“What a fucking bastard,” Giovanni snapped.
Vittorio swirled the liquid in his glass. “Isn’t it funny how we can totally look at Valentino Saldi and call him out for doing exactly the same thing each of us did with the women in our lives, binding them to us without their consent? Hell, we seduced them, we played every card we had to make sure they belonged to us. We were masters at it, and we didn’t care that they didn’t have a chance, yet he does it and we want to call him the lowest worm on the face of the earth. I think that makes every one of us a hypocrite or worse.”
Emmanuelle wanted to kiss him. Vittorio. Of course he would stick up for her. She could always count on him. He hadn’t even looked at her. He hadn’t acted in any way as if he was standing with her. He’d simply stated a truth.
“Damn it,” Taviano exploded. “Vittorio’s right. You can’t look at Val without seeing the way he looks at Emme and you just know …” He trailed off. “But there’s the cheating. We don’t cheat.”
Color crept up Emmanuelle’s face. “I might have gotten that wrong. I should have listened to his explanation. Elie told me to, but I just couldn’t bear to, and then there was the shadow thing that terrified me.”
“There was an explanation for a naked woman being in his bedroom?” Vittorio asked. He’d been the one to beat the crap out of Valentino, and Val hadn’t lifted much of a hand to defend himself.
She nodded. “Miceli had sent her to get information from Val. Val didn’t want them to know I was important to him. Dario was already on his way to interrupt them when I showed up. He’d been signaled when she took off her clothes. Apparently, she runs one of Miceli’s strip clubs and has something to do with the trafficking ring. Val can tell you about her and all of that when you talk to him about Miceli’s operations.”
“And you’re satisfied that he really didn’t cheat on you?” Taviano pushed.
“I can hear lies as well as any of you,” Emme said. “But question him all you want.” She had the feeling they would no matter what she said. She was their baby sister, and they were determined to protect her no matter what.
“Can you see the ties binding your shadow when he’s not with you?” Ricco asked.
She shook her head. She’d spent hours staring at her shadow, trying to figure out how to undo what had happened. “When he told me the story Giuseppi had told him over and over, I realized that was the real reason Grace had been targeted, not to pay a gambling debt. And I’m certain Dario looked at Nicoletta for the same reason. Suddenly, after centuries of this story being nothing but that, these men see three women with shadows that their shadows react to. If that gets out, all of our unclaimed riders could be in trouble. I had no idea. I had no way of protecting myself.”
She put the glass down on a coffee table and wrapped her arms around her middle to try to stop shivering. “Now I’m in love with a man I can’t have. I have to go into an arranged marriage so I can produce babies with someone I’ll never love. I’ll wreck his life. He’ll always know I don’t love him. It won’t matter that I won’t cheat on him. He’ll know. And what about the woman he should be with? Our marriage will wreck her life as well.”
She knew there was despair in her voice because there was in her heart. She’d thought about the scenario so many times. If she didn’t do her duty to the shadow rider world and produce children, she was just compounding her sins.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Emmanuelle,” Stefano said. “Way ahead of yourself. We take one step at a time. The very first step is with you and Val. It’s easy enough to call his family criminals and say we’re not, yet we kill as often, if not more. We tell ourselves we’re the good guys, but every now and then, I have to look at myself in the mirror when I put my son to bed, knowing I’ve been teaching him how to kill, and he’s just a baby.”
There was another long silence. Giovanni sighed, the first to break the mutual stillness. “It is all in the perspective, isn’t it?”
Vittorio nodded and finished off the Scotch in his glass. “I agree with Stefano on first things first. We have to find out how far this thing has gone between the two of your shadows, Emme. Let’s get you together and take a look. Does Dario know?”
“Yes. Dario knows everything, but for some reason, Valentino doesn’t want Giuseppi to know. He’s been careful, and even tonight, when he was telling me the story, he said he hadn’t told his father. I was still upset because when he was talking with Marge—the blonde in his bedroom that night—he said his father ordered him to seduce me. I told him in a way it was the truth. The story was all about finding someone with my kind of shadow and seducing her. Right? I met the right criteria, and he did exactly what his father wanted him to do.”
There was bitterness in her voice. She felt that same silly burning behind her eyes and fought against it. “His choosing me had nothing to do with me. After I was legally of age, I would meet him at the lake house. I was so happy. He was this amazing, wonderful, caring man. Later, looking back, I realized every time I started to question the weird phenomenon of his shadow binding mine, he would kiss me until I couldn’t think. He knew what he was doing by then, and he controlled the situation.”
“Emme.” Stefano said her name very gently.
“Don’t. I know you’re going to defend him. I can tell. You’re going to try to make me feel better, but it won’t work. I was stupid. I was all the things Eloisa said I was, with the exception of betraying our family. I never once talked about us or riding shadows. I didn’t know about his family’s myths. I had no idea they had any way of binding a rider to them and using them to spy or go into the shadows or if they can tie a rider permanently to them. Still, for all that, I saw our shadows. I saw the ties. I felt them. I felt our connection growing. Sometimes I even saw the look on his face of pure satisfaction when he looked at our shadows. It made me uneasy, and I still didn’t stop seeing him. I went to his house that night to tell him I’d give up everything for him. And I would have. I would have given up being a rider for him.”
“You love him that much?” Vittorio asked, his voice soft.
“Absolutely, I do.” Her voice rang with conviction.
“Is he aware you’re a shadow rider? That all of us are shadow riders? Does he know what that is?” Stefano persisted.
Emmanuelle was very careful. She was on shaky ground now. To know the secret of the Ferraro family could get someone killed. That was one of the reasons she had asked Stefano not to include Elie in their meeting. He was an Archambault. She’d revealed a little too much to him already, passing it off as being a young girl who’d had too much to drink, but still, it might have gotten him thinking, especially when she was so connected to Valentino. Elie Archambault could make one call and get the authority to take out a rider, let alone a civilian who threatened an entire community of riders. She hadn’t wanted Eloisa there because her mother would have taken malicious joy in making the call to the council.
“He doesn’t know. He may suspect. There is the story of the woman, the spy moving in shadows, the tether binding her to her man so she can’t escape him. I’m not even certain how it works because we didn’t have much time for him to explain it in detail. I said nothing to him. Dario asked me how I entered Valentino’s home without his guards catching me, but I didn’t answer him. Val never asked me a question about my family, and I never asked questions about his. It was one of the things that made me believe he really cared about me.”