AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Amadeo’s brow furrowed as he took a tentative step closer.
“You’re not afraid?” he asked, though it didn’t feel much like a question even without being able to hear the inflection in his tone.
I curled my toes in the grass, then stretched them out. He was right; I wasn’t afraid. I was overwhelmed and horrified by what I’d seen, but not afraid that I would meet the same end as the broken, bleeding man in the basement.
“Who was he?” I asked, though even in his battered state, I’d recognized him. The man from the hospital, the man who’d started an itch in my brain because something about him had seemed terribly familiar.
“He was the asshole who tried to kill that kid,” Amadeo said, nodding back toward the house. “You were right to send him out of the kid’s hospital room, but he just waited for shift change at the hospital to come back to finish the job.”
“How do you know that’s why he was there? Would a man really admit to such a horrific thing?”
Amadeo crossed his arms over his chest in a semi-relaxed stance, but I could see the way his hands were curled into fists.
“Raven and I walked into the room and he had a pillow over the kid’s face. I’d say his intentions were pretty clear.”
“Bloody hell.”
I felt sick. A moment or two longer, and the boy would have been dead. A boy whose blood had seeped out around my gloved fingers this morning. A boy whose tachycardic pulse had thudded beneath them.
Death was sneaky, it seemed. Even when I’d bested it, it had come back, slinking through the shadows and creeping into a boy’s hospital room late at night.
But Amadeo had done the same thing I’d done; he’d stepped in, thwarted Death. He’d saved Grayson Thomas’s life, even if he’d gone about it in a different way.
I licked my dry lips and took a shaky breath.
“I understand why you killed that man,” I said, and I truly did, even if I wasn’t sure I would ever have been able to stand in his shoes and pull the trigger. “But you didn’t just kill him, Amadeo. Youtorturedhim. Aurelio tortured him. Why?” I pinned him with a gaze that wasn’t quite accusatory, but it was far from accepting.
He laced his fingers behind his neck, shaking his head slowly. “You might not like what we had to do—and if you hadn’t been wandering where you shouldn’t, you never would have seen it, Heidi—but it needed to be done.”
“I can’t imagine—”
“Do you want to know what that asshole proposed I do to you?” he cut in.
“Me? What have I to do with this?”
“He thought I should tie you up and torture youuntil you led me to a fortune.”
I scoffed. “Have I not already done that?”
“He thinks your father stashed more—a lot more.”
“This was all about money? Grayson Thomas’s life? Brutal torture?” I looked up at Amadeo warily. Was money whatthiswas about as well? I wondered.
“Christ, you know me better than that,perla,” he answered like I’d spoken aloud.
“Do I?” I asked, but even before the words were out, I realized I did. When that had happened, I wasn’t quite sure.
He took a step closer, closing the distance between us in one long stride.
“I do want to tie you up,” he admitted. His lips moved with less enunciation than usual, and I imagined his voice was little more than a whisper. “But when I make you scream, it will be in pleasure, I guarantee it.”
Hot and cold shivers raced up and down my spine.
“And just to make sure we’re clear; I don’t give a flying fuck about your money.”
“It’s not my money,” I said, trying to sound composed even as my breath was coming harder and a fire ignited between my thighs. It felt wrong, so wrong that it made my stomach roil a little to think of becoming aroused so soon after the horrid thing I’d seen.
“It was your father’s money—however he came by it—which means it’s now yours. If you don’t want to look for it, don’t. I really don’t care,perla.”
