“Like this?”
“Ummhmm.” She didn’t nod, but he had the impression of her nodding. “I was hiding in my room when Diego, my step-uncle, came to get me. Cruz, Alejo and Diego would sometimes come together, and other times one would come alone, but it was always horrible when they did.”
He stroked soothing caresses down the thick, luxurious length of her hair, all the while watching the tension building between the two factions in the warehouse. “How old were you?”
“It was when I first went to live with my step-uncles in New York. I was only fifteen. My parents had just died in a car accident, and I was sent to live with those terrible men in a completely different environment. I didn’t know them. I’d never met them. I went from a loving home to a nightmare situation. I didn’t understand what happened, why I was suddenly just handed over to these strangers. I didn’t realize they were my father’s brothers.”
He knew she was so shaken up by the fact that the Demons had Clariss in their hands and she had narrowly escaped the same fate Nicoletta had suffered that she told him the truth. He kept rocking her, soothing her, all the while watching the building tensions, waiting for his moment.
“Your mother married their brother and he adopted you when you were four, but they never lived near his three brothers. He’d gotten away from the gang and made a life for himself,” Taviano supplied.
“I didn’t know that. I only knew that I’d lost my parents, and suddenly I was with these three men who ripped apart my body every chance they got.”
Taviano closed his eyes briefly, grateful for the dark of the shadows. He’d heard her screams, shared the nightmares, but knew he would never come close to knowing what it had been like for a fifteen-year-old innocent girl to go from a loving home to three grown men brutally using her whenever and however they felt like it.
“That time, when Diego came, I had been in the shower, and I was naked. I found a shadow and just stayed there, shaking, my hand over my mouth, frozen. His brothers came in to help look for me. They thought I’d gone out a window. They ended up searching the house. My head felt like it was splitting in two when the light finally moved, and the shadow was gone. I couldn’t move. I just lay on the floor, curled up in a ball. My nose was bleeding then, too.”
“What happened?”
“They took turns raping me. And beating me. They were really angry when I didn’t tell them where I’d been.”
Taviano forced down the bile rising in him. He couldn’t protect her from what had happened to her in her past. She’d risen like a phoenix, more powerful than ever, an amazing woman, a fighter, one willing to learn that every defense was an offense. Learn that her brain was her greatest weapon. Learn the Ferraro family business. Follow his lead even when she wasn’t certain where they were going because she trusted him that much and she had observed all along that the Ferraros were far more than what they appeared to the outside world, and she wanted to be a part of that.
She had come to terms with her past. He knew those terrible years of repeated rape and beatings had shaped her and would rise up at times to strike at her unexpectedly, just as the things that had happened to him in his past could do the same, but they had both emerged victorious, stronger, both fighters.
Although Benito Valdez still lived, the three step-uncles who had violated her were dead, killed by Stefano and Taviano, left on the floor of their apartment for Valdez and his lieutenants to find. Stefano and Taviano had taken Nicoletta with them into the shadows, but she had been unconscious—at least they thought she’d been. He was coming to find out she hadn’t been quite as unknowing as they believed.
Nicoletta was extremely strong, and Taviano was proud of being her partner. He brushed a kiss on top of her head, still rocking her. Still breathing for her.
“Can you still see her? Clariss?”
That told him she still wasn’t opening her eyes, that the light would hurt her. He was going to have to move soon. The tension in the warehouse was stretching to a breaking point and he wanted it to go his way. He glanced at the clock on the wall across from him. Drago and Demetrio would be there any moment to retrieve Clariss and take her to join Pia and Bianca if she was uninjured. If she was hurt, she would be taken to a private doctor. Her parents would be flown in to join her and they would be placed in a safe house until the danger was over. The bodyguards knew better than to show themselves inside the warehouse or interfere in any way until he gave them the sign to go in and get Clariss.