“It’s not just a rush, Princess. I have a hell of a lot more experience than you do when it comes to sex. What we have together is off the charts.”
“It’s still not love, Val. This is still about our shadows, not about us. It isn’t real and it’s wrong.” What woman would go into a relationship with a man knowing she was only worth something to him because of his shadow’s reaction to hers?
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s wrong or not, Emme. I don’t care if you want to call it obsession. Not when it comes to you. We aren’t going to try to break the ties between us, not that I think it’s actually possible. If anything, we’re going to keep strengthening them.”
She twisted her wrist and yanked it away from him, rolling off the bed and coming to her feet. “That is the last thing we’ll be doing, Val. I mean it. We aren’t going to have a relationship even if we can’t break the ties. Once this is all over, and hopefully we defeat Miceli and his army, I’ll have no choice but to tell my brothers about this.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why? This is between us, Emmanuelle. It’s always been between us. We work it out, no one else.”
“Because your family is a threat to ours. Grace was threatened. Nicoletta could have been. Obviously, I was.”
“Baby.”
His voice went soft, that voice that always played along her nerve endings like his melodies, running through her body and spreading like electrical charges. He waited until she looked into his eyes. Until she was drowning there.
“I have never, at any time, been a threat to your family. I’ve only tried to protect them. You know that. In your heart, no matter how angry or hurt you are, you know that to be true. I’ve protected you and what’s between us, and I’ve kept it between us.”
He was making it so difficult to do the right thing. She had no choice. He had to see that she had no choice. She hadn’t admitted she was a shadow rider. That she could move from one place to another, but he knew. She saw the knowledge in his eyes. He’d told her that he’d watched her. Just knowing the truth of her family would put him under a death sentence. If he knew about her family—and he would someday head one of the most notorious crime families in Chicago—the Ferraro family would be compromised in all of their vast businesses.
She backed away from the bed. This was far worse than she had ever imagined. She had seen the bindings on her shadow. The ropes were so heavy and so many, the loops intricate and the knots numerous and so complicated, she doubted if an expert would be able to get them undone.
Expert. The word slid through her mind. Ricco was more than an expert with rope and knots. Was it possible she had the solution right in front of her? If she was patient, after this was over, she could go to her brother, swear him to secrecy and then have him unravel the rope and knots for her. He wouldn’t like her tricking him into silence, but she would promise to tell Stefano and the others the story the Saldis passed from father to son, explaining it was all too real and the riders needed to be on guard.
The moment the solution was within her grasp, she breathed a sigh of relief. Val would be safe, whether he liked it or not. He might think he knew they could slide into the shadows, but he had no way of proving it. If he talked about it to anyone, they would think he was crazy.
“What are you planning, Emme?” Val demanded. “I can see you’re working on something I’m not going to like. My wounds weren’t that bad. Mostly, I lost a lot of blood. I’ll be up fast and will be able to help in a few hours. That means whatever fucked-up plan you’re devising to get rid of me isn’t going to work.”
It would work. It had to work if she was going to save his life. She lifted her chin at him. “Fortunately, Val, you never did get to dictate to me what I could and couldn’t do.”
He swore under his breath and planted one palm on the mattress, acting as if he might swing his legs out of the bed. The door opened and Dario strode in. Val settled and Emmanuelle let out the breath she’d been holding.
“I can see you two are getting along,” Dario said and dropped into the chair that allowed him to see both the bed and the door.
“What are you doing here?” Val demanded. “I thought you were looking after the old man? He’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Would I be here if he wasn’t?” Dario snapped.
“You didn’t take any pain meds, did you?” Emme asked. She couldn’t help herself, she moved closer to Dario even though his dark eyes warned her to stay back. Although his expression showed irritation, that was all on his features; there was near agony in his eyes. Vittorio had said his wounds were worse than Val’s, although Val had suffered severe blood loss. “Dario, you need to take pain meds.”
“You know as well as I do that Miceli will find this place soon if he doesn’t already know about it, Emme. I can’t take a chance on being impaired.”
“How bad were you hit?” Val asked.
Dario shot him a glare but didn’t reply.
“Take something mild. You aren’t going to be of much help if you can’t move around very well,” Emme pointed out, trying not to sound concerned.
Dario had pulled out his phone and was frowning down at the screen, but he glanced up, eyes shooting daggers at her. “Don’t worry about me, Emmanuelle. Worry about Miceli. He sent his fucking men after Giuseppi and Valentino. I told him if he ever did that, I’d kill him myself. I guess he didn’t believe me.”
There was truth in every word he uttered. Truth and venom. He really detested his father. Miceli had done things to him, or he knew things about the man that had made him this way. She glanced over at Valentino, wondering if he was aware of just how much Dario despised Miceli. She could see Val had full knowledge. For some reason, he had always trusted his cousin and treated him right when no one else had. She imagined it must have taken even Giuseppi a good amount of time before he trusted Dario to guard his precious son, yet he had come to do just that.
Emmanuelle wished she’d been nicer to Dario. He was a hard man. Closed off. She thought of him as a killer. But then, what was she? Did she think she was so much better because she told herself she meted out justice to criminals? She was still an assassin. She wasn’t sanctioned by the government. No law enforcement agency was behind her. In fact, they often tried to find out who was behind the killings of those who had, for a short time, seemed to escape justice.
Dario was a man whom the world saw as a killer. Valentino was the son of a crime boss. She was the princess of a billionaire mogul family. They were a dynasty. They had an empire all over the world. Hotels. Banks. Casinos. Clubs. They lived out in the open, a glitzy life among celebrities and stars. The paparazzi surrounded them whether they were on a racetrack or jetting off to some secluded island for a weekend. It mattered little what they were doing; it was always noteworthy. Reporters followed Giuseppi and Valentino occasionally, but not because they wanted to get great pictures; they were looking for news stories to tie them to crime.
“Stop looking at me like I’m going to fall apart any second, Emme,” Dario said. “I don’t kill so easily.”
“She didn’t look at me that way,” Val complained. “I think she thought about shooting me.”