She hadn’t told him she loved him. Never said the words. Not properly. She’d let him walk away, into the gravest danger,without telling him how she felt. It didn’t matter that he knew it. She should have said it.
Fresh tears welled up. She blinked them away and firmly told herself not to cry.
Why hadn’t she said the words? Niccolo had laid his heart bare for her, and she’d absorbed it without saying anything.
Because that’s what she did, she realised. Absorbed. Whenever there had been emotional pain to deal with, Callie had pushed herself forward to take the blows for them both. Georgia had absorbed the aftershocks. It had been shared. She’d never had to deal with anything alone.
And then she’d met Niccolo.
That time in Paris when he’d told her about Siena and made his insulting offer to her, Georgia’s world had come crashing down on her, but Callie hadn’t been there. For the first time in her life, Georgia had had to handle emotional pain alone, and she’d been completely incapable of handling it rationally. Her heart had been threatened, and she’d lashed out.
Sixteen minutes.
Please, God, keep him safe.
Was it emotional pain or emotional threat that made her lash out, she now wondered, trying her hardest not to fall into a daze of memories as the steady convoy of mourners drove out of the cemetery. So far, no one had given her a second glance, but she kept the gun tight in her right hand and the burner phone tight in her left.
It had been an emotional threat she’d reacted to in Paris. The threat to her heart.
When she’d believed the life of her child to be threatened in the Bayswater flat, she’d lashed out physically. That had been the first time she’d ever used violence.
Then, earlier in the hotel room, Niccolo’s proposal had put her heart under threat again, and she’d lashed out verbally.Already knotted with fear over what was to come with the Espositos, she’d been too wound-up and frightened to believe him. Too frightened of going through the pain of Paris and its aftermath again.
Nineteen minutes.
God, please, please keep him safe.
“Got to hand it to you, you’ve got some nerve showing up like this.” So said Tommaso Esposito, the second oldest of Lorenzo’s offspring and the most unpredictable and volatile.
Niccolo shrugged and widened his smile. Now that the time had come, he felt strangely calm.
Mattia and Tommaso had crossed the cemetery to him alone. The other mourners had gone, but a handful of Esposito dogs remained. All it would need was one signal from either of Lorenzo’s sons, and Niccolo’s body would be riddled with bullets. But gunning him down was too easy. Too painless. They had much better things planned for him before they let him die.
“How was the funeral?” he asked, as if they were three old friends who’d bumped into each other and stopped for a catch-up.
If a smile could cause a death, the smile Tommaso bestowed on him would see Niccolo fall to the ground lifeless. “Emotional.”
“Funerals generally are,” he mused.
“Yours won’t be.” Tommaso didn’t need to file his teeth into points for his smile to resemble a shark’s. “When we’re done with you, what’s left of your body will never be found. There will be nothing left for your parents to mourn over…” He slapped his forehead. “Oh, I forgot. Your parents hate you. I’m sure they’llpretend to grieve for you, though, just as they pretended to enjoy all the pre-wedding celebrations and pretended they were delighted their son was marrying our sister.” The smile dropped. “Our grandparents haven’t needed to pretend to be mourning your murder of our father. My grandmother had to be sedated, you piece of shit.”
Niccolo shrugged. “Considering his lifestyle and diet, she should be grateful he survived as long as he did.”
Mattia, who hadn’t said a word to that point, had only stared at Niccolo through thoughtful, narrowed eyes, pressed the back of his hand to his brother’s chest in a warning. “Why are you here?”
Niccolo beamed. “I always said you were the smart one, although, personally, I always considered your sister to be the brains of the family.”
“Don’t you eventhinkabout her,” Tommaso snarled.
“If I enjoyed thinking about her, I wouldn’t have jilted her at the altar.”
“Why are you here?” Mattia repeated, cutting his brother off before he could explode.
“To explain why it’s in your best interests to let me and Georgia live.”
“You are out of your fucking mind.” That, naturally, came from Tommaso.
“Where is she?” Mattia asked.
