“I almost forgot,” he said, turning to the table with the jewelry. “I promised you something new. Even though these are technically not. They were worn once before, but not for long.”
He took the blood red and silver rosary from the table, slipping it over my neck, then the dangling cross earrings resting beside it, matching in color and metal, and secured them in my ears.
“Ah,” he breathed out, admiring the entire ensemble. “Just like my mamma in her coffin.”
“T-these—” I touched the earrings, not only feeling the connection, but making sense of it. “These w-were your m-mother’s.”
He hadn’t given me that, though, and I could see the heat in his eyes take on a life of its own. Mentioning her had been the equivalent of taking a dagger to an open wound caused by the enemy he knew I loved. That was why I was here. His mother—
“Yes,” he said, his voice as cold as the air. “She was taken from me when I was only six. Died after childbirth. Spawning the devil’s child. My brother—” He spat on the floor. “Your husband’s brother. At least God had the good sense to take his life, but he could have spared my Mamma.”
Oh, dear God.The woman Luca had the baby with, the one who would have been older than Brando. This was her son from another man. A man, a parent, who was taken from him, too, his murder ordered by my husband’s mouth.
I wondered if Luca had given her the rosary and earrings—and she ended up wearing them to her own funeral.
Snatching me by the back of my hair, Cesare tilted my head back and kissed me, plunging his tongue into my mouth. No matter how hard I tried to keep my lips closed, he managed to get through. Finally, after I moved my head from left to right to prevent him, he stopped.
For him, though, the game of hunter and prey had only just begun.
“You recognize the story, I can tell,” he breathed out, staring at my lips. “Who told you? Luca?”
“N-no.” I shook my head, feeling the burn deep in my scalp from his hold on my hair. “V-Vincenzo.”
“Ah, my cousin. The murderer.”
His cousin?
“Do not look so surprised. You know the man you married and what his family is capable of. Luca charmed my mother into having an affair with him. She left my father after my aunt introduced them. My aunt is still married to the Fausti, the one who created Vincenzo and Guido. The story ends there—nine months later, with a woman and child dead on the floor. Luca going on to the next available woman to create his army. I was sent to live with people I didn’t know, instead of my own father, because he no longer wanted me. He didn’t want me because my mamma wanted the devil. After my father found out what I planned to do, he welcomed me. Then they stole him from me. Again.”
He ticked his mouth, shaking his head sadly.
“I would have expected better from a woman of your caliber. To associate with such a devious family shocks me. I have seen the way you dance, the way you hypnotize. You do not belong with him, none of them. But—” He sighed. “Looks are deceiving. Birds of a feather and all that.”
He threw me to the floor, then, deciding that was not where he wanted me, took a fistful of my hair and dragged me over to the table, where I was instructed to sit across from him.
“I wonder—have wondered for a while,” he said, almost contemplative, staring at the blood already welling up through the fibers of the cream dress, “what color your heart will be when I rip it out of your chest. Will it be full of life’s blood—that gorgeous red, the color of a rose petal? Or purple as the blood that pumps through your husband’s veins? I am sure a heart like yours will be gorgeous on the outside, but deep inside? We will see. Unless…”
I let that thought hang there, acting as if it was a conscious decision not to answer, but it wasn’t. Fear had penetrated my mind and had cut off communication—nothing wanted to work. He was building up to the moment, and since the days were much shorter, our twilight walk was close at hand.
Finally, when I knew he was about to cut me with my husband’s knife, I asked, “Unless?” It came out as a whisper, but stable for all that.
“You are mine—a heart for a heart.” He stilled on a thoughtful pause. “I will still kill Luca. And his son will die either way—you are his heart, whether you die at my hand or live by my hand, with me, forever. That will be two of the devil’s sons dead. Not enough, but enough for now.”
An insane urge to laugh rippled like the tide after a soft wind blows, tickling me. It had happened before. Under extreme duress, it was a coping mechanism, Uncle Tito had once told me. It would be the worst time for this coping mechanism to deploy itself, but when it came, it came, and I never had a choice about it.
This man truly thought he could defeat Luca, and that Brando would allow him to keep me—dead or, much more ridiculously, alive.
Cesare lived in his own world, and he believed his scheme would work. This monster had no notion of common sense or reality. He lived on pure instinct and his own beliefs—his mind and feelings ruled his world. And I was in it, for the time being.
In the way that a top of the food chain animal thinks, he was not a piece of the puzzle, but the hand that placed them together. And he might have been insane enough to see his plan through.
At this point, I wasn’t sure if he was going to make it through this “dinner” before he decided it was time to put me in a box, one he’d probably whittled with his own hands, without a heart.
His resolve swayed as though it were drunk and emotional.
I squeezed the dress in my fists, squaring my shoulders, lifting my chin. “What you’re doing to me is worse than what Luca did to your mamma, because you’re doing it on purpose—”
His hand was solid, heavy, and when it connected with my cheek, I wondered if he had loosened some teeth. My eyes started to water, my heart beat like an excited drum, fear and adrenaline the hand leading the band, but still, I righted myself, sticking my chin up.
