But I take her hand.
I’m not prepared for the wave of emotion that washes over me when I see my cousin’s pale, lifeless face. I don’t see my cousin lying on the bed before me. I see so much more, like demonic visions come to haunt me in my sleep.
The faces of everyone I ever loved—Romeo, Orlando, Marialena and Mario, Rosa and Santo, Mama and Rosa’s little daughter Natalia, even baby Nicolo, flood my vision. Each lifeless face is cold and pallid and still. I flinch at every image, accosted by the nearness of death. The scent is overwhelming.
“Yeah. It’s him. Jenoah,” I say, and my voice sounds strange, as if it isn’t my own.
“Thank you, sir,” the woman says in Italian. She goes to cover the body, but something makes me stop her.
I reach my hand out in front of her, my voice hoarse. “Stop. Fermare,” I say, my voice hoarse. The two women watch me as I peer closer at the decaying body and swallow the bile that burns my throat.
This was no mere accident.
I trace a reluctant finger at his throat, covered in lacerations. The cuts and bruises and swollen skin aren’t enough to hide the telltale signs of strangulation.
I take out my phone and snap pictures.
My words roll out, harsh and cold, in clipped Italian. I want to see the coroner.
“Si, signore,” she nods, her eyes wide and panicked. “Si.”
She tells me that he’s gone home for the day but she’ll get me his number. I nod and allow her to wheel the body away.
Something’s wrong. This was no mere accident. I was brought here for a reason.
I check in with my guards. “Anything out of place?” I ask, but everything’s kosher. Nothing out of place at all. I have to call Romeo, as soon as I can. He’ll have to make the call to Jenoah’s father. It’s his place, not mine, but I’ll take a higher rank beside him when I marry Elise.
Cold rage burns in my belly. Someone killed my cousin. Someone made it look like an accident, then had his body sent to the morgue so his flesh would rot before he was claimed and given a proper burial.
The faces of the people I love, cold and dead, still plague me. I stand in a sort of stupor, the rancid scent of death enveloping me.
“Tavi,” Elise says gently. “It’s over. They have a waiting room. Let’s go.”
She’s wrong. It isn’t over at all.
Still, when she tugs my hand and leads me to the door, I let her. My eyes sting and my nose burns at the impotent rage that powers through me, the fury that damn near chokes me. Fuck it, I haven’t cried since I was a child. I hate that I feel like this. I hate all of it.
I broke my leg in three places during a football game when I was a senior in high school. I was there the night my cousin Nicolo died and left a wife and children. I buried my father, my grandfather, and countless other made men.
I learned to take my father’s anger and rage. I learned how to throw my body between my younger siblings and his fists or belt.
Not once did I cry.
I won’t cry now.
But I let her take my hand. I follow her when she leads me out of the room. I sink onto the chair and bury my face in my hands.
CHAPTER 6
Elise
I’d bet everything I own that Tavi never meant to show his humanity in that cold, dark room. I’d bet everything I know that he meant to keep up the stoic face, to treat the identification of the dead body like nothing more than a business transaction.
He can tell himself that. Men like him think they’re impervious, that they can wall themselves off against actual human feeling. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
He can’t, though. He can try, but there’s too much loyalty in Tavi to be fully immune to death and pain. Only the truly selfish are alone.
That isn’t him. He might be cruel. He might be heartless. But his blood thrums hot in his veins, and his heart beats still. I know because I’ve seen the way he is with his family. I know that these men value loyalty above all. They all do.
He isn’t the callous creature he wants me to believe he is.
Sometimes I wish he was.
It would be easier to hate him.
I don’t know what happened to him, what trauma he’s experienced, but I know a part of him is broken. Just like me. I can’t ever forget the depravity I’ve witnessed with my own eyes and imagine he’s not much different. I spent so much time staring at the cold floor of his family’s dungeon, stained in blood, that I imagined the echoes of the screams of the ghosts that haunt that place still linger. And I know he’s had a hand in all of it since becoming a made man.
Despite my knowledge that he’s dangerous, that I need to protect myself from him because he will hurt me—hell, he already has—I can’t help but soften toward him. I feel as if I see the smallest flicker of a burning ember where others see only ash. If I fan that flame…
Who am I to think I can influence who he is at all?
He sits in front of me, his face buried in his hands, but his shoulders don’t move, and no tears squeeze between his fingers.
They don’t bother to make the waiting room in an Italian morgue welcoming. A small, circular folding table and metal chairs sit on a concrete floor. This is where you sign paperwork, make a phone call. Shake hands. Do whatever else it is that’s required before you bury your dead.
I watch as he inhales, and I feel every sharp intake of breath as if it was my own. Shards of ice stab my lungs. I stand, tentatively at first, then decide I don’t care if he pushes me away.
I mentally brace for him to dismiss me. I reach my arms around him. I don’t know if it’s him I want to comfort, or me.
My heart aches. I want to cry for him.
Wordlessly, he takes his hands from his face, his beautiful, tortured, perfect face, and reaches for me. With one sharp tug, he yanks me onto his lap.
“It’s fucking brutal,” I tell him, my voice surprisingly strong and loud in the barren room. They should warm this place. This isn’t a room for the dead but for the living.
“What is?” he asks, his gaze tortured and broken. My frigid heart melts a bit more.
I shake my head. “All of it.”
The lies, deception, and manipulation. Violence, threats, and bullying. Anger and sadness and death. Every bit of it’s depraved, and he knows it. You forfeit a childhood and peace for security and wealth, yes, but it’s a choice most of us would rather not make. I’m not sure if anyone outside mob life would ever really, truly understand how he’s been raised, what it does to you.
But I do.
“Yeah,” is all he says, shaking his head. When I meet his gaze, his serious, stern eyes that flicker with the hint of warmth, he reaches his hands to my waist and yanks me even closer to him, his grip painful and hard.
I gasp when he arranges me so that my legs straddle either side of him. My shoes slip off my feet and click on the concrete floor.
I know he can’t control much of this… but he can control me.
I know before his mouth touches mine that he’s going to kiss me.
If I let him.
My heartbeat throbs when his hands slide up either side of my face, framing me. “It is fucking brutal,” he echoes, his eyes on mine cold and angry, but the warmth in his hands belies his frigid gaze. “All of it’s fucking brutal.” His hands press harder, tighter, before he wrenches my mouth to his.