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Fresh sobs clambered up my chest, but before they could slip out, the sound of a voice forced them back in my throat.
“Buona sera,Raven,” the voice spoke from my other side.
I whipped my head around, recognizing the voice.
“Gabe?”
“Fancy meeting you here,signorina.” His words came out sluggish like he was just coming awake too.
He was sitting on the floor next to me, his knees drawn up and his back against the post, caught in the thin sliver of light from the lampposts outside. It took a moment to recognize his awkward position.
He was shackled to the post like me.
From our brief meeting, Gabe had struck me as a man with perhaps a more easygoing countenance than Nico, but he still gave off the same lethal energy as his brother. He would have been no easy man to capture, and his presence here blew up the tentative theory I’d been formulating that Lorenzo Costa was somehow behind my abduction.
“What are you doing here?”
He shrugged. “I had some time on my hands.”
I scoffed. “And this was your idea of a good way to spend an evening?”
“I hear it’s good to mix things up every once in a while. The spice of life and all that, right?”
“How can you be so calm?” I glanced at Cesare.
And yet, he laughed. “If you grew up in my home, you’d find that not much fazed you. Besides, Nico might not be aware ofmycurrent predicament, but he knows you’ve been taken.”
My heart clenched painfully in my chest, but at the same time, bubbles of hope surged through my veins before I could tamp it down. I squeezed my eyes shut and thrust it away, letting his parting words play over in my head.
“Because you’ll always be a Luca.”
“I’m sorry, Gabe, but I wouldn’t count on him calling in the cavalry.” The bubbles popped, and I had to fight to keep my voice from cracking.
He reached out and put his free hand on my arm. “My brother will move heaven and earth to find you,signorina. And I don’t envy what he’s going to do to the people who took you.”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice. I would never be more than a passing entertainment to Nico because in the end, he’d never trust me. And no one moved heaven and earth for a passing entertainment.
He sighed and squeezed my arm. “My brother can be confusing at times, but once you learn to read between the lines, he’s much easier to understand. Whatever he said to you, Sofia, he said because he’s afraid. You bring out a side of him he tries to keep hidden. A side that can be hurt… rejected.”
Hurt? Rejected? They just didn’t seem like words in Nico’s dictionary. He was strong, confident, nearly invincible. The other words just made him sound so…human.
But it didn’t matter. Well, it did, in my heart, but I didn’t share Gabe’s confidence that anyone was going to find us. How could they? I didn’t even know where we were.
I never thought I’d face it so calmly—the end. Death. It wasn’t that I wasn’t terrified—my whole body was shaking and, if I was being honest, it wasn’t entirely due to the cold. But I would have expected more tears, more silent bargaining with whatever deities might have been listening.
My mind tried to shy away from it, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this was how my mother had felt, afraid of the void, the blackness that was coming, but almost resigned to the inevitability of it.
If it weren’t for the people I was leaving behind, perhaps I could have resigned myself entirely, but I couldn’t stop the images of Nico from flashing through my mind. And Dominic, Greta, Vito. I’d never see them again.
Tears trickled down my cheeks, and I swiped at them angrily. All I had left was my composure. I couldn’t let Diego take that too.
“How… how did you end up here?” I asked, grasping for something, anything.
He laughed. “I can’t quite say. One minute I was heaving a dead body up off the floor and the next…” he said, motioning around us.
My eyes widened at his suddenly free hand.
“Shhh,” he said before I could open my mouth. The sound was little more than a breath. “We’ve got company,” he whispered just as quietly.
