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Mattia studied his mother’s features as closely as he could via the screen of his phone. It was the first time he’d ever seen her without a full face of makeup. But, of course, makeup was one of the many luxuries the Ranieris had denied her. He suspected that would have been the hardest one for her to endure.

It was also the first time he’d seen her without perfectly coiffured hair. Without all the clever tricks she used to disguise the passage of time, his mother, he realised with shock, looked older than her age. Somehow, despite a small fortune spent over the years to keep the ageing process at bay, she looked a decade older than her sixty-one years.

Was that what ten days in captivity did?

“When are you getting my home back for me?” she demanded, before lighting a cigarette.

All the treatments she’d undertaken over the years had eradicated any smoker’s lines, but Mattia imagined he could see them now, imagined too that he could smell that unique scent she carried of expensive perfume heavy with jasmine and cigarette smoke. No expensive perfume on her skin now. Now she would just smell of the cigarettes. They were the one luxury the Ranieris had been happy to keep her supplied with, no doubt hoping boredom would encourage her to smoke herself to death.

“The villa’s gone,” he told her bluntly, and was rewarded with her flicking her chin and making a pft sound.

“Your father would get it back,” she said.

“My father is dead, and if he hadn’t started that war all those years ago, you’d still be sitting pretty in your home.”

Mattia still remembered moving into the villa. It had been the spring he’d turned eight. Before the villa, they’d lived in an apartment in a block his father had owned. He remembered tagging along with Stefano’s father to collect the rent from the tenants. Everyone had paid in cash. Some days, the safe in the apartment would be so stuffed full of cash that rolls of it would fall to the floor when it was opened.

There had been no such problems with the villa’s safe. Safes. There had been three of them, not including the one put in the panic room his father had installed shortly before the war with the Ranieris. The safes in the villa had been the same height as eight-year-old Mattia.

When the Espositos moved into the opulent villa that spring twenty-eight years ago, Elvira would have been a freshly born baby. Like Mattia, she’d had a mother and a father and two brothers. She’d had grandparents. Aunts and uncles. An abundance of people to shower her with love.

He remembered Siena’s birth, and how different the reaction had been to Rico’s (he didn’t remember Tommaso being born). A girl born after three boys had been something special in Mattia’s family. His father had his princess. His mother had her mini-me. Mattia had a new playmate he’d instinctively known he would never be able to beat the crap out of as he did with his two brothers. Their family had been complete and had remained complete until his father had died earlier that year.

Elvira had enjoyed only three years of completeness, and he couldn’t say she’d even enjoyed it. She’d been too young to remember any of it.

While her own children had been raised in ever-growing astronomical wealth, the hard-faced woman glaring at him in icy disappointment at his ‘failure’ to take back her home had masterminded the orphaning of the Ranieri children. If killing them hadn’t gone against the moral code everyone in their world abided by, she’d probably have ordered their deaths too.

“Your father did what was needed to be made king,” she said without a hint of remorse. “And he knew how to keep an empire too. You’re the one who lost it. I should never have backed you – he always said you were too intellectual to do the job with the clarity that was needed. Where were your history books when those bastards were working under our noses to take everything your father built and destroy his legacy?”

“If I’d known the real history of our war with the Ranieris, I would have known the danger they posed to us,” he shot back tersely. “You kept that from us, so if you want to blame anyone for this whole mess, go and look in a mirror.”

He ended the call without saying goodbye.

A figure appeared at the living room’s threshold wearing the ripped shirt from their first coupling.

A rueful smile on her face, she padded over to him and straddled his lap. “Am I right in thinking Cruella was suitably grateful for the lengths you’ve taken to secure her freedom?”

His laughter at this was harsh.

“You really didn’t know, did you?” she said. At his questioning stare, she added, “That the war between our families was all carefully planned and then covered up.”

“Not that it changes a damned thing, but no, I didn’t. I only learned the truth recently…” She slipped her hand into his open jeans and gripped his cock. “What are you doing?”

“Finishing what you started earlier.” Manipulating him to hardness with her hand, she smiled and brought her face to his and breathed, “You’ve got what you wanted. Cruella is free. If I’m lucky, I’ll live to take another shot at her, but until then, you can give me what I want.”

“And what’s that?”

Pulling his erection out of the tight confines he’d squashed it in, she raised herself so she was hovering over it. Looking into his eyes, she sank on his length and whispered, “You.”

Chapter Fourteen

The bedroom was dark. The beats of Elvira’s heart felt dark too.

She’d fallen asleep again. For how long, she didn’t know, and it frightened her that she was frightened to check the time. Frightened her, too, that this was the second time she’d slept cuddled into Mattia. Proper sleep. The kind of hard sleep she’d spent her whole life craving and which she’d only ever achieved with two glasses of wine that had her waking with a banging headache and the need to be sick.

She felt sick now, but it was a different kind of sickness from the wine sickness that had seen her swearing off wine for good. She didn’t think it was caused by the third pizza they’d shared, either, before showering together and then finally crashing, exhausted, into bed.