"Mother." I reach for her hand, sudden fear icing my veins. "Where did everyone go?"
Her face crumples with something that might be guilt or might be relief, and I know before I turn around what I will find waiting behind me.
Magnus Sterling's hand lands on my shoulder with the weight of inevitability, and his voice slithers into my ear like poison.
"Hello, my sweet Persia. Did you really think you could run from me twice?"
I grab the first thing I can get my hands on and swing. The fork buries in Magnus’ cheek and he howls with pain.
It’s a dogfight from there on out. I’m not about to go with this man willingly.
God help me, I fight with everything I have. I throw food in his face and flip the table between us and claw at the hands that try to restrain me. But when the gunshot explodes against the marble floor inches from my feet, I freeze. And when his palm connects with my face hard enough to send me crashing to the ground, I taste blood and understand with horrible clarity thatthis time, there will be no Rafael crashing through the doors to save me.
This time, I am truly alone.
And as Magnus's men drag me toward the exit, my mother watches with tears streaming down her face and does absolutely nothing to stop them.
Fifteen
Rafael
My father's house sits on the North Shore like a monument to everything I have spent my adult life trying to escape.
The drive from Club Genesis took forty minutes, and I spent every one of them trying to reach Persia on the phone she refuses to answer. The calls roll straight to voicemail, her sweet recorded voice telling me she cannot come to the phone right now, and with each unanswered ring the knot in my chest pulls tighter until breathing feels like a conscious effort.
She is angry with me. She has every right to be. I showed her the file on her father in a room full of strangers and expected her to process a lifetime of betrayal while I conducted business like nothing had changed. I am a bastard of the highest order, and the woman I love deserves so much better than the devil she has bound herself to.
But right now, I need to handle the man who started all of this.
The Milano estate sprawls across three acres of manicured lawn, all ivy-covered brick and towering windows that reflect the lastlight of the fading sun like accusatory eyes. I grew up in this house, learned to walk in its marble hallways, bled on its Persian rugs when my father's lessons became too physical to ignore. The memories press against my skull like fingers searching for weak points as Drake pulls through the iron gates and up the circular drive.
"You sure about this?" Drake's voice cuts through the silence, his steel-gray eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. "Enzo has been quiet since the wedding. That usually means he's planning something."
"He has been quiet because I have been too busy with Persia to give him the attention he craves." I straighten the cuffs of my jacket and check the gun holstered beneath my arm, a habit so ingrained it requires no thought. "Time to remind my father who actually runs this family."
We step out of the SUV and the front door swings open before we reach the steps. One of my father's men, a broad-shouldered enforcer named Carmine who has been with the family since before I was born, gestures us inside with a face carefully wiped of expression.
"Mr. Milano is expecting you in the study."
Of course he is. My father has always preferred to conduct his manipulation from behind the massive mahogany desk that once belonged to his father and his father before that. Three generations of Milano men have sat in that leather chair and destroyed lives with the stroke of a pen or the pull of a trigger. The fact that I refuse to take my place in that particular throne is just one of many disappointments I have delivered to Enzo Milano over the years.
The house smells exactly as I remember, furniture polish and old money and the faint undertone of cigar smoke that has seeped into the very bones of the structure. Crystal chandeliers cast warm light across oil paintings of ancestors who look down at me with the same cold disapproval my father wears like a second skin. Nothing has changed in the decades since I fled this place, and somehow that makes everything worse.
Drake falls into step beside me as we navigate the familiar hallways, his hand resting casually near his weapon in a gesture that looks like habit but speaks of preparation. He knows this house as well as I do. He spent enough nights here as a teenager, the two of us hiding in my room while my father raged through the lower floors, breaking whatever and whoever got in his path.
The study door stands open, warm light spilling into the corridor like an invitation.
I step inside and freeze.
My father sits behind his desk, looking every one of his seventy-three years in a way I have never seen before. His skin has taken on a grayish pallor, his hands trembling slightly where they rest on the leather blotter, and the round spectacles perched on his nose catch the lamplight with each shallow breath he takes. He looks diminished, weakened, nothing like the towering figure of terror who dominated my childhood.
But it is not my father's appearance that stops me cold.
It is the two men flanking him like bookends of betrayal.
Governor Barret Fiore stands to my father's left, his round spectacles catching the light and his face arranged in an expression of smug satisfaction that makes my blood run hot. And to my father's right, silver hair swept back from a facethat has haunted my nightmares since the day I stole his bride, Magnus Sterling watches me with eyes that hold nothing but murder.
"Ah, Rafael." My father's voice carries none of its usual command, but the cruelty underneath remains unchanged. "So good of you to finally visit your aging father. I was beginning to think you had forgotten where you came from."
