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As you wish.

How did he know my husband said that to me sometimes?

Had he been stalking us for years just waiting for this?

A moment later I heard the telltale mechanical note of a code being punched into the keypad for the panic room.

Frantic, I slammed my hand on the panic button to summon the police and crouched beside the gun safe, punching in my birthday for the code and grabbing the first pistol my hand closed over.

By then, the door was already swinging open.

I fell to my ass and leveled the gun at the entryway, waiting.

Seconds after, the man I’d thought was my husband, the man I’d thought I could actually fall for, strolled into the room like he fucking owned it.

I fired the gun, aimed at his throat.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Luca

I should have known she would have a gun.

But I was too focused on the memory of her fear-struck face, of the way she stared at me like I was the worst monster she had ever seen.

And in our life, Fiammetta had seen a lot of monsters.

It struck me like a knife slammed between the fourth and fifth ribs.

After a night of limpid eyes filled with rabid want and soft desire so tender it felt like a physical touch to my cold, dead heart, that expression was impossible for me to bear.

No one had ever looked at me the way she did before we fell asleep, like I was a wonder, a beautiful mystery.

Everyone looked at me the way she did in the light of her phone when she somehow discovered that I was not Dario.

Like I was death incarnate.

Usually, that terror infused me like a drug. I was used to striking horror in the hearts of hardened men. My name was whispered like a curse in dark rooms and sketchy alleys.

I could not stand to strike that same fear in the heart of this woman.

This woman who was, technically, not my wife.

But who had become the preoccupation of my soul over the last six years while I acted as shadow sentry and occasional stand-in husband for Dario when his expertise was needed in favor of my own.

My routine revolved around orders I received on encrypted software or through drop points throughout Chicago, but my life?

It revolved around Fiammetta Ferretti.

My brother’s unwanted wife.

From the moment I’d first seen her when I had shadowed Lando to a meeting in Palermo with the Italian capo, Vincenzo Cavallaro, I had wanted her.

No, want was too trite a description.

I’d hungered for her. Fierce as a vampire’s need for blood, rabid as a wild dog for a scrap of warm meat.

There was something vital about the princess of the Sicilian Mafia, even under the prim and proper decorum she exhibited for the audience of her father and his associates.