Page 55 of Accidental Alliance

Anger is easier to deal with in this situation, anyway.

“I have questions you need to answer,” I finally say.

She laughs bitterly, but there is fire beneath it, the same fire that once drew me in like a moth to flame. Now it turns on me in full. “Are you kidding me? You kidnap me and my son, force us apart and take him to God knows where, and expect me to answer your fucking questions? Get bent, Conti.”

Her words land like punches, deserved in every sense. I can hear what she thinks of me in every syllable that comes rolling off her tongue.

Some part of me wants to cross this room and grab her and shake the anger out of her, while another part knows I have earned every bit of her hostility.

I keep my face still. “He is safe.”

Her eyes flash. “Do not lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

She takes a step toward me then. Her hair has fallen loose around her face, chestnut strands wild from fighting and the hours since we dragged her in here.

One sleeve of her sweater is torn near the wrist, exposing a strip of pale skin that should not still be capable of pulling my attention toward it. There is a fading mark on her cheek from where one of my men forced her to the floor to restrain her.

The bruise looks wrong on her. It sits on her skin like a signature I never wanted attached to her, let alone by my hand, even if indirectly. She looks every bit dragged through violence and coming out meaner on the other side of it.

Fear has not softened a thing about her. It has only burned away what little room was left for restraint and possibly negotiations.

There is something almost feral in the set of her mouth now along with the rigid lift of her shoulders.

Her eyes lock onto mine with such bright, vicious disbelief that for one second, I almost look away.

“Safe?” she spits. “You expect me to believe that?”

“What reason would we have to harm him?” I counter.

In my world, that is never a comforting sentence. All it really means is that I have not yet decided how I will use him against her.

How much pressure I need to break her, how much pain it will take to get what I want. How far I am willing to go before she gives me what I need.

She knows that better than anyone.

She was raised in the same blood-soaked cathedral I was. Different pew, perhaps, but under the same religion.

Her father perfected that tactic long before mine ever taught it to us. Amos Russo could pin a man to the proverbial cross with nothing but the threat of what might happen to the people he loved.

He didn’t need to speak violence aloud to get them to bend to his will.

Her expression shifts from raw, blazing maternal fury and pulls back by a few degrees.

Each inhale she drags in reels her farther from the edge until she gathers herself piece by jagged piece.

I can practically see her burying the instinct to lunge for my throat, fear for her son focusing her.

The woman standing in front of me now is no longer only a mother in panic. She is Amos Russo’s daughter, and Christ, she wears it beautifully.

“I want to see him,” she says.

For one reckless second, I almost give in.

I almost tell her I’ll take her to him now so she can touch him, hear him breathe, calm the terror I have no doubt is ripping through the both of them the longer they are forced to be apart.

Mercy almost wins. Or guilt. Whatever it is that remains inside me that still remembers how to feel something other than the comfortable numbness I’ve grown used to over the years when I look at her.