“It’s good you aren’t underestimating her as most men would. It might be a better idea to have someone else interrogate her, Geno. If you’re the target, it would be better not to give her access to you. We need the information she has. Dario can extract it without danger to himself.”
Dario Bosco was one of the few nonriders in existence who knew of the shadow riders and lived. He was also a powerful crime lord holding a vast territory in Chicago for the Saldi family. The Saldi family was reputed to be the number one enemy of the Ferraro family. Emmanuelle Ferraro, youngest of the Chicago Ferraros and Stefano’s sister, was wife to Valentino Saldi, who happened to be head of the Chicago Saldi family. Dario had been Valentino’s enforcer for years and had the reputation for being vicious as well as able to get information from any prisoner.
Geno shook his head; his entire body rejected the idea. Every single cell in his body. He had such a visceral reaction to the idea of Dario interrogating Amaranthe that he knew he was in trouble. Had it been anyone other than Stefano with him, he wouldn’t have said a word, but his uneasiness was the very reason he’d sent for his cousin. Stefano was the one person he trusted.
“I can’t let Dario take her apart, Stefano. I haven’t heard her voice. My shadow hasn’t connected with hers. I don’t even know if she’s a shadow rider, but somehow there’s a connection between us. I don’t know what it is, but as much as I know she’s a definite threat and she has information Ineed, there is a part of me that feels as if I need to protect her.”
“You know it’s too dangerous for you to be in there with her.”
“I can’t allow anyone else to take a chance. I do know without a doubt that she’s lethal. She may look like a fragile little dancer, but I know in my gut she’s anything but.” Geno was certain he was right.
“Let’s take this back to the house,” Stefano said. He didn’t wait for Geno’s agreement, he simply stepped into a shadow and disappeared.
Geno watched the woman for a few more minutes, wondering if it would be better to simply kill her than take a chance on her killing anyone else he loved. Shadow riders executed criminals—men and women who had committed heinous crimes. Those criminals had somehow managed to escape justice and the riders had been called in as a last resort. He didn’t know for absolute certain Amaranthe was guilty of any crime. He couldn’t sentence her to death.
Swearing under his breath, he stepped into the nearest shadow and allowed the familiar wrenching pain to tear him apart, take his mind from the puzzle of the woman, to be replaced by a grid of the city as he made his way home.
Stefano waited for him in a chair in front of the fireplace in one of his three libraries. Geno preferred open spaces as a rule, but this library appeared small, mostly because of the tall walls of books surrounding him on every side. Geno liked real books. He had one wall that was enclosed and temperature-controlled so the vintage books were preserved carefully from the sun and no further damage could be done to them. He preferred to read them in the language they were originally written in and went to great lengths to acquire them.
“Tell me about the night your parents were murdered,” Stefano said.
Geno poured two small glasses of scotch and handedone to his cousin. “We’d taken an assignment in San Francisco. I was the primary rider. Salvatore and Lucca were the alibi with our cousins there.”
Shadow riders rarely meted out justice in their own cities. They investigated and brought riders in from another city to do the actual assassination. If Stefano came in from Chicago to fulfill the assignment, he would do so with his brothers on a private jet. Several family members would come to party. One member would ride the shadows to the jet and board unseen. While the others partied in front of the paparazzi all night with the cousins in that city in front of cameras, the one in the shadows would dispense justice to the criminal. No one would ever know the Ferraros had anything to do with the death. They simply looked like they had too much money and too many toys.
“I appeared to stay home that night. Our parents always visited their friends and the priest in the evenings and took a walk around the neighborhood. Papa had a prosthetic leg, but at night he often used a wheelchair. He was doing so the night they were killed. They liked to go to the park after they visited the priest. That’s where the assassin caught up with them.”
“Even at their age and with your father in a wheelchair, he still had to be dangerous,” Stefano pointed out. “Your mother was a rider as well, Geno. I don’t care if this killer surprised them, how was he or she able to kill both? You had to have seen the reports. You know the sequence of events.”
“Just as with the first two murders, Papa was killed first with a slash to the throat from behind. He was jabbed twice more, once to the jugular and once under his arm. That attack took seconds.”
“In those seconds your mother had to have been alerted.”
Geno nodded, swirling the scotch. “I’ve thought of this a hundred times. The killer rode a shadow right up behind my father’s chair. That’s the only explanation, or he would have known. My mother was facing my father.”
“There was a second killer,” Stefano concluded. “He or she came out of the shadows behind your mother.”
“It had to have happened that way. The police had no idea my parents had the skills they did. If Mama was facing Papa and the killer emerged from the shadows to cut his throat...”
“He would have had to carry a knife through the shadows, Geno,” Stefano said. “That would have been impossible. How would he have been able to do that? What composition would that have been?”
“It is possible. You know there are ways to make weapons out of natural materials. Our cousin Damian Ferraro has done it,” Geno objected.
“He’s a jeweler,” Stefano said. “And yes, he does experiment for us. A good man.”
“He can’t be the only one able to come up with ideas like that. Your own brothers experiment.”
Stefano took a drink of the scotch. “Suppose they managed to come up with a way to take a knife through the shadows and there are two of them. One emerges behind your mother. She’s facing your father. How is it the police have no inkling there’s a second killer?”
“Every stab wound was in the front and the pattern is exactly the same as on Viola and Noemi. It appeared as if the killer went straight from murdering Papa to stabbing Mama, and he stabbed her twelve times, just as he had stabbed Viola and Noemi. In fact, there was a transfer of Papa’s blood to Mama.”
“So the same knife was used on her.” Stefano frowned. “If there were two people, what did the second killer do?”
“Inject my mother with a drug to prevent her from fending them off.” That was the only conclusion Geno could come up with. “It had to be fast-acting and had to leave her system quickly for it not to show up when a tox screen was run. The ME didn’t find an injection site, either.”
It wasn’t easy to calmly discuss the murder of his parents, but over the years, as head of his family and theshadow riders, Geno had learned to compartmentalize. He needed a cool head and to be able to think quickly. While he had initially disliked what he considered the overbearing and exacting Archambaults when they had arrived to take over his life at thirteen, they had trained him in every aspect of leadership.
They worked day and night with him on every type of self-defense and fighting technique they could teach him. They were never satisfied with his speed or reaction time. The Archambaults were the fastest in the world, and training with them brought his speed up, improving his reflexes and forcing his body into becoming a machine it would never have been without them. Not only his body, but his mind as well.
