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I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t make my mouth move or find the words even if I could.
A picture flashed on the television screen—a beautiful woman who resembled my mother, just older. Then more pictures. A man who looked like an older version of my father. Three men who were no longer the teenagers from my hazy memory, from when I last saw them.
My breath was coming fast and shallow. I was going to hyperventilate, but I couldn’t stop it any more than I could make my mouth move. The whole world was spinning wildly out of control. It had sucked me up in its chaos. Black spots flashed across my vision, speckling the picture on the glass screen.
I leaned in closer, trying to hear the reporter over my pounding heart. Something about a feud, or maybe he said “funeral.”
“Raven, I’m coming in there,” Vito said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, more like an annoying blaring alarm clock.
If he walked in here, though, and found me just sitting around, ignoring him, he’d kill me. Still, I couldn’t muster the will to move. And besides, “dead” didn’t seem to mean what it had five minutes ago.
“Dead” didn’t mean dead at all, apparently.
The doorknob turned, jarring my spinning world to a stop and bringing my senses back to me.
My mother was dead.
My mother, who’d died eleven years ago, was dead.
My father and brothers, who’d died along with her, were alive and well.
And the person who’d told me they had died:Vito Rossi.
Chapter Three
Nico
The stonewalled room was humid, the air thick with the metallic tang of the blood that dripped from the spatter on the walls and ran in rivulets toward the drain on the floor.
Even though the room had been thoroughly scrubbed before, old rust-colored stains speckled the walls and floor beneath the fresh deluge. Layer upon layer, it spoke to the purpose of the room. It told the story of the vile things that had taken place here over and over again.
I dropped my serrated combat knife on the low metal table next to me and stripped off my shirt, using it to wipe the sweat from my brow like a blood-soaked rag. I chucked the rag on the table, the movement serving as a painful reminder that the hostage had gotten a good shot in, leaving a giant black-and-blue bruise across my ribs.
I operated on a principle of strength: I never tied my hostages to a chair. If he could go toe to toe with me, then maybe I wasn’t the one who should have been doing the killing.
The guy had given me a name—just like I knew he would. Diego Berlusconi—the name of a middleman, maybe, but not one I’d ever heard linked to the Luca family. Or any other family.
This left me with a dilemma:Hand over the truth of what I’d found at Aunt Isabella’s house to Lorenzo or keep my mouth shut?
I walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind me. It wasn’t like the guy could escape now. Down the hall to the wall at the end, it didn’t take me long to find the lever that opened the false wall.
The loud music from above thudded through the ceiling. It was barely after midnight, so it would be hours before Onyx shut down for the night. As much as I would rather have headed up the stairs and out the rear exit to the car waiting in the back parking lot, I turned instead into the second room on the left. I couldn’t go wandering around the club floor shirtless and covered in blood. It might have aroused suspicions. I say “might” because a visit to this club had been known to leave more than the occasional cuts and bruises, lashes and rope burns. It all depended on what the club goer was interested in.
Inside the room, a spacious glass-walled shower stood against the opposite wall surrounded by plush sofas and chairs, all arranged for optimal viewing. Fortunately, the room was otherwise empty.
I stripped off the rest of my blood-spattered clothes, pressed the button to start the shower, and stepped beneath the hot spray. It burned like a thousand tiny flames. I welcomed the heat, gritting my teeth and taking it inside me like it could burn away every memory of the past hour, but it never did. No matter how many times I tried to burn or wash it away, the memories were still there.
The screams, the cries of agony, the blood, the torn flesh. Always there. Always threatening to burst free from the deep, dark vault I kept them locked in inside my mind.
And now we were poised for more bloodshed. A war, if I opted to tell my father about the name I found carved into Aunt Isabella’s arm.
I was running out of time to make a decision.
Within minutes, all proof of the monster I was had washed away. I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my waist. I pulled out the spare change of clothing I kept buried in the back of the liquor cabinet against the far left wall. Pants, socks, and an Armani shirt, I’d only just finished getting dressed when my cell phone I’d left on the sofa started to ring. There was little chance anything but a headache waited on the other end of the line.
I glanced at my phone screen.Lorenzo.
Make no mistake; my father wasn’t in the habit of making social calls. The only time the man ever called was when he wanted something. Still, I snatched up the phone and answered it to stop the ringing, feeling the weight of the decision I had to make like a boulder on my shoulders.
