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“Many times, but never on someone. This gun was mine, and it was given with an express purpose.”

After a beat, she tentatively said, “To kill someone?”

‘No, thank fuck. You know all those apartment blocks we owned that you took from us? The ones he charged dirt-cheap rent to build love from the community?” And to launder money, a rent of two hundred euros a month magically transformed into five hundred euros. “He took care of his people and in exchange, they were his eyes and ears and protected him. My father learned one of the old men – I say old when he probably wasn’t even fifty, but he looked old to me back then – was harassing the young girls from his block. Most of them were younger than me, and he kept getting his cock out and offering them money to suck it and trying to touch them up.”

Elvira shivered. She’d known men like that.

“My job was to punish him. The specific instructions were to not kill him but to teach him a lesson that would make the other paedos think twice about touching the young girls on our patch. I shot his cock off.”

Startled, she lifted herself onto an elbow. “You shot a paedophile’s cock off?”

“Yes. I knocked on his door, and when he opened it, I put my new gun to his groin and fired, and I have never sweated so much with fear in the whole of my life as I did when I knocked on that door or felt as sick as I did when I pulled the trigger. I kept throwing up for days afterwards but kept having to hide it because I knew my father would have thought me weak. I honestly don’t know if I could have gone through with it if he’d told me to kill that man.”

“But you’ve killed,” she said uncertainly.

Even through the darkness, she saw the flash of his eyes. “Yes, I’ve killed; that came much later, and let me tell you, taking a life kills something inside you. My father must have been a psychopath because he could kill a human with the same disregard as he would kill a spider. He only tamed that aspect of his life when he built the Esposito Group and decided to memory-hole the shadowed world.”

“Clever to build a media empire that controlled so much of the news and social media content our country relies on.”

“My mother was the brains of the partnership, but he was a clever man in different ways to her. He knew how to make people love him. The people of our city loved him for all the good things he’d done for them and were happy to play along with whatever he presented himself as to the world.”

“And any independent journalist who probed too deeply into his origins disappeared,” she supplied.

His chest rose sharply.

Lying back down, she put her hand above his heart. Its beat was strong beneath her palm.

“You’re more like Elio than you want to think,” she said quietly. “He remembers the bloodshed vividly and will do anything in his power to stop it happening again. That’s why he insisted the coup over your family be as bloodless as it could be.”

“Other than you killing my mother.”

“I’ve dreamed of killing your mother since I was nine years old.”

“Not my father?”

“He was Elio’s.”

“Who was Bruno’s?”

“Stefano’s father, but like your father, he inconveniently died of natural causes.”

He took her hand and squeezed it. Inching his face closer to hers, he said, “You want to know why I hated my father so much and why I despised sex?”

Something in his tone chilled her heart.

“Not even two months after he made me shoot that man’s cock off, I was summoned to a bar he owned. I found him in a back room fucking a girl who was barely sixteen. He didn’t break his stride to see me there, but then he wouldn’t because he’d set the whole thing up. He wanted me to see. He was testing me.”

Elvira hadn’t believed there was anything left to discover about Lorenzo Esposito that could shock her, but this…? “What kind of test was that?”

“He was gauging my reaction. Testing me for weakness. I always thought it was punishment for my reaction to shooting the paedophile. I thought I’d hidden how it made me feel, but my father missed nothing.”

After a long pause, she whispered, “And how did you react?”

“I didn’t. The whole thing turned my stomach, but I knew to give nothing away. I left the room and waited until they’d finished and acted as if nothing had happened.”

“So…” She hesitated. “Was your father a paedophile?”

“He liked his women young, but he was damned careful to make sure they were legal. When he hosted his sex parties, he used an agency to supply him with high-class hookers who were all above age but looked no older than twenty-one.”