“Edward Dante,” she scolded, but her eyes were distracted, her lips a bloodless line in her face. She watched the phone in her hand ring the way I imagined a soldier watched a bomb countdown to detonation. There was almost a macabre resolve in her face I only recognized in retrospect. “There are some demons you cannot run from. Your father is one of them.”
I looked at Tore, but his face was a grim mask. He knew better than to argue with Chiara and think he could sway her when her mind was made up.
I’d gotten my stubbornness from her too.
We both stared at her silently as she stood from the chair and palmed the phone, ignoring the call even though, seconds later, it began to ring again.
“I think I’ll retire now,” she murmured in that mixed British/Italian accent I was coming to share with her. “Buona notte, figlio mio.”
I accepted her kiss on my cheek, closing my eyes as I carefully pulled her closer to my body. She was so slight compared to me. I felt I might accidentally break her ribs if I wasn’t gentle.
Guilt surged through me as she kissed Tore on the cheek, then slowly walked up the back stairs to her room. I’d been gone for four years at uni, throwing myself into my studies of the human mind and my freedom out from under Noel’s thumb. My criminal tendencies were already showing. I’d started a sports gambling ring with some of the posh students that had netted me over a million quid by the time I graduated with my master’s, and I was looking forward to moving to Rome to see what trouble I could get up to with Latin girls.
I hadn’t realized until this trip that in my absence, Noel had been beating Chiara much more than he had when I was a boy.
I should have known, but I was a stupid, selfish twentysomething kid with too much swagger and not enough sense. Whenever I spoke with her on the phone or she visited on the weekends, she was always all smiles and positivity, promising everything at home was fine.
But she only did that for us, for Alexander and me, so that we could get free of that pearly cage and free of Noel without obligation to her dragging us home.
“I didn’t know, either,” Tore admitted that night, looking older than he ever had before, his broad sloping forehead creased and rumpled like a used napkin. “I’ve let you both down.”
“No,” I argued, loving him so fiercely at that moment for being the kind of man who cared about his childhood friend and her family enough to risk Noel’s fury. “I should have watched her more closely.”
He sighed, swirling his glass of red wine so that it caught the candlelight and brightened to a blood red. “She’s safe here. We won’t let her go back to England.”
“No,” I agreed. “I’ll move with her. She needs––I don’t know––love and attention after living with that monster for so long.”
Tore had agreed. We spent the next hour drinking wine and discussing what I might do in Italy. If maybe I was interested in working with Tore and his crew.
I wasn’t seriously considering it. I was a man with a wild, untameable heart, but I didn’t like the idea of becoming a criminal like my father.
And then we heard it.
The scream.
The hairs rose on the back of my neck as adrenaline poured like a bucket of ice water over my head.
I was up out of my chair and running before my mind had a chance to compute the noise into thought.
Tore was right behind me, one of his men trailing after that with his gun raised.
My legs took me to my mother’s room. The door was locked, but I didn’t think twice before I kicked in the old wood with one brutal thrust of my right foot.
The room was empty, the sheer linen curtains billowing into the room from the slightly open balcony doors.
And I knew.
Elementally, spiritually, I knew that what I found outside those doors would change my life forever.
My heartbeat thrummed in my ears like a ceremonial drum, my steps stomping heavily in tandem as I moved to the door and pushed it open with one finger.
The small balcony was empty, the climbing ivy over the stone walls rustling in the olive scented breeze.
“Edward,” Tore protested, reaching forward to grab my arm when I tried to go to the balustrade to look over the edge. “Don’t.”
I shrugged him off ruthlessly, not taking my eyes off the ground I could see from my angle. When I reached the edge, I held my breath as I curled my fingers over the stone and looked down.
But she wasn’t there.
In fact, over the next few days and months and years, Chiara Davenport was nowhere to be found. Local authorities ruled it a runaway, but we knew better.