I had spilled more blood over the past few months than I had in years and yet I wasn’t able to get a handle on my anger. Every night I went to bed with it coursing through my veins and every morning I woke with it, white hot and at the forefront of my mind.
Xavier had berated me for my decision to choose someone outside the family and for allowing her to leave without consequence. Why was I giving this woman a free pass? How did we know that she hadn’t spilled our secrets to someone? How could we guarantee our safety? If this had been anyone else, they would have been dealt with in the appropriate manner. They would have been silenced for good.
I’d kept my mouth shut the first time Xavier had mentioned it. She’d return or I would find her, and we would figure out what the fuck had gone through her mind when she left but it was evident that wouldn’t be the case. And slowly but surely, I came around to Xavier’s way of thinking. While I buried myself in work, fixing my tattered reputation, Xavier hammered home the plan that would ensure I wouldn’t be taken for a fool again. Every person who dared cross me had been dealt with except for one, and she would no longer, could no longer, be the exception.
At every turn she was still embedded in my life. It didn’t matter that I had ordered everyone to not breathe her name, she remained within the silence. I found pieces of her everywhere: the desserts served at dinner, the lack of laughter in the house, even the church we were sitting in.
The church, the house of God, had surprisingly been the most difficult place to return to. I had become a stranger to the building after my father’s funeral, unable to truly reconcile with Him after taking the most important person in my life without warning, but circumstances had caused a reintroduction in the form of Stefan and Hector’s deaths.
Last month, naïvely, I had opened the doors to the church and sat in the pew at the front of the room, staring at the altar. When Father Duffy had asked if he could help, I waved him away. I was after a miracle that I was uncertain he could deliver, and yet still I stayed put. The room had turned pitch black before I left. She hadn’t turned up for Hector’s funeral and some foolish part of me, like a child on Christmas Eve, had hoped that she would return to me on our wedding day. Her absence on the day that we should have bound our lives, our souls, together for eternity had doused the small flicker of hope that had remained.
The most frustrating part of her disappearance was that for six months I hadn’t been able to pin her down. My car had been found abandoned and there were a few bytes of grainy security camera footage that showed her, but then it was as if she had disappeared off the face of the Earth. It shouldn’t have been so hard to find a woman who had no help, no connections, but not a single person I knew could track her down. All of our attempts were futile.
It had only served to add fuel to the fire. She’d lied, left, and now made us look like amateurs. I vowed to God that the moment I found her, I’d make sure I watched the life drain away from her eyes for putting me in this impossible situation. I’d restore the honor and respect to my name.
It was said that to reject forgiveness and to refuse mercy was to put yourself above God, and no one was above God, but it was yet another item on the long list of things to repent for. The divine plan hadn’t aligned with my own and that meant having to take matters into my own hands. I would double the efforts, ask for help from the very few I could trust, and once she was gone, I’d reclaim my place and my sanity, and my world would have order again.
“Amen.”
Chapter Two
Dante
“Have you lost your mind?” Dom asked, whirling around to face me. His accent was always thicker when he was stressed, and it reminded me of the days he first started working for Luc. He was wary of all of us, of the money and late nights, but never questioned it. It took less than a year for Dom to be truly trusted with everything in our lives, and he’d made the decision that it was something he could live with, cementing him as a permanent fixture.
We were standing in Luc’s kitchen, having finished dinnersansLuc. These days it was hard to pin him down if he wasn’t at work. The house held too many ghosts, too much nostalgia of a life that had slipped away, and Luc seemed to avoid them at all costs.
When Mia left us, I hadn’t just lost a sister, but my brother had vanished as well. Whereas Luc was dealing with the situation in unparalleled rage, I felt lost. We had been barred from mentioning her name, an order I hadn’t taken seriously until Luc had turned a gun on me and taken a shot without warning. Nothing fatal, but the message had been delivered loud and clear and if I was stupid enough to disregard his rule again then there wouldn’t be another near miss.
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I asked him in return. This was always my opening gambit. How many times had I asked that question just to be shot down? “She just disappeared without a trace. How is that possible?”
“What does it matter?” Dom threw his arms up in the air in frustration. He never wanted to discuss the matter. “She. Left. Us.” Each word was punctuated with a clap that echoed in the space. “If she wanted to get in touch, she would have. Let her live her life, Dante.”
“What if I find her?” I asked, following his steps around the marble island. This was a new strand to our usual conversation. Not once had I mentioned trying to find Mia because I didn’t know if I would actually go ahead with the plan. The sting of her disappearance ran deep but the longer she was away, without a word, without a sighting, my curiosity continued to develop until I took action.
The almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of Dom’s eye told me that he wasn’t as far gone as Luc where Mia was concerned. Her disappearance had caused a clear divide, forming a group of those who wanted to find her, and one with those who wanted nothing more to do with her. So far, I was the sole resident in the former camp.
“If you find her,” Dom said, turning away from me so I could no longer read his expression, because he couldn’t trust his poker face to stay in place, “then you better hope Luc doesn’t find out, because he’ll kill you both.”
I flinched at the words. Luc had made his intentions crystal clear. Anyone who found Mia had explicit orders to bring her back to him and he would take the kill shot. There had never been an order Luc had given that made me reconsider my position in the family until that moment. I shouldn’t have worried though, since I was under strict instructions to keep clear of any business that concerned her. Luc didn’t trust me, and he had every right not to.
I’d never be able to walk Mia to her sentence and watch as someone pulled the trigger. Just the thought of it made me nauseous. Mia hadn’t left out of malice; the Feds hadn’t knocked down the doors with search warrants in hand. She had every weapon in her arsenal to complicate our lives, to potentially bring us down. I wouldn’t blame her after what she’d experienced, and yet we continued to operate as if nothing had happened. Mia wasn’t Nero watching an empire burn. She had been spooked by the murder of her father, something I had tried to get Luc to understand, but he was so blinded by his rage that reason and logic were ignored.
What worried me was the fact that no one had seen her or heard from her. We all knew she didn’t have the funds to start a brand-new life somewhere we couldn’t get to her. So, where the hell had she gone? With those thoughts in mind, I distractedly told Dom, “He doesn’t mean it. He’d never hurt her.”
Dom let out a bitter laugh, a sound that brought me back to the present. He spun around again, leaning back against the counter. “Dante, I know he’s your brother and you love him, but I wouldn’t put anything past him anymore. He killed Emanuel and Cecilia because they let her go.”
The two members of Luc’s staff who had been the last people in the family to speak to Mia, to allow her to leave, had been the first to face his wrath. In Luc’s eyes they had made an unforgivable mistake. I wasn’t sure he’d even thought before he pulled the trigger.
“You saw what he did to me because he thought I knew where she was,” Dom continued.
I’d walked into the house the day Luc had turned his attention on Dom. All of us thought that Dom might have an idea where Mia went. They had been thick as thieves, whispering and giggling over jokes only they would understand, but seeing the way his mood had fallen confirmed that Dom was as in the dark as the rest of us. At least, to everyone but Luc. He believed he’d be able to beat the truth out of Dom. I was surprised when Dom returned to work, bruised and broken, but loyalty to the family ran deep.
“He fired Lydia and he shot you,” he completed to the list.
“Shotatme,” I corrected him.
Dom ignored me, not interested in the technicalities of the matter. “Luc doesn’t care anymore, Dante. The greatest gift you can give Mia is peace. Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, pray she stays hidden, because Luc’s not joking when he says he’s going to kill her.”
