Okay, stop, he begged.
So, I did, the spoon hovering an inch from his bleeding socket.
“Yes?” I coaxed.
His breath heaved through his lungs as if he’d run a marathon. I waited a moment for him to catch some air then lowered the spoon again.
“Wait, fuck,” he called out again in Italian. “You crazy bastard.”
“This is nothing,” I said with a humble shrug, twirling the spoon between my fingers. “Now, tell me why you came for me.”
He glowered at me, but the effect was somewhat ruined by the pulpy mess my fists had made of his face. “You think you can just come back to Napoli and slide right back in to your old role?”
“Ah, so you do remember.” My smile was smug and I felt a resounding pang of triumph in my chest.
The truth was validation was important to me. I’d grown up the second son of a powerful man, the spare to the prodigal heir. No one had their eyes on me and it chafed more than I cared to admit. I was shaped by that need for glory, so much so that it was entirely too easy to settle for infamy in the place of fame.
I’d wanted to make a name for myself in the world and I’d done it.
There was no shame in being Dante Salvatore, ruthless mafioso, the Devil of NYC, the Mafia Lord, or the Crown Prince of Hell.
I’d forged him like a weapon from the ashes of my old life as Edward Davenport, parentless, with a brother who hated me and no home to return to.
So, it pleased me deeply to hear that my name still echoed through the alleys and underground backrooms of Naples.
“You think you’re entitled to whatever you want just because you’re some hot shot capo in America? You’re all soft and weak. Porci.”
Pigs.
“No…” The word slid from my mouth on a hiss. “We are crafty and relentless. Where you would have shot me dead in my bed, I have you here about to confess all your plans like a talking toy with a pulled string. Who, may I ask, if the weaker man here?”
He tried to spit at me, but there was only sticky blood in his mouth so the effort failed.
I sighed wearily and tensed my fingers in his hair again, yanking his head back for a better angle for my spoon.
“Che palle,” he cursed. “Okay, you bastard, no one sent me because I came myself.”
This was a surprise. I studied the younger man again, but I was certain I didn’t know him. When I looked up across the room at Tore who leaned against the wall with his arms and legs crossed casually like he was waiting for something as mundane as a bus, he shook his head.
We didn’t know this man for him to hate us enough to kill us.
“Why?” I demanded, dropping the spoon, because I was bored.
Umberto sighed in relief until I grabbed the abandoned torch and lit it an inch from his eye.
When he finished screaming, I repeated myself.
“Because I love Mira,” he shouted hoarsely, too loud and forceful, the tendons in his neck straining.
It was the look and sound of a man at the end of his rope.
This pleased me.
“You’re in love with Mira?” I asked, vaguely surprised that the meek woman could inspire such passion that this stronzo would risk his life trying to take mine in my own home.
He clamped his mouth shut truculently, but before I could light the torch again, a soft, lilting voice spoke in a language that I wasn’t used to hearing from her.
“In love with her? No, you love her, though, don’t you?”
I sucked in a deep, steadying breath before I looked over my shoulder at the woman who could seduce me and infuriate me in equal measures.
She was still in her damned nightgown, the silk so thin it molded to her every curve. For modesty’s sake, she’d donned the robe but I had taken the sash so the entire length of black silk gaped open and made her look even more inviting. Angry as I was, she still took my fucking breath away standing there with all that red hair mussed, her face bare of makeup and all the more striking for it.
In an entirely different outfit, in an entirely different space and she still reminded me of some heathen goddess of sex and war.
“Elena,” I began on a low growl, hyper aware of the blood sprayed across my face, the swollen, cut open knuckles on my bloody hands, the gory spoon in my fingers.
This was not how I wanted Elena to see me.
She was too smart not to know what a mafioso got up to in the shadows. How a Made Man might punish someone for trying to take away his life. She knew what I was on trial for, shed read the FBI files about my supposed crimes front to back more than once.
But she didn’t need to witness it. Let alone me doing those deeds.
She was a lady.
She deserved diamonds and silk and lace, manners and galas in velvet dresses.
Not basement rendezvous at midnight with a man’s cries still ringing against the walls.
Not even Cosima had ever seen this side of me, the ruthless, seething darkness I had inside of me. I’d never shown her, even though she was married to my brother who was often more monster than man.
I hadn’t trusted her, or maybe I hadn’t trusted myself.
Either way, standing over a man I fully intended to send to hell with the woman I would move heaven and earth for was a deeply fucking unsettling scenario.
She ignored me, her gaze pinned on Umberto. Without hesitating, she walked toward us, her bare feet catching in the blood splatter, tracking red footprints on portions of the clean tiles.
When she was in line with me, she stopped even though she didn’t acknowledge my presence. I was irritated, but also curious. What was my sharp-minded lottatrice thinking?
“You love her,” she continued in that liquid Neapolitan accent of dropped vowels and shushing ‘s’s’ that couldn’t be taught, only learned from birth. “You love her, but not as a lover. As a sister? Ah, no, maybe a beloved cousin?”
Umberto blinked, but there was an uncanny twist to his mouth that confirmed Elena’s suspicions.
“I know Mirabella is afraid of Dante,” Elena continued smoothly, sitting in my vacant chair primly, legs crossed, hands loosely clasped like she was in a holding room at a New York jail interviewing a client and not in the basement torture room of an infamous mafioso. “But he wouldn’t be a bad match for her, would he? He’s affluent and respected in the community. I don’t believe you’d kill him just to get your sister out of an arranged marriage. There’s another reason.”
Umberto’s lips twisted tighter, a valiant effort to cap the bubbling emotions bursting inside him.
Elena sighed, leaning forward earnestly. “You don’t seem very attached to your sight, Signore Arno.”
Taking her cue, I sparked the torch in my hand, the hiss of flame loud in the quiet room.
Umberto swallowed thickly. “My sister deserves to be happy.”
“Yes,” my woman agreed easily. “Everyone does. Whether or not that’s feasible is another case entirely. Have you thought that perhaps Dante doesn’t want to marry your sister either?”
“So he can marry you?” he snarled in heavily accented English. “Some American whore?”
Elena didn’t say a word as I grabbed Umberto by the throat and squeezed, his face plumping, reddening like an overripe fruit on the vine about to burst.
“Say another word against her, I’ll take your eyes and your balls.”