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I pull her down and we lie in the bed spooned together. When she wakes me with a nightmare, I hold her, and she settles back down. What she explained sounds like torture, and after seeing her body, I don’t doubt that’s what she went through. The scars make more sense now.
We wake early before Vittoria, and I leave a note with the housekeeper to give to her when she wakes. I know my papà will be upset that I’m not meeting with him, and just doing what I’m doing is grounds for treason in the family, but one thing I figured out while Luna slept in my arms is that I love her, and I want her.
She is mine.
* * *
Luna
We have been on the road for almost an hour when Dario pulls the car through a large set of gates into an expansive vineyard. I sit up and look around me. Something about this place causes a niggling in the back of my mind. My head starts hurting, and I hold it between my hands, hoping to hold it together because it feels like it’s going to explode.
“Luna, are you okay?” Dario puts his hand on my thigh.
We had to stop at a boutique on our way out of town since he left all of my clothes at the hotel. I’m dressed in a pair of brand-new jeans with holes in the knees and a long black shirt that looks like a dress on one side and stops at my waist on the other. It’s long-sleeved and covers the wounds I sustained last night in the hotel. I have on black knee-high heeled boots in a soft buttery leather.
His hand on my knees stirs me from the pain in my head.
“Headache,” I tell him. “This happens when I have a memory. It’s like they are fighting their way out. But this time my head feels like it’s going to explode.”
He pulls up into a circular driveway in front of a large manor that has flowers all around. Vines climb the walls. It’s old, and I feel like I’ve been here before. I lean forward, hoping I don’t yack up everything in my stomach as the pain rolls through my brain more.
A voice in my head is telling me to kill. Something about this place brings back a memory of the doctor telling me that I need to kill. My palms itch for weapons. I need to kill those that live here. They are bad, evil, or something else. This is the person Dario was supposed to lead me to.
My door opens, and I look up into Dario’s soft hazel eyes. The brown ringed in green, and I sink into them to focus myself. To remember I’m not just a killer.
“Everything okay over there?” a deep voice that rattles through my mind too says. But this time the memories of running and laughing are greater than the kill order. Dario pulls me from the automobile, hiding the man from me.
“I trust you,” Dario says softly in my ear as he kisses it, and the pain subsides for a moment. The voices silence. It’s just Dario and me.
Dario turns our bodies after he helps me out of the car. I see a large man just a hair taller than Dario. He has thick muscles and dark chocolatey brown eyes. The scruff that lines his face is dark. He reaches his hand out to me, and I realize I’m staring. But something about this man is so familiar. Something deep inside me clicks as soon as our hands touch.
“Dante Lupo.” His deep voice washes over me, and my eyes start to roll back as I collapse against him. Memories flood my mind, and my head feels like it exploded.
“Caro fratello,” I say in a whisper, calling him what I did when I was a little girl.
“What?” He grabs for me and pulls me to his chest. I hear the voices all around me, but I see it.
The car ride to the church, the woman, the priest, the doctor, and all the killing. But the image of the doctor telling me I need to kill him is foremost in my brain. I can’t kill my own brother. I won’t kill him.
“Luna Lou,” he says in a broken sob as he holds me to him.
“Hey, give me my girl,” I hear Dario yelling, but it all fades as more and more memories flash behind my eyes.
Torture.
Pain.
Rape.
Death.
ChapterEight
DARIO
Imove on Dante to take Luna from his arms, but he pulls a gun from his back and aims it at me.
“How do you have her? Where did you get her?” he barks orders. His wife, McKenna, who followed him outside is crying and holding his arm.
