Page 58 of Mercy in Betrayal

I frown. “What? That means…”

Ivan nods before finishing my train of thought for me.

“Your father and Vitto Marzano. Now, your father is dead.” Ivan leaves the rest of that sentence hanging in the air.

The thread is easy to pick up. “But Vitto Marzano is still alive.”

Ivan nods and walks back to the table. Bare-fisted, he plunges his hand directly into the body’s chest cavity and rips out the heart.

“I do have advice for you, my friend.”

He keeps using that word. We aren’t friends, and we both know it. “What’s that?”

“Let the old man go. His time is almost over, and you have nothing to gain from his death. Concentrate on your wife and your business.”

“Would you let something like this go?” I know the answer. Like hell he would. Everyone who was involved would most likely end up like this man on the table.

The corner of Ivan’s mouth twitches the faintest amount. “My father valued me; he would never have put me in that position. But these Italian families…you throw your sons away so easily. Your Commission has sent the deadliest killers in your world into your city. Do not kill this man, Scarpetta. Promise me.”

I focus on the heart that Ivan clenches in his hand. Blood oozes out between his fingers. Most men would cower, and maybe rightly so. I’m not most men. Lying comes easily to me.

“Yeah. I promise.”

Chapter 20

Rowan

The edge of the knife slips a little as I wedge it into the small space between the pieces of plastic that make up Clementine’s pet tracker, slicing a tiny cut into my thumb. Bringing it to my mouth, I suck on it to stop the bleeding, too impatient to go rinse it off properly and bandage it. The cut’s small enough that the blood should coagulate quickly and be fairly unnoticeable.

The pet tracker is small—a little thing that usually hangs on Clementine’s collar. I ordered a second one to replace this one; according to parcel tracking, it should be arriving any day now.

I don’t want Clementine to go without it for any length of time, but I need the tracker now. I’ll just have to be careful with my baby until the replacement arrives.

For my purposes, I need to whittle the tracker casing down and make it even smaller. From what I can see, most of the plastic is there for the circuit board’s protection, so it’s a relatively simple, if painstaking, matter of carefully scraping the excess material away.

I will figure out where my husband is spending his nights.

My lips twist in a humorless smile. I’m not some vapid, brainless twit Enzo can install in his mansion and forget about. I’m actually quite clever. Evie said I was too soft and that I needed to toughen up. Well…this is me toughening up. I may not have been precisely raised for this world, but I’ll survive it anyway.

But I’d like to do more than just survive it.

I don’t even know why I feel this compulsion to know what Enzo is up to. I really don’t think he has another woman somewhere, although I could be fooling myself. We have sex too frequently for him to be seeking it elsewhere, and I may be inexperienced, but I could swear his need for me is genuine.

He looks at me the way every girl wants a man to look at her. Surely that’s real?

I need it to be real, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep my own rebellious heart in line. It wants what it wants, even if it knows it’s going to get hurt.

It takes hours, and I can feel the tension in my shoulders by the time I’m finished. Once I have the excess removed, I keep the two remaining pieces together, careful not to place any strain on the fragile wiring that connects them, and place it in a carved wooden jewelry box on the dresser beside the bathroom.

I wipe my sweating palms down my thighs and take a deep breath.

Phase one: complete.

I’m on the bed working on my assigned reading for one of my classes when Enzo arrives home later, looking exhausted and distracted. It’s a familiar expression. My gaze tracks him as he pauses at the foot of the bed and looks me over broodingly.

“Hello, little bird.”

“Hello.”

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