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It had given him much.
Money, education, power.
But it had taken a vast amount from him as well.
His mother had loved him.
But she had been powerless to stand against the powerful Valenti Company when it came to defending her rights to her child.
Krav himself had been five.
He could scarcely remember anything before coming to Italy.
Just vague pictures of a room with bright pink walls and a soft voice speaking to him in his native language.
Then he’d been thrust into a world with unfamiliar nannies, words he didn’t understand and a distant, tyrannical father.
He’d survived it. And he’d thought he’d survived it well.
His mother remained his one weakness. He ached for her, all of his life. Like there was a hole in his chest where his heart had once been. It caused him pain, always. His father had been quick to point out that pain like that was nothing more than human frailty, and Valenti men could not surrender to such things.
He had only done so with her.
Her death had...
It had rocked him in a way he had not imagined anything could. And then Riot had been there.
Riot. A ridiculous name for a girl with blond hair and an accent thick and sweet like honey. She had looked like a forest nymph with her hair all curled from the rain and her brightly colored dress plastered to her body by the rain, her cheeks pink from the sun, her nose scattered with freckles.
And her touch had been a revelation.
He had felt more in those moments with her than he could recall feeling in the whole of his life.
He gritted his teeth and kept his focus determinedly on the scene below. “What about her?”
“She has been injured.”
“What?” he turned sharply, and for the first time really looked at the man delivering the message.
But it was not his face he saw.
It was Riot.
Her face full of joy and wonder as she’d looked at the tree house. At him. At everything.
And then devastated that night...that last night.
Injured.
He thought of her lying on the ground, broken. Then he thought of that night he’d broken her. That night all his poison had spilled out and destroyed the world they’d lived in.
Dio, what had he been thinking?
Those months with her. All sun and sex and brightness and he’d been pretending. It had only been a matter of time before the darkness leaked out of him, and it had.
From the first time he’d seen her to the last, she’d gone from pure joy to pure anguish. And it was him. All him.
She was hurt now, though.
