I refrained, though, because I had promised Alexander I would follow his lead, and it seemed utterly imperative that I do so at that moment.
Even Dante, strung taut as a wire at my other side, did not speak for his brother, though I knew he wanted to.
We waited, the silence almost vibrating with strain.
“If I win,” Alexander began to say slowly in his cultured words formed out of ice. “You will tell me the location of the next Order of Dionysus auction in the city and abroad. You will give me the information immediately following the game. In addition, should I need a favour from you in the future, you will be open to receiving it.”
Ren’s eyes narrowed at his audacity before he let out a little chuckle. “Ballsy. I thought you Brits were known for your conservatism.”
“Clearly you’ve forgotten the ruthlessness of the great British empire,” Alexander said drolly.
Ren’s eyes sparkled with wicked mirth. “Clearly. Well then, I approve.” His eyes slid like an ice cube over my body, leaving a cold trail in their wake as he sized me up and then smiled thinly. “I believe your service is required at my side, bella.”
Alexander scowled at his endearment, but surprisingly, he didn’t protest. Instead, he stood and helped me to my feet. I was just moving away when his hand tightened on my hand, and he jerked me forward into his solid chest. My lips parted on an exhalation of breath, and then his mouth was sealed over mine, his tongue parrying hotly with mine in a quest for domination even though he knew I’d eventually give it freely.
I moaned, caught up in the heat that bloomed between our mouths and sank roots deep into my belly, down into my sex.
When he finally pulled away, his firm, full mouth was damp with my attentions. Before I could help myself, I raised on my toes and licked across his swollen lower lip before biting the plumpness between my teeth.
His eyes sparkled like frothing champagne as I stepped back, pride and abiding lust bubbling through the silver.
He tipped his chin slightly, and I went, rounding the table with my hips rolling, legs as fluid as honey poured over the floor.
The men watched me, and Ralston even adjusted himself in his trousers. When I reached Ren and gracefully collapsed into a kneel at his feet, I caught the lust in their eyes trained on me like spotlights, lighting me up with his desires.
I knew the dress had been a good idea.
And though Alexander wasn’t usually one for blunt force, his show of ownership was apparently just the show these possessive Italians needed.
Ren looked down at me, the only man without want clouding his vision. Instead, he studied me as a bug under glass, cataloguing my attributes and reading the intent in my face.
“Beautiful,” he said softly, just for me even though everyone else could hear him under the low music. “But then, that’s been somewhat of a curse for you, hasn’t it, Cosima?”
I slanted him a hard look, but I wasn’t surprised. He was a man of information, so of course he had known who I was the entire time. It only made me curious what his end game was. Did he mean only to play havoc with the Davenport brothers by so obviously displaying me at his side?
Or was there something else he wanted from them, from me?
I knelt quietly as the men resumed their play, but I kept a close eye on Ren, watching his hands and learning the way he played poker.
I’d learned you could discern a lot from a man by the way he played a game of strategy.
Alexander was calculating and cold. His beautiful face didn’t twitch out of its repose for even a moment, as if a marble statue sat in his seat instead of a human being. When the game had finally dwindled away to just Ren and himself, I still had difficulty reading his intent. I thought he might have a high face card in his hand, probably a queen as two showed on the river, and his eyes grew even colder with wicked delight.
Dante played as he lived, with a bold passion that you saw a mile away but were still helpless to counter. He often had nothing of significance in his hand, but no one could bluff like a handsome Italian assured from birth of his own magnificence. When he went out, he did so with a gruff Neapolitan curse and an impolite hand gesture.
The man named Ralston played lazily, enjoying his booze and cigar much more than the craft of the game. He was out before the game had even really begun, but he sat there, vaguely amused and growing drunker, to watch the tense game play out.
And Ren?
He played with sly acuity, as if he was a puppetmaster dabbling with his toys.
After over an hour of play, I realized where his smugness stemmed from.
The bastardo was cheating.
I was appalled at his balls in doing so. Cheating in the house of di Carlo was akin to signing his own death warrant in his life’s blood. He did it seamlessly, though. I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t so close, if he didn’t insist on petting my hair condescendingly or leaning over to smell my skin and lick my ear. He did it to inflame Alexander, but in the end, his smugness was his downfall because I learned his trick.
I waited, my easy submission around my shoulders like a shroud, hiding my calculation and keen eye from the misogynistic Italian beside me.
Then the fifth card was flipped on the river, and I saw my opportunity.
Ren had slid a queen into the opening between his wrist and his shirt, and it winked at me as he leaned over to slide a hand through my hair and drag his nose over my face, loudly inhaling the scent of me. Instead of passively allowing him to assault me, I wrapped my hand around that wrist and tugged him farther into me so that his mouth landed on the corner of mine. Before he could right himself, I kissed him.
It was closed mouthed, my lips sealed against his invasion, but still plush enough to entice him to give in to the embrace. He softened from his shock, and his hand tightened in the back of my hair. I moaned softly as I swiped my fingers delicately over the gap in his shift sleeve and carefully pulled the card out from his sleeve.
