“Close, ten,” he confirms with a narrowed eye. “So you do know something about this case?”
“It was a guess,” I mutter. A guess that rose up from the dead, soaked in black and crimson and chanting sin.
My lungs stop working suddenly. I can’t seem to draw breath. I stumble backward in a panic, clawing at my chest.
It hurts.
It burns.
Help me, Luca.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Redwick’s thin lips curl into a sneer as he looks me up and down again. “Careful, Miss Bailey. Your bitch face is in danger of melting.”
That’s when I hear his voice: “The mask is a gift of many, cara mia. It’s your greatest weapon. Never take it off for anyone.”
And never for men like Brian Redwick and Trent Anderson.
“Emotion is just another door, cara mia. Shut it and bolt it.”
“Do you always talk to women like this?” Smoothing down my shirt, I meet his derision head on.
He shrugs. “My jail. My rules.”
“What makes the cops so convinced that Vincent even knows where these other nine bodies are buried?” I say, plastering a smile across my face. “How do you know he isn’t feeding you all a line to buy himself time before he stands trial himself? I know the DA has every intention of seeking the death penalty on his conviction.”
Redwick just shrugs again. The light above us switches to green, and we’re clear to enter a new section of J-Wing. There’s an open door up ahead, flooding darkness into the strip-lit corridor.
Surely, that’s the wrong way around.
“Believe me, Miss Bailey, I share your frustrations.” Redwick runs his hand through his thinning gray hair a couple of times, as if to prove his point. “I want the cops out of here as soon as Vincent sings like a caged bird. There’s nothing I hate more than having a bunch of faceless fucks dictating the rules to me in my own facility.”
“I’ll find out for both of us, then.”
He scowls at my sarcasm, but I’m done with this conversation.
“Be my guest,” I hear him threaten as I brush past. “But watch yourself, queenie... Vincent may not have the most blood on his hands, but he’s one of the most dangerous men in here.”
“And the most mysterious, by all accounts.”
Three guards block the doorway, but I’m not interested in their wall of silence. I want the answer to this riddle—to finally reveal the criminal who has demanded my time in exchange for his blood-soaked confession.
A beat later, my curiosity is the second killer in the room.
It can’t be...
The man sitting behind a metal table with heavy chains around his wrists isn’t Enzo Vincent. I know him by another name. I call him my past. My depravity. He’s as familiar to me as my bleeding heart.
He’s the memory I’ve been running from for ten years—encapsulated in this brutally handsome form, wearing an orange jumpsuit that barely contains the huge breadth of his shoulders.
His black eyes meet mine, gleaming with amusement and something else I can't bring myself to recognize as I stumble further into the room.
The boy I knew became a man.
The boy I knew became a monster.
Who am I fooling? Luca Esposito was already a monster when he stole me from the streets and shattered me into a million pieces.
“Madeline,” he says coolly. “Or should I address you as Madigan these days?”
God, that voice. It shudders through my body like an earthquake—rough and sinful, and spliced with the same forcefulness that waged war on my innocence without my permission.
Shards of my past start raining down on me like broken glass.
Log cabin. Pain. Hate. Love.
“Do you feel me, cara mia? Do you feel me so deep inside your heart you’ll have to shatter it to truly understand it?”
I reach for the back of the chair to stop myself from falling.
“Y-you died,” I whisper, so quietly only we can hear.
“And now I live.” A touch of a smirk now graces those beautiful lips, but this man is a master of deception. An emotional chameleon. His expressions are carefully choreographed, all designed to lull you into a false sense of security.
That’s what makes him so dangerous.
“Don’t you think you owe me, cara mia?” he continues smoothly. “After everything I did?”
This can’t be happening.
Twelve years ago, Luca led me in and out of hell, and now I’m right back there again.
They say fear is the ultimate deceiver, but she’s a wicked cheat too.
She tempts lies from the honest.
She turns sinners into saints.
And in a heartbeat, she’s turned me, a public defender, into as much of a criminal as the killer who demanded my presence.
My past comes rushing up again so fast, it steals my breath away.
In that moment, I know who the buried bodies are—the ones he claims to have knowledge of. I also know that within a couple of months, Luca Esposito will be walking out of here a free man.
I know this because I’ll be the one breaking his chains for him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Luca
Ten years.
For ten years I’ve thought about nothing else but this moment. Finding her wasn’t easy. My clever girl changed her name. Madeline Benning became Madigan Bailey.
It wasn’t the only thing she switched up.
“You changed your hair.” Changed is putting it mildly. The long blonde hair that used to kiss her waist is now a coppery red that dusts her shoulders. Not only that, the layers cut into the sides are causing a large chunk of it to fall flat over one eye.
I don’t like it.
Eyes are the window to the soul. Lips can tell lies, but the eyes can’t hide the truth. Sin reveals itself through a silent stare, not a roaring confession.
I watch her closely, intrigued by her reaction. She’s rattled, and rightly so. I’d be offended otherwise. She assumed I died that night she escaped, and in a way I did. Ten years without her was the worst kind of hell to be in.
Her pure heart bleeds all over her pretty white shirt as her tight grip on the metal chair slowly eases. Second by second, that blissful weakness disappears as her shields come crashing back down.
I watch her glance up at the security camera, but there’s no audio.
Client confidentiality.
“Hair, cara mia?”
“Don’t call me that,” she cries, then blushes as if outbursts are an uncommon occurrence with her.
Another change.
When we first met on that sidewalk, she wanted to live, and I wanted to die. She fought like a hellcat. She resisted until her limbs ached and her breath ran ragged. That Madigan had fucking welcomed outbursts like a summer shower.
My case file is waiting on the table for her. She forces a tight smile as she pulls out the chair opposite me, brushing that damn hair out of her face again.
It’s a professional smile.
It’s a bullshit smile.
That’s another thing lips can do: tell a thousand lies without a single word being uttered.
“Haircuts are what people do when they don’t want to be found, Mr. Vincent,” she clips, but the shaky cadence betrays her newfound composure. “Yet, here we are.”
The shackles around my wrists rattle as I clench my hands. I want nothing more than to snap them in half and push that red away. I need to see those goddamn eyes.