Mia was still asleep, not bothered by the fuss around her. She was accustomed to noise. Being Italian, it was a requirement.
“Brando?” Scarlett whispered, touching my arm before I could follow Lothario out. “Where—”
I kissed her hand. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“The crowd is getting restless.”
“The piazza is decorated for Christmas. Lola will take them, if some of them want to look around. Then we’ll all meet at the villa.”
Rocco had arranged for a get together to take place at a friend’s villa in Florence, which was much bigger than ours.
It seemed the crowd was more restless than I had thought. As we made our way outside into the bright December day, a line formed from the church, following us out.
The men who were part of the “meeting” stopped in a more shadowed part of the piazza. There were not as many people, and none were paying attention to us, but we could still see our families.
Scarlett had tucked Mia into the pram with a thick blanket and had covered her hair with the hat to shield her from the wind. All of the women with strollers seemed to follow one another, to wait in a spot where the sun was at its hottest.
There was a baby boom of strollers. Mia was the only girl amongst their inhabitants. Carmen held her and Dario’s new son, Dino, patting his back. Chiara had Carlo, her and Donato’s second son. Lou held Thomas, named after our cousin who had been killed. Juliette shushed Angelo, the youngest of the delivery boom. He had the hair of a six-month-old.
Lothario made a comment about us being busy, but none of us responded. We wanted him to get down to business. Our women and children were out in the cold.
The four of us already knew what Lothario wanted. He wanted us on his side. When Luca returned to claim what would’ve rightly been his, Lothario didn’t stand a chance.
In terms of how this kingdom was supposed to be run, Luca was up first. Ettore second. Then Lothario, Osvaldo, and Niccolo as the last spares.
Lothario didn’t have it in him to lead men. Cesare had come sniffing around because he sensed this. He smelled weakness, which in men like him smelled a lot like fresh wounds and warm blood.
Lothario had been doomed from the start, and he was close to losing his position to his fiercer older brother, or to another branch in the mighty Fausti tree. I’d heard of Cesare, but I wasn’t sure exactly where he fit in the family, just that he belonged.
I was surprised that a challenger had waited this long to approach Lothario. Luca was probably the one force stopping Cesare from trying to cut Lothario’s throat while he slept. A big no in the rules—challenge but not kill, unless in self-defense. Cesare didn’t seem the type to abide by rules, which made me curious about the game he was playing. If he killed Lothario in a backhanded way, the family would go after him. Even Luca.
If the rumors were true, Luca was back, though Maggie Beautiful hadn’t seen him cut Aberto’s heart out—they held her down and made her listen. No one had stopped her when she went to his body, crying over it, before she left for our villa.
But back to the point of the reason for Lothario’s visit. I knew he had come to ask us to stand with him against his brother, our own father. So none of us were surprised when he brought it up.
Lothario put the situation to us as though Luca were a recovered felon and had no right to be in charge of the family business again, since he couldn’t be trusted.
That was one way to take his gallant speech.
Our ears heard that Lothario wanted to keep what was his fair and square, and he was the lesser of two evils, the fairer ruler in all of this.
Fair? I almost barked out a laugh. There was nothing fair about Lothario.
Lothario did what suited Lothario—even if that meant taking the coward’s route to have someone killed. When Spataro took Scarlett, he refused to lend enough men to help me get her back. He knew that once I found her, I’d trade my life for hers. And I had. Then he refused to help her get me back. So she had pulled a gun on him and told him to never show his face again.
I was one less threat to him and his kingdom. One less son of Luca’s to challenge him to the throne. All that had been done had been orchestrated, but it was done in a way that his hands seemed clean in the end. It was the true definition of the word Machiavellian.
“You have broken away,” Lothario said seriously in Italian. “You and your brothers. Yet you have not challenged me. That tells me there is hope. We can be strong again. Together.”
The rest of our conversation took place in Italian.
“Strong again?” I lifted a brow.
“He will not let you go free. You know the truth. I allow you freedom though still treat you as the royalty you are. I will continue this treatment if you will stand with me in this war.”
“How about protection from predators, Uncle? Will you offer protection from them? For our families and ourselves?”
I had him there. He couldn’t promise a damn thing. Since we both knew what he had done, how he had played the game. The only reason he stood before me, whole, alive, was because my wife came out of the ordeal unscathed, whole, alive, and to go to war with him meant that I would have to lead once I won.
