“A lot of these messages are idle chat.” Trygg’s jaw tensed as he skimmed a few of the more explicit comments. He was already having enough trouble staying focused on the task at hand with Sia sitting close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body, her sweet scent filling his head with all kinds of dangerous ideas. He cleared his throat and kept scrolling. “A couple of months ago, Rosa thanks him for a gift he gave their daughter, says it’s the child’s favorite thing. That she can’t go to sleep without it. There’s a gap in dates between that text and the next one. He’s telling her there’s a problem on his end and he needs to lay low for a while.”
“I’ll bet,” Sia interjected. “A problem with the wife?”
Trygg smirked and scrolled through a few more messages. “He doesn’t elaborate. The next time he contacts her is five days ago. He tells her he’s leaving Rome the next day. She’s upset, doesn’t understand what’s going on. He doesn’t say, just urges her to take the child and go somewhere else too.”
“She didn’t take his advice,” Sia murmured grimly. “Rosa stayed, and now she’s dead.”
Trygg nodded. “Which seems to suggest she had no idea about the trouble this man of hers was in. Or that he’d somehow put her into it too.”
“The poor girl. She deserved better than that. Better than him.”
“What about photos?” Trygg asked.
Sia shrugged. “The only one I saw was on the home screen.”
Trygg made a quick check of the galleries. “Everything’s been deleted. Or has it?”
With a few taps and swipes and hardware overrides, he managed to break open the cache of deleted photos. Just as he suspected, the majority of the images were ones of Rosa, some with her baby, some of them intimate, meant for her lover’s eyes only. He ignored those few out of respect, and because he was searching for something specific.
And there it was.
A selfie she had taken in a sun-filled park. Rosa was pregnant, and seated beside her was a man. He looked a bit old for her, with gray at his temples and shadows under his eyes.
Trygg peered at the human male, zooming in on his face. “Holy shit.”
Sia leaned closer. “What is it?”
“I’ve seen him before.” He grabbed his own phone and pulled up a search browser. The news article he was looking for filled his screen. He showed it to Sia.
She glanced at the story and the accompanying photos, then read the Italian headline aloud. “Body of Gianni Tiaggi, Special Investigator for the Guardia di Finanza, recovered from the Tevere near the Vatican on Sunday morning.” She looked at Trygg, her lovely face drawn in shock. “Santino had him killed?”
“Considering that the Guardia di Finanza is the agency in charge of investigating international drug trafficking, there’s no doubt that Santino had him dealt with. Now we need to figure out what Tiaggi did to cross him, or what he might’ve had on the bastard that was damaging enough for Santino to have him killed. Maybe that something ended up in Rosa’s possession. If it did, she probably didn’t even realize she had it.”
“What kind of man would jeopardize the mother of his own child like that?”
“A desperate one.” Trygg picked up the gold locket. “Didn’t you say Rosa was always wearing this?”
“I never saw her without it on.”
He tried to open the delicate piece of jewelry, but struggled. His hands were too big, his fingers more accustomed to weapons and technology than fragile, feminine things.
Sia reached for it, her soft touch brushing his knuckles. “Here, let me do that.”
Sitting next to her so closely on the narrow mattress was its own kind of hell. Now that she had pressed up even tighter to him as she worked on the locket, it was all he could do to resist reaching out to smooth his fingers through the loose cascade of her platinum hair. She smelled like citrus and fresh sea air, and her body’s warmth radiated against him like the heat of the sun. His mouth watered as he breathed her in, his fangs throbbing as they slid out of his gums behind his closed mouth.
“Got it,” she blurted, glancing up with a smile as she held the tiny photo frame open to him.
The image was a close-up of the baby’s sleeping face, her tiny fist resting against her cheek and wrapped tight around the edge of a pink blanket.
“She’s such a sweet child,” Sia murmured, gazing at the picture. “It breaks my heart to think of how much she’s been through in her short little life.”
Hearing the sadness in her voice, Trygg wondered if Tamisia had ever wanted children of her own. Before he could stop himself, a shocking mental fantasy came to life in his head. He and Sia making love. Him planting his seed inside her while he sank his fangs into her creamy throat.
Fuck.
Arousal surged through him, instant and uncontrollable. The erection he’d been fighting all night raged to life, making him shift in discomfort on the bed. He cleared his throat, but nothing could mask the rough edge of his voice.
“Take the photo out, Sia. Maybe there’s something behind it.”
