Page 128

I’d always wanted to be loved, to be seen through to the bones.

And Luca was the only one who’d ever wanted to do that for me.

I found myself wanting to do the same for him.

I knew what it was like, in my own way, to be a ghost.

“I never stopped loving you, Fi,” Niccolo said, leaning forward to brace his forearms on my desk and reach for my hands.

I kept them steady, the gun still trained at his head. I could have held it there without quavering for hours. Beside me, Cerberus raised his paws onto the desk and leaned forward with a growling snarl to emphasize my orders.

“Why are you here, Niccolo?” I asked again. “Why create this ruse to confront me?”

“Take off your mask,” he begged. “Let me see your face up close after all this time.”

“Up close,” I echoed woodenly. “You’ve been watching me.”

His mouth thinned. “I saw you . . . on a date with that man in the park. I wanted to make sure you were safe.”

“Safe from my own husband?”

“He’s an animal,” Niccolo snarled. “You don’t know what he’s done.”

“Don’t I?” I leaned back in my chair and lowered my weapon so my wrists were braced on the desk and Niccolo was still in my sights. “I am not only his wife, but, as you somehow found out, the Oracle. I think I know what I need to about my husband.”

At least, now I did.

Though the twins had managed to keep me in the dark for years, and it rankled my confidence to admit that even to myself.

Something shifted in Niccolo’s face, a delicate rearranging of his features like the sun moving shadows into a new position. It was a sinister shade, and when his lips parted, they peeled back like an animal’s. “I bet you don’t know what he did the day of your wedding.”

“He protected me,” I said, because I could admit it now. “He took me away from the chaos and brought me here.”

“He made you abandon your only family,” he countered.

“Yes,” I agreed. “But they were dead, and technically, Dario was the only family I had left.”

“You had me,” he insisted, thumping a hand on the desk. “You could have had me.”

“I wasn’t allowed, and you didn’t fight it,” I countered calmly.

“He gave the orders, you know,” Niccolo said with a triumphant expression as he threw down the unpinned grenade on my desk. “Dario and his father paid Lo Spettro to take your family out so you’d be all alone in America with the big bad wolf and they could move into the power vacuum left in Sicily to take charge of the whole international outfit.”

My tongue felt like a dead whale, beached on the dry shore of my mouth.

The problem was, I could believe him.

So easily.

Of course, that’s what they’d done.

It was genius, in a mad, horrific way.

Marry the Sicilian princess to gain credibility with the southern Italians and then knock out the major pieces on their board so they were at the mercy of the Ferrettis. Just as I had been at the mercy of the twin sons.

Bile poisoned the back of my throat, and I felt sure I would vomit right there on my desk.

But I could feel Niccolo’s eyes on me, see the smug little smile curving his full mouth.