Page 74 of Modern Romance September 2026 Books 5-8

Went back to his father’s empire.

Took her with him as a pawn.

After I welcomed him into the fold when we were young, and angry, needing to escape the lives we were born into. After I introduced him to sweet Vittoria in the first place.

Everyone has a price.

I trust no one.

I don’t even feel personally betrayed by him. How can I? Everyone does what they must in this world. We are all the authors of our own book of morals. A man can justify anything to get what he wants; I know it well.

Thank God I don’t allow anyone to know the location of my bolt-hole. When my men travel to the safe house they are transported by a man who has worked for my mother’s family for generations, and they do so with no understanding of where they’re going. I’ve even drugged some of them for the journey.

If not for that then I’d have to be concerned about Renzo coming here now. Vittoria knows nothing about this place, so he can’t extract the information from her.

But I have to confront the reality that I trusted him, and was wrong.

That I don’t know him, actually. And he could be capable of anything.

She is glowering beside me, clearly angry, the little fool.

“You would prefer that I had left you?”

“To be honest, I would prefer that my womb hadn’t been hijacked by the Mafia. That’s what I would prefer. I thought that I was giving a baby to a couple who really wanted one. I thought that I was helping them, and they were helping me. But you don’t even want this baby, not because you love it. You’re just trying to use it for control. And you’re using it to control me too.”

“This is not about control. As I said before, you are simply a vessel to me. I have no investment in you.”

The world has casualties. All the time. If something happened to her, it would be no different than any of those. But my child…

It’s hard to articulate why I care. I don’t even know why. Except that it feels extremely poor that a life has been created as a means to manipulate me. That my father took my DNA, created a human being to trap me. A human being that did not ask to be created.

And perhaps there would be some mercy in snuffing that life out early; I don’t know. There has certainly been very little mercy in my life.

But I’ve decided to go the other way, at all costs. Perhaps someday I’ll have an explanation for that.

I don’t have one now.

I’m not sure that I need one.

When you’re a dangerous man, it’s rare that you’re asked to explain yourself.

I’m a man of action, far more than I’m a man of deep introspection.

And so I refuse to engage in it now.

With her held firmly in my arms, we get out of the car in front of the large, imposing compound that sits there in the middle of the rocky outcropping. The sea is angry all around us. It is more fortress than island. Just as I need it to be.

“This place is cursed,” she says, giving up on fighting me, and instead going limp in my arms, attempting to be deadweight, I assume, since this woman is intent on making all of this difficult.

“It doesn’t exist to charm you. And neither do I. You would do well to remember that.”

“You would do well to remember that if there’s one thing I’ve done from the cradle to now it’s survive. And that isn’t by suffering fools, or brutish behavior.” Her eyes flash, blue with her fury, and I have to admire her futile attempts at shaming me, threatening me and annoying me.

“You will suffer what I command that you suffer,” I say. “If you leave here, you will die. You have survived against reasonable, familiar elements. You have survived when faced with the passive cruelties of life, I assume. But that is different than surviving when a professional hit man decides to end you.”

“You have no idea what I’ve survived.” She makes her body even more limp, less accommodating if such a thing were possible, as I continue to carry her. “I’ve survived the advances of meth heads in my parents’ home. I’ve survived men thinking they can have their way with me on fishing vessels. I’ve survived everything. And the only reason that you can look at me and think that I don’t know how difficult life is is because you are a man. You think that you had some unique experience being in organized crime, because there might be danger all around you. That’s just the experience women have every day. And look at that, both of us, endangered by men.”

“There are some very accomplished female assassins.”