Black Hearted (The Margarelli Brothers 1)

He nodded, his eyes dark and worried. My people loved me. They loved Angelique.

“I am glad she is home,” he murmured softly.

I nodded my thanks and escaped to my bedroom, shutting and locking the door before the tears started to fall. Alone at last, I did the one thing I had wanted to do all day. I gave in to the torment inside me.

I collapsed to the floor and wept.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Vincent

“You shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I should, and I will.”

“You can barely stand.”

“I can fucking shoot straight,” I countered. Tiny sighed. I glared at him. I was tired of being treated like an invalid by a bunch of hoodlums.

“Your hand is shaking,” Tiny countered calmly. Damn him. I was sick of everyone fussing over me! I was a man, not a mouse. “You barely slept.”

“Are you a fucking gangster or a nursemaid?” I grumbled. Tiny just shrugged. It was a rhetorical question, but he answered me anyway.

“Today? I’m both,” he said, looking like a supremely unconcerned mountain. A mountain I was usually fond of. But right now, I wanted to pound the mountain into the ground for arguing with me.

“I am your boss.”

“Yes. You are.”

I made a noise of pure dissatisfaction. I needed to get to Francesca. I needed to remove the threat to her. I needed to hold my woman in my arms, dammit!

And I wanted to meet her daughter, too. I was applying for a very important job, after all. I needed to make a good impression on the girl I wanted to be my stepdaughter. And my daughter, if Francesca allowed me to adopt her.

I already loved the little girl, and we hadn’t even met.

“Espresso,” I demanded irritably. “Three of them.”

Tiny nodded and left the room. At least he followed orders. A knock on the door had me shouting ‘enter’ before my brother and cousin came in.

“We finish this, today,” I growled.

Tony nodded curtly. Michael nodded. Thank God they didn’t argue. I was sure they would have if they hadn’t already known it was pointless. We were going to end Philip, once and for all.

And then I was going to get my woman.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Francesca

The scream tore from my throat as I sat up like a shot, my eyes wild and searching. I had been dreaming, I realized. I had seen him.

But not alive. Not smiling and opening his arms to me. Not kissing me or holding me.

It was Vincent, but not, just a shell of the man he had been. A body. A shape. A slab of meat lying in a pool of blood. Gone from the world. Gone from me.

It could not be. It was not possible. I did not want to exist in a world without him. I pushed the thought away immediately. I knew I didn’t have the luxury of thinking that way. I had my girl back. She needed me.

Even if my heart was breaking.

I would have to bury the pain and the fear, hide it where she could never see it. I had to put Vincent out of my head and out of my heart. I closed my eyes and pictured a red heart-shaped box wrapped in a thousand chains and bound with a thousand locks.

There. He would be safe inside until I was ready to take him out again. When she was asleep and could not hear me cry.

“Mama?” an achingly familiar voice called from just outside the bedroom.

“I’m here, sweet pea,” I called out.

I had unlocked the door, I realized. I had cried half the night, unlocking the door around dawn in case my baby girl wanted to climb in bed with me as she so often did.

Thank goodness she had not heard me scream.

“Come snuggle,” I said, pulling the covers up. She scooted in and curled up against me. She had grown in the past few months. Precious days that I would never get back, where I hadn’t gotten the chance to see her, hold her, and smell her sweet little girl smell.

I knew it didn’t matter. I had her now, and I would never let her go again.

Never.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Vincent

“Goddamn,” Michael breathed under his breath as we observed our prey. We didn’t speak other than that one word. But we were all thinking the same thing.

The sheer arrogance of the twisted fuck we were about to put into the ground was astonishing.

The fucker didn’t even have a guard. He was standing outside the back entrance to a pool hall in a deserted alleyway. It was clear that he had zero awareness of his surroundings. He was having a cigarette, squinting at his phone and smiling.

He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. As if he didn’t have enemies up and down the West Coast. He looked drunk.

I knew better than to think he was harmless, though.

But he was unguarded. His men probably didn’t have any loyalty to him, I realized. How could you have loyalty to a snake?