7
SCAR
Ivory danced around the kitchen, her newborn daughter tucked into the sling across her chest as she moved slowly and swayed along with the beat of the music playing over the speakers. Her lips moved as she mouthed the lyrics, but her voice was too quiet for me to hear on the other side of the kitchen.
My chest twinged, and I reached up a hand to rub at the scar that rested closest to my heart from the bullet that had nearly killed me—or rather one of the six that had nearly killed me. Only fear for Ivory had kept me from descending into the complete blackness of death.
In the moments when I’d first woken up, I’d been relieved to find her alive and well. Scared, but mostly unharmed, even if she was covered in the blood of our enemy after stabbing him in the throat.
I’d been grateful to know she was okay, and then I’d immediately sunk back into that place. The part of me that knew death would come for me one day, and when it came I would greet it as an old friend.
Only death could reunite me with the only person who had ever loved me.
My only regret would be that there was still one more name on my list. The man who’d seen all his associates dead and had witnessed the bodies of his friends at the hands of a masked vigilante.
Only Brad could make the connection. Only he could see the writing on the wall and know that they were all people who’d wronged a little boy who only ever wanted to protect his sister.
He’d run, leaving Chicago in his rearview, forcing me to hunt him down personally. It was only a matter of time before I found him, because in my search for him I’d discovered a knack for computers.
I’d found a love of technology and of using it to make people suffer in all the places that my fists couldn’t touch, taking everything from my victims and revealing that I was coming for them long before I actually did. Those same skills would lead me to him one day, and I’d toy with him the same way he’d toyed with me before he took what he wanted.
I wouldn’t just take his life, but make sure he knew how every moment of fear felt. He’d understand that there were some fates worse than death, and anticipation of the pain made the eventual suffering even worse.
“You’re doing it again,” Ivory observed, drawing my attention away from the laptop where I typed away. Hacking into a government database for Matteo was something that should have taken all my concentration, but it was nothing but child’s play for a man like me who had done it hundreds of times.
“Doing what?” I asked, keeping my face tilted down toward the computer screen but shifting my eyes up to hers.
“Lost in thought. What is it this time?” she asked, unwinding the sling to pull Luna free. She cradled the sleeping baby in her arms, moving toward me and staring down at my computer screen. She sighed, expelling the breath in her lungs as she tried yet again to understand the meaning in the code.
“I can teach you,” I offered.
“No thanks, I want to be able to claim ignorance when they make me testify,” she said, her voice entirely deadpan. She reached out, lifting my arm and putting it into position while she carefully deposited Luna into my grip.
“Wait a minute,” I protested, glaring as she shrugged and moved around to the other side of the island.
“Hold her for a bit. You can do your gibberish on the laptop with one hand,” Ivory argued, waving a hand as she pulled the stand mixer out from the corner.
“I think you’re missing the point. You can’t just force your baby on me whenever you want,” I said, staring down at Luna’s sweet face. As much as I wanted to keep her safe, there was a vast difference between protecting her and actually having to hold her.
What was a man supposed to do with a baby? In the month since Luna’s birth, the initial excitement I’d felt at holding a baby again had drifted away into a feeling of deep betrayal. The last baby I’d held, the last one I’d loved, had been my sister. I’d vowed never to let anyone fill that place in my life again.
And then came Luna.
I hated people. Being touched was out of the question from any normal person, but Luna’s tiny body wrapped in a onesie didn’t bother me in the same way. That didn’t mean Ivory needed to know that, for fuck’s sake.
“Seems like I can,” Ivory returned with a smile, looking pointedly at her daughter as she woke up from her nap. I shifted her in my grip, working to support her head in the way I remembered doing for Cesca all those years ago, when she’d been a baby with parents who didn’t care to take care of her.
“Ivory,” I groaned, watching as Luna’s eyes opened and she stared up at me.
“You’ll be fine. Accepting love from people is a good thing, Paolo,” she said, using the name that nobody called me anymore.
Nobody had since the day Franco Bellandi gave me the name Scar. Since the day Paolo De Luca had died alongside Francesca De Luca.
Luna yawned, stretching out with her hand like she wanted to be snuggled. I grabbed hers in mine gently, laying it back on her body and wincing when she wrapped her fist around my thumb. “Ivory,” I muttered, not wanting to scare Luna. “What do I do?”
“Just talk to her,” Ivory laughed. “She likes to listen to your voice.”
“Why the hell would she like that?”
“Because she loves you, silly,” Ivory laughed as I stood up, walking around the counter and handing her daughter back. I closed my laptop, grabbing it and moving toward the hall where Matteo’s office was located. “You have to let someone love you one day!”
That’s what I was worried about.
I’d hide in Matteo’s office until my death if it meant keeping that woman and her child at a distance. They were already too close, had already burrowed their way inside me to the point that I worried what would happen to them if I was gone.
Already so ingrained that I felt responsible for them.
Lovewas out of the question for men like me. For men who were so broken that there was nothing left worth saving.
“Is she pushing you again?” Matteo asked when I stepped into his office, not bothering to look up from his computer screen. But a smile curved his lips, because, unlike me, he found his wife’s antics highly entertaining.
“She’s relentless,” I grunted. “You couldn’t have married someone less aggravating?”
“One of these days, you’ll find your Angel. Then you’ll understand,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the desktop twice. Just the mention of his wife and daughter was enough to drive him out of the office, wanting to spend all his time with them.
He ran the city with an iron fist, and it wasn’t often that his instinct was wrong, but in this, he was.
Because no woman deserved to be stuck with the likes of me.