Then, just as my shoulders started to relax, Cini began to convulse in the back seat.
Five
“Sir, you need to back off!” a nurse barked at me as Elio put Cini’s still shaking body onto the gurney and they began to wheel her away from us.
I wanted to shout back at her—to tell her to shut the fuck up and that wherever Cini went, I would go—but Dante’s firm grip on my shoulder stopped me.
Together we stood and watched as the gurney was wheeled out of sight.
“You need to know that the Five are handling this,” Elio said to one of the nurses, an older woman with knowing eyes, and the woman nodded resolutely before following after the group at a steady clip.
That phrasing was usually reserved for the made men who came with gunshot wounds or any other varying injury incurredin the field, but as sheltered as she was, Cini was as much a part of this life as we were.
The Five families paid an exorbitant amount to the city’s hospitals and police to keep their memories faint and their gaze turned away from the seedy underbelly of the city and the people who ran it.
And I hated every bit of it.
If you’d have asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said that I was going to run away from this life as soon as I turned eighteen. As the only son of Salvatore Silvestri—Amante Sr.’s second-in-command and his underboss—the expectation had been for me to take up his mantle one day and serve Amante Sr.’s son in the same way.
None of that had worked out in our fathers’ favors, however, because Alesso liked Elio far more than he would ever like me. So, despite only being the son of aconsigliere, Elio had become Alesso’s right hand, and me? I wanted to be nothing.
But getting out of this kind of life was easier said than done.
I could charm my way in and out of most situations, but my father’s green-eyed gaze was always sharp on me, even when I had gone to prison which limited my options once I got out.
I’d nearly almost done it once—gotten away from it all. I had my tickets purchased to go backpacking in China, something I had always dreamed of doing. The plan was to go and disappear forever, using a fake name and have my own life where I made my own choices.
My plane was supposed to leave the day after Cini’s eighteenth birthday.
Then Alesso died and everything had changed.
A year in prison and seeing the shell of a woman that Cini had become after being alone in the Amante mansion had changed my mind. If anyone deserved to get away from this kind of lifeit was Cini and I’d vowed to help her even at the cost of my own freedom.
At first, it was purely out of affection for Alesso because, while I would never be his best friend in the same way Elio was, we were something…more.
As fucked up as it was—and it was fucked up.
Alesso would have never admitted to it whether out of fear for the retribution that Amante Sr. would rain down on us or just the fact that it was obvious that I liked him more than he liked me.
So, I stayed to help protect the only thing in this world that I knew for sure Alessodidlove: his little sister.
She had always tagged along with us whenever we were at the estate, following us around like a silent little duck when she was younger and eventually like a standoffish cat as a teenager, appearing in whatever room in the mansion that we were in, acting as if we didn’t exist.
Then, after we got out of prison and visited the mansion for the first time in a year, she stared at me with a blank expression, her cheeks hollow as Amante Sr. offered us the keys to the proverbial kingdom.
We’d made a deal with the devil for the express purpose of getting her out of that hellhole. We would do whatever he asked of us, and in return he would make us his heirs thanks to our closeness with his dead son.
And we’d failed to do even that. Things had started to go downhill after our would-be wedding to Peregrine Chandler and I couldn’t help but think that it was our fault that she had been kidnapped.
She was different now. All of us could tell.
Her scent was sharper and stronger than it had ever been, the honeydew melon taste of it clinging to my senses like a bittersweet reminder of what had occurred.
When we were stuck in the car together, my inner-alpha had roused from what felt like a long slumber and perked up at the odd scent. I had spent so much time going against my instincts that they were almost numb to me now.
I’d shoved the feeling down as quickly as it came, appalled by the idea that Cini’s scent made my senses tingle in a way I’d never felt before.
Cini was Alesso’s little sister. She was sacred and I was going to have to ignore my instincts if I was going to make it through all of this.
