I squeeze her hand a little tighter. “Then I’ll dance for the both of us. I’ll take my fucking gun, and I’ll spin the chambers until everyone who tried to keep us apart is dead. Just don’t die too, Ada. Promise me. Promise me like I promised you in the library last week when I said I’d come back. No matter how bad it gets.”
Someone’s pulling on the back of my jacket, yanking me away from her, but our hands hold fast until the last second, stretched out and taut, before they’re finally ripped apart.
“Promise me,” I hiss, as I’m pulled further and further away.
“I promise,” she whimpers.
“I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you, and I’ll never stop. You hear me?”
She starts to cry as I’m kicked onto my back again, and then I’m roaring out my next words at the top of my lungs, letting the whole basement hear my truth:
“No regrets, Ada. No fucking regrets!”
The last thing I hear before they knock me out cold is her soft voice echoing them back to me.
CHAPTER 13
FRANKIE
Fourteen years later…
They say a good man has a long walk to freedom. He endures it with dignity and turns a prison sentence into a lesson in faith and forgiveness.
A villain counts ninety-seven paces from his cell to the front gates and turns a five-month stretch into a window of self-serving opportunity.
I’m holding a crumpled pack of cigarettes in one hand as I wait for the final security clearance checks to kick in, with hard purpose resting somewhere in the other. Red lights on the barbed wire fences flash above me and distant alarms clang. It’s the usual fanfare that announces the departure of any jailbird from La Bastille, the most notorious prison in South-West France.
This isn’t my first time behind bars, but it’s the first time I’ve earned it.
Call it penance for keeping the truth from Aiden for all these years.
Call it the start of my Endgame.
Whatever the hell it is, Tommaso Zaccaria is finally dead, and the chains around my wrists and heart just got blown apart.
My ride is waiting for me beyond the silver mesh fence. He’s leaning against the side of his Maserati and messing up the lines with his same-old sin. He’s a bird too, but he bought his own freedom a long time ago.
Aiden the Raven. Mr. Black Skies himself.
“Stay out of trouble, Lastra,” the guard behind me mutters, his spiky French accent piercing my surname with scorn as the gates swing open. “Your criminal friends can’t buy you out of every damn jail cell in Europe.”
I hold his gaze without answering, my six-foot-four cowering him into submission before my reputation finishes off the job. His face flushes and his eyes drop, and I’m left staring at a greasy patch on his forehead. Words are a delicacy not to be wasted, and this man doesn’t deserve a single one of mine.
As I approach the car, I release the top button of my crumpled white dress shirt and rip the bow tie from my neck, sliding it into my jacket pocket before taking Aiden’s outstretched hand. Right away, the weight of our history is crushing a pleasant afternoon into something boxlike and unwanted. From his expression, it’s clear he's pissed at me, but not enough to leave me stranded with my balls hanging out by the side of the road.
“I owe you for this, Raven.”
He studies me for a moment. Our handshake lingering. We’re both British, which means there’s more bite to our silences than our bullets.
“You should have told me about her.”
“I had my reasons.
“You should have told me what Zaccaria had over you, too.”
I pause. “How did you find out?”
“Went looking for the truth after you petitioned so hard to end up in the same prison as him.”
“Had to grease a thousand palms with shit to slip the situation, Raven. Yours just happened to be one of them.”
He breaks the handshake first, and it feels significant. “Is it true your surname’s Lastra, not Adams? You a mafia man, Frankie?”
I nod, and some of his anger escapes through clenched teeth.
“You kept me in the dark for fourteen years for her? Why?”
“You know why.”
He mulls this over for a moment, tilting his handsome head to one side as a car rumbles past, kicking up dust and regret in our faces. Men like us don’t understand love. We defer to it like it’s a trend with a mild case of influence, until it sneaks up and consumes us.
In that respect, we’re both addicts. He’d walk through the same fire to protect his new wife, Issa.
“Is she the girl from the library?” He narrows his eyes as he says it. Dragging us both back to the past.
“Yep.”
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters.
He changed since I’ve been inside. There’s a new looseness about him. He’s already fought his monsters and won the girl. His casinos up and down the French Riviera generate him a hundred million euros a year, and the amount of dirty money he now launders through his businesses nets him almost as much.
All this, and he lives on a superyacht in Monaco.
“Heard Zaccaria was found dead in his prison cell this morning.” He leans back against the car and stretches out his legs. “Heard someone ripped the capo dei capi’s throat right out of his neck.”
One down, three to go.
“Just because he turned out to be a relative of mine, doesn’t mean I’m going to mourn him, Frankie,” he adds, seeing my expression. “Fuck him. I make my own family. So? Did you kill the old bastard?”
I give him the ghost of a smile. “Ask me again when we’re a couple of thousand miles away from here.”
“Good riddance. Still, fourteen years…” He whistles to himself in disbelief, as if love, to him, has an expiry date. “That’s a long time to keep a flame burning.” Turning back to the car, he grabs a folder resting on the front dash and holds it out to me, the corners of his mouth lifting before adding, “No matter how pretty the smoke is.”
Not pretty. Ada isn’t pretty. Her light and grace weave a million gold threads around that statement.
She’s perfect, and she’s mine.
Even after all this time.
Even now when she’s forced to wear another man’s ring.
Flicking open the folder, my heart stills when I see her face. She’s sitting all alone in a garden reading one of the books I sent her, with her Bratva bastard of a husband’s men in the background disturbing the peace.
My finger traces the curve of her cheekbone. “I had to keep her alive, Aiden.”
Brotherhood is brotherhood, but Ada is my whole soul.
Our gazes catch again before he’s switching up the subject. “I got you out as soon as I could.”
“How d’ya do it?” I hand the folder back to him but pocket the photograph. “Did you hold a gun to Miss Interpol’s head? Was she cute?”
Aiden laughs, diffusing some of the tension between us. “Not me. I’m a happily married man these days. One of Santiago’s men did the honours.”
“Remind me to send him a bottle of bourbon.” Slotting a five-month-old cigarette into the corner of my mouth, I lean against the car next to him and wait for his usual bitching about my smoking habit, but it never comes. Blowing rings at the silhouette of the French jail, we watch them break apart as soon as they hit the metal fence. “I’m going back, Raven.”