When Ren moved away, he studied my face closely. He was smart enough to wonder at my play but not so unmanly that his eyes were still clear of desire. I licked my red lips and watched the way his eyes tracked the movement.
Alexander was between us in the next moment, looming over Ren with such a cold fury, I could feel it emanating off his back like dry ice.
He wrapped a hand around Ren’s throat and leaned into his face to whisper, “Kiss her again, I’ll remove your bullocks. I’ve done it before, and trust me, I rather have a knack for it.”
Ren rolled his eyes as he shoved at Xan’s hand. “It was your woman who kissed me, Davenport, not the other way around. And I hate to shatter your delicate sensibilities, but when I win this game, I’ll do much more than kiss her mouth in my hour alone with her.”
Dante growled lowly from across the table but didn’t move from his spot. I knew if he did, he wouldn’t be able to control his loose rein over the anger inside him.
I couldn’t see Alexander’s face as he stared down at Ren, but I was sure it was a frozen mask of contempt and not one blink gave away the fact that I’d slid a card into the back pocket of his suit pants. I was obscured from Ralston’s eyes by Xan’s big body and only Dante, seated to my left could have caught a glimmer of my movement.
Of course, he didn’t say anything, but when his eyes slid to mine, they were filled with our old rapport, a childlike excited that filled the black with merriment.
Finally, Alexander broke his standoff with Ren and moved back around the table to resume his seat. He did so stiffly, a muscle in the acute angle of his jaw jumping. It was easy to read that he was angry and frustrated, that maybe his hand couldn’t stand up to the assuredness Ren expressed over his ability to win.
I swallowed the smile that threatened to blossom across my mouth and tilted my head farther to the ground so my hair would obscure my face.
It was amazing how men could underestimate a pretty face, as if all a woman’s effort went into her good looks with nothing left f
or intelligence.
Ren would learn just as the Order would, that I was no pawn.
I was a queen.
Two minutes later, when Ren went all in on the hand, I couldn’t resist looking up at Alexander from across the table. Our eyes locked, resolved as a contract signed in blood. We were a team, a closed loop of energy.
No one would ever again tear us apart, and together, working like this, we were invincible.
Giddiness arched through my gut like a shooting star.
Alexander accepted Ren’s bet and pushed his chips into the center and flipped over his cards.
Two queens that matched with the cards on the river, meant he had a full house.
Ren smiled like a shark, all teeth and mean intent as he readjusted his cards, slyly trying to pull the hidden queen from his shirt sleeve.
Only, it wasn’t there.
Of course.
Because I had given it to Xan.
Ren’s frown flashed across his face before he could curtail it, and his eyes cut down to me.
I smiled at him beatifically.
He tensed just slightly as my possible duplicity sank in, and then he his jaw flexed as he tossed his cards onto the red felt.
A queen and a ten of hearts.
Without the queen laid out for Alexander, the queen he had meant to play, Ren only had a flush, which was trumped by Xan’s full house.
If he’d had the queen, he would have played the most powerful hand in the game; a royal flush.
Alexander’s smile sliced a red wound between his cheeks as mocking and evil as the Joker’s. “Well, Tarsitani, I believed some information is owed to me. Where and when is the Order holding its next auctions? Additionally, what do you know about the relationship between di Carlo and my father?”
Ren swallowed heavily, obviously attempting to speak through his anger at being thwarted in his plan. He opened his mouth to respond, and a crashing bang resounded through the underground room.
A moment later, the back door, one we hadn’t entered through, slammed open, and four masked men spilled through the gambling den dressed in head-to-toe black. They had automatic weapons in their hands, weapons that started to spit bullets before we could even make sense of the calamity.
I dived to the floor on instinct and started to army crawl around the table to get to Alexander and Dante. A cacophony of grunts, startled shouts, and gunfire ripped the air to shreds, and the poker table exploded into splinters over my head, raining sharply down over my skin.
I shouted as two hands pulled me roughly off the ground under my armpits and began to haul me toward the door.
Not the front door, though, and with gut cramping affirmation, I knew it wasn’t Dante or Xan who had caught me up to save me.
It was one of the masked men.
I screamed as I was hefted over his shoulder, kicking out and punching deeply into his kidneys in an attempt to get free. He didn’t hesitate a moment, spraying bullets over the area of the room where my two beloved men were hidden.
I heard Dante swear loudly in Italian and then Xan call, “You take her now, and I will end not just you, but every single fucking person you have ever loved.”
The man holding me paused for one brief second, his gun silent, his feet heavy in their tread. I thought maybe the dominant, arctic voice of my Master would be enough to halt him, but even Alexander’s power had limits.
A moment later, amid a hail of gunfire, he was running us across the floor under cover from the other men and out the door into an alleyway. He took the steps to the street level two by two and then wrenched open a car door before tossing me roughly inside.
I righted myself quickly, pushing my rumpled hair out of my face with one hand while grabbing the knife from my ankle holster with the other. A flicker of movement across the interior had me moving in a flash, holding the knife up under the throat of my captor, my body spilled like an oil slick over his lap.
Only then did I look up into the face of my abductor.
“Good evening, carina,” Seamus Moore said in mild greeting. “Look how you’ve grown.”
