His father frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
He built rage inside him, black, bitter. “Cut the shit. Where is he?”
Lorenzo Maroni blinked at him, leaning back against his chair. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Dante breathed in, calling for all his patience. “I went to see him, only to get there while a fire burned the fucking property down. Why does every home he’s in burn down, huh? I’ve spent hours searching for him, through bodies and survivors, and he wasn’t there. So, dear father, where the fuck is my brother?!”
He saw his father grab his phone from the table, standing up as he dialed someone and started to pace. Dante waited, the acid inside his veins just looking at the man eating him alive.
“Damien Maroni,” his father barked into the phone. “Where is he?” Pause. “No, he’s not at the facility. There was a fire.” Pause. “Yes, I want him found.”
He turned towards Dante, his eyes steady. “I don’t know where he is but he will be found.”
Dante leaned forward, his eyes deadest on the man. “You better hope so, father. Or you and I are going to be having a very different conversation.”
“Don’t you dare threaten me.”
Dante stayed silent, letting his eyes talk, every ounce of hatred he felt for the man and for himself becoming visible to him.
“You don’t find my brother, you have nothing to hold over my head,” Dante told him quietly.
“I have her,” his father told him. “You’re foolishly attached to her. And I have her, son.”
Dante deliberately gave him a little smirk. “Good. And you better make sure nothing happens to her.”
“Or?”
“Or I walk.”
The silence between them loaded with tension. Dante had never made that threat before. But he hadn’t been ready before. He was now.
“You can’t walk away,” Bloodhound Maroni stepped into his space, his finger pointed at his chest, his eyes disbelieving.
“I can and I will,” he told his father, taking a hold of his finger and pushing it down. “A hair on her head gets harmed, I’m out. Your entire legacy crumbles. Lorenzo Bloodhound Maroni becomes nothing but fodder for gossip without an heir.”
“I would kill you before that.”
As expected. “And there would be nothing standing between you and Tristan,” Dante informed his father. “Now that he’s a grown adult, why do you think you’re still alive, father?”
That shook him. He could see that.
Dante pat his shoulder. “Thinking she was a pawn was your biggest mistake, old man. So, tell your watchdogs to keep her safe. She gets so much as a paper cut, it’s your reputation and your neck on the line.”
“I will not have you sullying our blood with a common little whore.”
What a pompous prick.
“That ‘common little whore’ is going to be the mother of my children one day, father,” Dante smiled at the man. “Your grandchildren. The future Maronis.”
“You get with her, I will slit her and her mother’s throats,” the older man spat out.
Triumph rolled through him. He had maneuvered his father exactly where he had wanted him. “So, as long as I stay away from her, you leave her alone?”
“She was going to meet with an accident,” his father said, making Dante’s gut clench. He had already suspected that though. “But you’ve learned to bargain, son. I won’t touch her as long as you put her out of your head. Find someone else to fuck.”
Dante gritted his teeth, knowing now wasn’t the time to tip the scales of this precarious balance. With that, he turned around to leave and paused. “Oh, and as of today, her mother is my employee, not yours. The same rules apply to her. Now, I’ll leave you to find my brother.”
He knew what his father would find – a burned corpse of a teenage boy by the edge of the property. Dante doubted it would occur to his father that he had been played. His brother was across the ocean, safe in a wonderful house with friends he had made in the facility, living a good life away from these games, no longer a pawn on the board. Dante could never see him again, never risk having anything trace him back to Damien, for his own safety.
Dante had known, as soon as Amara had told him about his father’s generous offer, that her life was forfeit. His father was going to break her rhythm and that, he fucking couldn’t allow. So he had removed the only leverage his father had had over him for years, planning his brother’s fake death and protecting the woman who had his heart, even as he broke hers.
Something clogged in his chest, remembering the last time he had seen his brother a few weeks ago, almost as tall as he was, intelligent enough to understand what Dante was telling him. Damien understood his brother loved him, which was why he had to let him go. He would always watch over him, but until the old man died, they couldn’t see each other again.
With Amara, he had to lay low. Her life hung in the precarious balance between his father’s threat and Dante’s promise. It was a sacrifice worth the wait. She was worth the wait.
Although he imagined she’d tell him to go to hell if he showed up, her voice low and raspy and fucking messing with his heartbeat like it always did. He didn’t think she knew how much he loved her voice. In his world of gunshots and screams, her voice was a gentle prayer, evidence that there was life after the endless noise.
There would be life after this.
The old man couldn’t die, not yet. There were too many variables that would impact a lot of lives if he was killed.
Dante imagined killing him a lot, torturing him in different ways for everything he’d done to his mother, his brother, to Roni, to Amara. He wanted to sneak up to his room and slit his throat in his sleep. He wanted to march into his office and put a bullet between his eyes. He wanted to drag him to the interrogation room and make him bleed for hours.
Dante nurtured the hatred he felt for the man, cloaking it under an easy smile, all the while planning to take his kingdom apart, bit by bit, moving the pieces until nothing remained but the bare foundations of the empire that Dante would build.
It wasn’t time yet.
But one day, it would be.
And that day, Dante would smoke a fucking cigarette as he watched him bleed, and he would come home to fuck the woman he loved.
The new city was a stranger, made worse by the fact that she was completely alone.
She missed her mother, her best friend, her half-sister.
She missed the hills, the woods, the views.
She missed him.
She missed his kisses, his eyes, his voice. That little grin he gave her, that polished look on his face, that fire in his endless eyes. She missed the sculptures and conversations and books, the dances and the drives and the dreams.
After years of spending every day together, the separation felt more brutal. But she’d make it. She had to.
“Hi, I’m Daphne!”
The bright girl in her class came towards her. First week of school and it had been slightly overwhelming. The campus was beautiful and the classes were interesting.
Amara smiled. “Hi,” she whispered in her soft voice.
The girl frowned. “Why are you whispering?”