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I nodded once. My brain was playing tricks on me, tugging at that gossamer thread trailing all the way from my Olivia to the cold depths of my heart.
“I need to go,” I said. “I don’t want to waste time. Do you all have your burners?”
They nodded and we exchanged numbers. Then I left them standing at the edge of the cliff and strode through the dark to where I’d parked the rental car at the edge of the road.
When I’d left Greece, I’d had a fake persona drawn up for me. Here, I was Adam Bradley, a middle class accountant from Wisconsin. The stock image on the ID I carried was altered to look like me, but just different enough it wouldn’t raise any flags.
In the car, I tugged the neck gaiter up over my mouth and nose and pulled back onto the highway. My foot sank down on the gas pedal slowly and the car sped up until the trees and fields streaked by. I kept my eyes ahead, ignoring the sights I knew by heart.
I pulled up a half mile from my front gate and flicked the lights off before parking the car in a nearby field. I shut the door and began striding through the dewy grass, my boots already soaked. The sky hung heavy with stars and the moon was an orange disk against soft, black velvet.
Olivia would love this sky. Perhaps she was sitting in the window with the lamp lit, drinking in the sight. Ever since our trip to Russia for our honeymoon, she’d found so much comfort in the stars. When we’d moved into the renovated Romano mansion, I’d built her a ballroom with a glass ceiling so she could dance under them.
She used to go to the ballroom when she couldn’t find rest. I’d found her there when she’d gotten to the end of her pregnancy with the twins. She’d risen because she was too swollen and exhausted to sleep and left me alone in bed.
I tracked her down and discovered her curled up on the ballroom floor one night. She found it most comfortable while pregnant to curl up in my lap with her stomach supported on my lower leg. I sank down and pulled her into that position and stroked her hair silently until her lids closed.
I sat there for the rest of the night, hours and hours, and watched her sleep. Overhead was the most beautiful sky of stars I’d ever seen, but still I couldn’t tear my eyes from the woman in my lap. She was more lovely than the galaxy bursting with color above our heads.
I drew up outside the gates of my home. I knew it would be bad, but I hadn’t anticipated the feeling that spread through me.
My jaw twitched. Like a kick right to the gut.
He’d burned my house to the ground and in its place was a two-story compound. He’d poured concrete where Olivia grew her white roses and he’d parked a line of SUVs in the yard where my sons had played. The darkest kind of rage, so wild it felt like a wave of cold, curled through me and settled deep in my stomach.
He could have lived anywhere else and he’d chosen to pave over my wife’s garden.
Right there, in the dark on the other side of the bars, I decided it was important that I was the one who did it. Like I had with Carlo Romano and Rosario Barone. I needed to be the man who pinned his writhing body to the ground and slit his veins open. There was a certain satisfaction I got from cutting up my enemies with a knife that I didn’t get from shooting a gun.
Before this, I was going to kill him quietly with a gun and silencer. But not now—no, now I wanted to feel his blood grow sticky between my fingers. I would slit his throat, or perhaps slice the artery on his inner thigh and watch him bleed out on the ground.
Perhaps on the bit of earth he’d chosen to deface.
It had to be done this way. The sense of justice I’d developed from living under my father’s abuse needed to make him pay.
If Olivia saw what he’d done to her home, she would be ruined.
My fingers closed on the bar and my knuckles burned with how hard I gripped it.
It wasn’t just about this house or this garden. When I’d met Olivia, she was so small and frightened. Her heart was sensitive and her body was thin from years of abuse. On these ground, in the house I’d built, she’d grown strong and discovered what it felt like to live in her home without fear.
It was her healing space. And he’d violated that.
My eyes caught a flicker of movement. The sliding door opened and I stepped back and melted into the shadows. Riccardo Mezzasalma appeared in a pair of dark shorts and walked out to the steaming pool. I saw him bend down and hit a button and the water began frothing.
I cocked my head. Watching him back up and dive in.
Beneath the water, his eyes would be closed. And if he opened them, all he would see was frothy blue.
Perhaps someone was waiting at the bottom of the pool. Perhaps they would dive up through the water and slit his inner thigh so his blood spilled out and filled the pool with roiling crimson. Perhaps they would drag him, still alive, onto the pavement and let him bleed out.
Slowly.
A sick sense of satisfaction filled my chest.
All I needed to do now was wait.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