Cosima
Seamus Moore was five years older, and apparently, none the wiser. The moment Alexander and Dante discovered he had taken me, he was a dead man, which, maybe unsurprisingly, did not incite feelings of woe in my heart. Time, it seemed, did not heal all wounds. I found only an astonishing amount of hate and dread toward the man who had acted as my father—however abysmally—since birth.
Unfortunately, it seemed time hadn’t touched Seamus in other ways either. His thick hair was still the gleaming colour of candle lit copper in the low light of the limousine, his handsome features strikingly Celtic to my now trained eye; from the russet freckles on his pale skin, as vaguely sweet and contrasting as cereal in milk, to the perfectly formed small rosebud of his pink mouth. He and Elena looked so much alike, especially in the low light. For some immutable reason, they both looked even more beautiful in shadow.
It was such a shocking blow to see him again, let alone know that he had orchestrated the entire holdup in the backroom just to have a private moment with me. Some other daughter might have thought of him more often, in the moments when his choices on her behalf from the past echoed into her future. But there was more than one villain in my life, and Seamus was the least pertinent and the least malicious.
Or so I’d thought.
Sitting across from him now, his long body leaning against the expensive leather interior as if he’d been born to riches, his lips half-smiling as he sipped from a glass of champagne, I had to wonder if he’d come back to ruin my life all over again.
“Celebrating something?” I asked before I could help myself.
I’d taken my knife from his neck, but that didn’t mean I was eager for a chummy father/daughter catch up.
“I’m reuniting with my long-lost daughter. I would say that’s reason to celebrate,” he proclaimed with the same level of showmanship he always had, as if everything in his life was happening just as he wished it to.
“I believe I told you I never wanted to see you again,” I reminded him, proud of my composure when my insides roiled like a washing machine filled with rocks.
“As a matter of fact, you told me never to see the rest of our family again,” he corrected with that smug mischievous twinkle in his dark grey eyes. “A promise I’ve upheld.”
“Am I supposed to commend you for that? It’s the first promise you’ve ever kept and the only kind thing you’ve ever done for our family.”
I felt physically ill with resentment as I stared at his creased, handsome face arranged in his coy, carefree smirk.
Did nothing matter to this man?
Was he just as sociopathic as Noel, but cut into a different shape by his emotional impotence?
“You should.” He cocked his head, a thick hank of ginger hair falling into eyes the very same dark grey as Elena’s. “Do you think it is easy for a father to abandon his family?”
“Do you think it’s easy to be abandoned?” I shot back, leaning forward to bare my teeth at him. “And don’t give me any cazzate about me forcing you to leave. You abandoned your responsibilities to our family long before you actually left Napoli.”
For the first time, he frowned at me, obviously put out by my attitude. “Cosi, I would think you are old enough to know I did the best I could given the circumstances.”
“I would think you’d know I’m old enough not to buy wholesale into your lies. You fucked us over all our lives, and now you’re back, to what?”
“I wasn’t in a good…position to help you much before now, but I have the means to make a difference to your life and I want to help. Especially with the situation you’ve embroiled yourself in. Honestly, carina, I taught you to be shrewder than all this.”
“All this?” The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end in the suddenly electric air. “What do you know about my life?”
“More than you might think,” he said with this
sly, trickster smile.
“Don’t be a smug bastardo. You don’t know anything about me.”
“Oh, but I do,” he said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his thighs, the expensive material of his suit gleaming in the low light. I noted the luxury David Yurman watch on his wrists and wondered how my terminally poor father could have afforded it. “I’ve been watching you for years, since I had to hand you over to that British swine.”
“What?” I asked, mouthing the words because my voice had fled.
“It wasn’t always easy,” he confided, both casually and conspiratorially, the contrast so Seamus that I had to blink away the feeling of déjà vu. “Those Davenports have some good security, but a cousin of mine lives in Manchester. Wasn’t too inconvenient to drive down to Thornton and get the village gossip about the big bad Davenports up in the grand house.” He paused, sliding his eyes out the window just as pain flashed through them. “Heard you lost the baby. I’m so sorry, carina.”
Something about the way he said that abraded my flesh like nails over a chalkboard. I shuddered, biting my tongue in the process so that when I spoke, it was with blood on my teeth. “How did you know about the baby?”
My dad flashed me a sharp-toothed grin, shark-like but cartoonish as though he’d studied it. “Who do you think paid the good ole doctor to switch out your birth control?”
Thundered rumbled through my head, the rush of blood so fierce I thought I would pass out. I couldn’t comprehend his words, and my body went numb with shock.
“Why would you do something like that?” I breathed, sucker punched.
Seamus finally shed the act, scooting forward on his seat to take my limp hands in his, chafing my cold skin between his rough palms. His fingernails were short and misshapen, never having healed from when Tossi pulled them out with pliers. The physical contact seeped through my astonishment and brought my riotous emotions to the surface. First, unexpectedly, was nostalgia. I’d forgotten that my dad could be affectionate when he was around to be so. I’d missed it without even realizing it, and I felt some shame at taking comfort from the very man who had set me up to need it in the first place.
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