“Please don’t kill me!”
Inside the cupboard, tangled up in himself like a pretzel, is a young man, very blond, very pale-faced, utterly terrified, holding on to a cell phone with two shaking hands. He lifts his arms over his head, as though they could possibly protect him from a bullet.
“Please don’t kill me,” he begs again, breathless and small. “Please, Alessandro.”
He knows my name.
I pull him out by the scruff of his hoodie, throw him down on the hard cement and stand over him with my sights trained between his eyes—two deep blue eyes, the color of the Mediterranean. His fair hair is darkened with dirt and dust, presumably from the cupboard.
“Who the fuck,” I ask, “are you?”
I should have killed him already. Why haven’t I?
He’s shuddering all over, but those sapphire eyes meet mine fearlessly. “I’m the best chance you have at solving your father’s murder.”
CHAPTER5
TEDDY
It’strue what they say about your life flashing in front of your eyes before you die. Or at least, that’s what I experience when Alessandro Castellani throws open the door of the cupboard and almost blows my head off.
I wouldn’t even blame him for it. He’s within his rights.
For a long few seconds, I’msurehe’s going to kill me. But then his lips twist and he gives a disbelieving laugh.
“You? Pissing all over yourself,you’rethe best chance I have?”
I’m not pissing all over myself. Am I? I’m so terrified that I’m numb.
“Me,” I tell him. “I can help you.” I sound so certain, so sure of myself. Then I ruin it by adding, “So p-pleasedon’t kill me.”
The smile—if that’s even what it was—disappears. “What were you doing in there, little mouse?” He has an accent, faintly—Italian—and his voice is silky, sexy, cajoling, but I see something very different in his eyes.
I knew it was risky coming here and I did it anyway. The problem is, with that gun pointing right at me, and those empty dark eyes behind it, I’ve completely forgotten why I ever did.
And he wants an answer.
“I wanted to see you,” I get out at last. “I wanted to…”
“Yes, little mouse?”
“I wanted to watch you work.”
He crouches down, one knee pressing hard into my chest so that I struggle to breathe, and the cold barrel of his gun kisses my forehead.
I look into his face.His face. I see now what all those rumors were about. He has a long, raised scar running down the entire left side of his face, and I can’t look away from it even as I feel death coming closer and closer.
And he stares back at me, brows twitching together. Part of me wishes I knew what he was thinking. Part of me is glad I don’t.
“You wanted to watch me work?” he murmurs. “Then let me show you.”
He pulls me up, hand on the back of my neck, gun poking into my back, and marches me outside to a car. An expensive, elegant, European town car with dark windows, which—when he pushes me into it—I find is full of mahogany panels set into the dash and leather seats that cradle me like a mother.
Like an ideal mother, anyway. I read once in some 80s pop-psych book that babies who don’t get held much by their mothers grow up weird. That might explain a few things about me.
Alessandro stays there at the open door, looking down at me. “You’ll behave, won’t you?” he asks me. “I don’t have to throw you in the trunk, do I? Or tie you up?”
“No,” I manage to get out. “I’ll be good.”
