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She saw his hand come to her braid, wrapping it around his fist. “What has you waking me up at this hour then, my lady?” he asked, flirting.
Amara smiled, but her mind was still on the paintings outside. “I need to ask you something about your mother.”
He frowned but leaned back against the pillows. “Sure.”
“According to Alpha, she was an art student who was kidnapped by Lorenzo Maroni and brought here, right?”
Dante nodded in confirmation, his eyes narrowing at her question.
“And she used to paint with you and your brother?”
“Yes, but where is this going?” Dante asked, his voice thick from sleep.
Amara swallowed. “And you found her with Damien in the room with her wrists slit?”
His jaw clenched but he nodded.
“Does Damien remember anything from that time?”
The braid left his fist. “I don’t know. He was too young at the time. If he did remember anything, he never told me, and I asked.”
“Just answer one last question,” Amara beseeched him, taking a hold of his big, rough hand in both of hers, her eyes earnest on his. “Do you have more paintings by her?”
He shook his head. “My father pretty much threw most of them out in his rage. The ones outside are the only ones I could save. What’s all this, Amara?”
Amara bit her lip, not knowing how to tell him what she had learned. She inhaled, taking in the musky scent of his warm skin. “Your mother felt hunted, Dante,” she whispered quietly in the space between them.
“How can you say that?” his voice came out hoarse.
“The paintings,” Amara looked into his dark, chocolate eyes. “I studied them in school. Seeing them all together, it’s all wrong. Was her death odd? Especially that she would kill herself with her child in the room?”
Dante’s grip tightened on her hand.
“Could it be that she didn’t slit her own wrists, Dante?” Amara felt her lips tremble. “Or if she did, something drove her to it? Could it be that she was murdered?”
They had no answers, even as more questions were born.
He called Damien.
After the suspicion Amara had shared with him, Dante hadn’t been able to let it go. He tried to remember his mother, her sad eyes, her wide smile, her love for him and his brother. The more he remembered, the more he realized she never would have killed herself with one of them in the room. For years, he’d hated his mother slightly for abandoning them both, and now, standing with the phone to his ear, he was nothing but rage.
It wasn’t his father. Dante knew that. For one, if his father had to kill her, he never would have married her. Once she became the wife of Bloodhound Maroni, she became untouchable. Her death had been a blow to his pride, and there had been nothing his father loved more than his ego. He had been angry, very angry, that she had thrown that insult at him, her suicide like a slap to his face.
The call connected and his brother’s voice, one he hadn’t heard in weeks, came on. “Dante!”
He could tell his brother was smiling. “How are you, Damien?”
“Good, good,” Damien said, and Dante could imagine him nodding his head. He liked doing that. Nodding, shaking out his hands, tapping his feet. Dante had learned his brother’s habits as a child, loving him as he was.
“How is Alia?” Dante asked, referring to the woman in his brother’s life. They had met through a mutual friend. She was an interior designer, and from what Dante could tell, a sweet girl good for his brother.
“Good,” Damien’s masculine voice said over the phone. “We started a dance class together.”
Dante smiled, imagining his tall brother and the tiny woman dancing, both uncoordinated as fuck. “How’s that working out?”
“It’s not,” his
brother chuckled. “But we have fun.”
