The fabric presses against my mouth, muffling my cries. He ties it behind my head, gentle despite everything, careful not to pull my hair.
I’m sobbing now, tears soaking into the makeshift gag. This is a nightmare. This has to be a nightmare.
But the belt around my arms is real. The T-shirt tight around my face is real, and so is the cold dread in my stomach. He shifts me on the bed, arranging me almost tenderly so I’m more comfortable, and then he reaches for the ice pack and places it carefully back on my ankle.
“I’ll be back soon,” he murmurs, “and then everything will be better. You’ll see.”
He stands up from the bed and reaches for his jeans.
I watch him through blurry tears as he pulls them on, his movements calm and methodical. Like he hasn’t just tied me up and gagged me. He’s off to kill his father like this is all perfectly normal.
His back is to me as he moves toward the door, and I can see the marks I left there, vivid red scratches from my nails, running from his shoulders to his waist. Marks I made in passion, while I thought we were really becoming something.
He pauses at the door and looks back at me. “I love you, Mina. Everything I do, I do for you.”
And then he’s gone. The door closes behind him.
I scream against my gag until my throat is on fire, but no one hears me. I thought I’d finally found the real Cristiano, the sweet, vulnerable boy I would have given my heart to. But this is who he really is. His true face that he’s already shown me once before.
He didn’t fool me into thinking he’d changed.
I fooled myself.
9
Cristiano
The gun feels light in my hand. Or maybe I’m just ready. I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life, and now that it’s here, everything feels weightless.
Easy.
Right.
I stand in the doorway of my father’s study, shirtless, the scratches Mina left on my chest and back still stinging. Good pain. Perfect pain. Proof that she wants me, that she loves me, and that everything I’m about to do is necessary.
My father stands at his desk with his back to me, sorting through papers. Agnello Montoni. Tall and broad, even in his fifties, with silver threading through his gold hair, and the rigid posture of a man who’s never bent for anyone. His shoulders are still powerful beneath his tailored shirt. All my memories of my father are of being thrown against walls, shoved to the ground, and beaten until I learned not to cry out. Not one happy memory.
I know I wasn’t the only one who’s suffered. Mom endured his cruelty as well. I heard her cries and saw the bruises. But it ached—it fuckingached—to run to her for comfort or out of concern only for her to shrink from me. She ignored my pain, the woman who was supposed to protect me, shunning me because I look like the man who fathered me.
I didn’t cry for my mother after she died, nor will I shed tears at my father’s graveside in a few days as I hold tight to Mina’s hand. Dad will never accept her as a wife for his only son. I know that with bone-deep certainty. He wants me to take a bride from one of the other prominent Malus families who will cement the Montoni empire for another generation. The housekeeper’s daughter is invisible to him.
But not to me.
Never to me.
I raise the gun, feeling nothing but calm certainty and the warm glow of Mina’s touch still lingering on my skin.
Mina.
I’m sorry I had to tie her up, and I’m sorry I had to scare her. But she’ll understand once my father is dead and nothing stands between us anymore. She’ll see that this was the only way. She’ll forgive me.
My father is still bent over his papers, oblivious. The back of his head is right there, the thinning hair like a target, the vulnerable curve of his skull. One bullet and Mina is mine forever.
I step into the office.
My finger tightens on the trigger.
A cry of horror splits the air behind me.
