that criminals almost always wanted to go to confession. Many of them didn’t get nearly the same satisfaction if they couldn’t tell someone what they’d done.
Well, I was happy to be his confessor. And hopefully, if luck was on my side, I’d get to be his judge, jury, and executioner too, though I wasn’t yet sure how.
“Anna, bless her, she never stopped nagging me. I don’t even know how I got it up enough to make those two boys, and then when I had, she grew ten times worse. Had to protect her precious babies from me, their own father. I listened to her for years. I even tried gently to get her to change her mind. I didn’t want to have to take the next step. In my family, marriage is forever. The only way out is in a casket.” He sighed. “She didn’t leave me much choice.”
Horror wound through me, cold and numbing. I couldn’t stop the sound that escaped me, and he turned toward me, seemingly just realizing I was still there.
His resemblance to Giovanni—and Dante—was chilling. He had more silver in his hair, and his eyes were pure black without the streaks of blue to lighten them like Gio’s. But the coloring, the bone structure, the bearing… Everything matched the man I loved.
Whom I loved even more, after understanding he’d been through hell and had still come out the other side as the wonderful, sweet man I’d fallen for. Fucked up, for sure, but still, so very good.
“What, you don’t like that? That offends your delicate sensibilities?” He rolled his eyes.
“Bleeding hearts, all of you.”
I didn’t say a word.
He stepped closer to me, his eyes so dark that I couldn’t tell where his pupils ended and his irises began. “It’s only fitting your heart will bleed for real. I’ve decided I would enjoy making Giovanni suffer more than giving him the honor of a quick death.” He bent down to my level and rubbed his thumb over my cheek. “He has brought me no honor, so it would please me immeasurably to cause him pain. You, lovely one, may be the one who finally ends him.”
I didn’t think, simply reacted. I swung up with my loosened arm, shocked that it could even move with all the pins and needles firing in it. My hand connected with his cheek and he jerked back slightly, more surprised than anything that I was free. I grabbed the dagger around my throat and jabbed with it, shocked to feel the dagger’s sheath snapping away to reveal a blade. I kept jabbing, screaming as he grabbed my arm and twisted it until pain blared through my head.
Then came the sound of a single gunshot, the explosion so loud I would’ve covered my ears if my hand had been free. The pressure in my arm eased immediately, and Giovanni’s father dropped at my feet, blood gushing from the wound in his chest.
He’d been hit in the heart.
Nausea swarmed my belly, and quickly, I turned my face away. I was never good with blood under the best of circumstances. When I was still shaky with fear and adrenaline—oh yeah, and pregnant—it definitely wasn’t a good mix.
Dante strode in front of my chair and tucked his gun in the back of his waistband. “What’d I tell you about not letting him know you were free, fasso?”
“I’m sorry, this is my first kidnapping,” I muttered, yanking my other wrist free of the ropes. “Next time, I’ll be better.”
He bent over his father and checked his pulse. “Soft, huh?” He said a few words in Italian, words I really wish I understood. Then he touched his father’s torn up cheek. “You had a blade on you?”
I shook out my hands and held up Gio’s rosary with shaking fingers. “This. Apparently, it’s a blade inside a blade.”
And I’d sucked on it, during sex. That could’ve been problematic.
“Grazie a dio. I haven’t seen this in years.” He pivoted, still crouched, and reached out for it, still around my neck. “He let you have this?” He lifted his gaze to mine in a perceptive way that made me almost as shaky as what I’d just gone through.
I nodded, biting my lip.
“Then you must be truly special to him, for this was our mamma’s and she gave it to him when she was dying. He refused to ever take it off.” Still holding the rosary, he glanced back at his father. “Gio knew something was off with the way she passed. I refused to listen. He was right.”
Not knowing what else to do, I closed my hand around his and squeezed. He glanced back at me, his features etched in shock. “I’m sorry. I lost my mother too young too and to know it didn’t have to happen…”
He blinked, then nodded. His expression made me think he didn’t encounter empathy often, and he didn’t know what to make of it.
He turned his hand over and squeezed mine before shifting back to his father’s body.
God, those poor, lonely boys. Both of them. And it seemed that for years, they hadn’t even had each other to lean on. I would’ve died without Ame.
Oh, God, Ame.
“I have to get back.” I wiggled forward on the chair to untie my ankles and wondered if it was my imagination I couldn’t bend as easily as I once had. It must be, because I was barely pregnant. “Now.”
He rolled his father’s sightless eyes shut and made the sign of the cross. Then he rose. “Yes. There’s nothing left for us here.”
I swallowed hard. “Thank you. For saving me when you don’t even know me, and he’s your father.”
