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Lorenzo Carmine threw out his hands in greeting, but Romeo glimpsed the wariness in the old man’s eyes. ‘Welcome, mio figlio. Come, I have lunch waiting for us.’
Romeo tensed. ‘I’m not your son and this meeting will not last beyond five minutes, so I suggest you tell me what you withheld in your letter right now and stop wasting my time.’ He didn’t bother to hide the sneer in his voice.
Lorenzo’s pale grey eyes flared with a temper Romeo had witnessed the last time he was here. But along with it came the recognition that Romeo was no longer a frightened little boy incapable of defending himself. Slowly, his expression altered into a placid smile.
‘You have to pardon me. My constitution requires that I strictly regulate my mealtimes or I suffer for it.’
Romeo turned towards the door, again regretting his decision to come here. He was wasting his time looking for answers in stone and concrete. He was wasting his time, full stop.
‘Then by all means go and look after your constitution. Enjoy the rest of your days and don’t bother contacting me again.’ He stepped towards the door, a note of relief spiking through him at the thought of leaving this place.
‘Your father left something for you. Something you will want to see.’
Romeo stopped. ‘He was not my father and there’s nothing he possesses in this life or the next that could possibly interest me.’
Lorenzo sighed. ‘And yet you came all this way at my request. Or was it just to stick out your middle finger at an old man?’
Romeo’s jaw clenched, hating that the question he’d been asking himself fell from the lips of a man who’d spent his whole life being nothing but a vicious thug. ‘Just spit it out, Carmine,’ he gritted out.
Lorenzo glanced at the nearer bodyguard and nodded. The beefy minder headed down the long hallway and disappeared.
‘For the sake of my friend, your father, the Almighty rest his soul, I will go against my doctor’s wishes.’ The remaining guard fell into step behind Lorenzo, who indicated a room to their left.
From memory, Romeo knew it was the holding room for visitors, a garishly decorated antechamber that led to the receiving room, where his father had loved to hold court.
The old man shuffled to a throne-like armchair and sank heavily into it. Romeo chose to remain standing and curbed the need to pace like a caged animal.
Although he’d come through the desolation of his ragged past, he didn’t care for the brutal reminders everywhere he looked. The corner of this room was where he’d crouched when his father’s loud lambasting of a minion had led to gunshots and horrific screams the first time he’d been brought here. The gilt-framed sofa was where his father had forced him to sit and watch as he’d instructed his lieutenants to beat Paolo Giordano into a pulp.
He didn’t especially care for the reminder that it was possibly because of Fattore’s blood running through his veins that he’d almost taken the same violent path when, tired of living on the streets, he’d almost joined a terror-loving gang feared for their ruthlessness.
Sì, he should’ve stayed far away, in the warmth of his newest and most lavish by-invitation-only Caribbean resort.
His eyes narrowed as the second bodyguard returned with a large ornately carved antique box and handed it to Lorenzo. ‘It’s a good thing your father chose to keep an eye on you, wasn’t it?’ Lorenzo said.
‘Scusi?’ Romeo rasped in astonishment.
Lorenzo waved his hand. ‘Your mother, the Almighty rest her unfortunate soul, attempted to do her best, but we all knew she didn’t have what it took, eh?’
Romeo barely stopped his lips from curling. The subject of his mother was one he’d sealed under strict lock and key, then thrown into a vault the night he’d buried her five years ago.
The same night he’d let his guard down spectacularly with a woman whose face continued to haunt him when he least expected it. A woman who had, for the first time in a long time, made him want to feel the warmth of human emotion.
A tremor went through him at the memory, its deep and disturbing effect as potent, if not more so, than it’d been that night when he’d realised that his emotions weren’t as clinical and icy as he’d imagined them to be.
He shut down that line of thought.
Maisie O’Connell had had no place in his life then, save as a means of achieving a few hours of oblivion, and she most certainly didn’t have one now, in this cursed place. Like the bush outside this miscreation of a mansion, she represented a time in his life he wanted banished for all time.
