Page 1 of Forbidden Until Midnight

CHAPTER ONE

New Year’s Eve nine years ago, Munich

SANTOSABATINIGAZEDabout him with such open disdain and barely suppressed irritation that the guests attending the Albrechts’ party were giving him at least a three-foot-wide berth. He scowled again, shrugging into the black tuxedo jacket he disliked intensely. Supposedly the mark of money, Santo only associated the formal attire with the sneering superiority that disguised the kind of wilful ignorance and laziness that turned his stomach.

He would have turned his back on the whole sorry affair, but for one reason. Six years ago he’d made an unbreakable promise, a vow, and nothing and no one would stop him from fulfilling it.

Pietro had been more like a father to him than the bastard that had given him blood, genes and the eyes that stared back at Santo in the mirror every day. The only other thing he’d inherited from his father, after his death, was the Sabatini Group.

‘I don’t want it.’

‘You don’t have a choice, mio figlio,’his mother had said, tears streaming down a cheek still bruised from his father’s fist.

‘Careful,’ a feline voice warned from behind him. ‘The glass you’re holding so tightly could snap.’

And just like that, Santo released the white-knuckled grip memories had tightened around the champagne flute’s thin stem. The alcohol handed to him upon arrival now at an unappealing room temperature, he paused a passing waiter and swapped the champagne for whisky. Wiping any trace of his thoughts from his features, he turned back to see Marie-Laure taking in the impressive display of opulent Renaissance architecture of the Munich Residenz’s Hall of Antiquities.

‘The Albrechts have outdone themselves this year,’ Marie-Laure observed, unable to hide the lascivious greed in her tone.

Santo took in the changes since he’d first met her five years ago, the year he’d gained entry to the most exclusive event of the financial year that neither Wall Street nor the FTSE had heard of. The year she’d seduced him, aged eighteen, in a baroque bathroom in Dubrovnik. A memorable event he almost wished he could forget.Almost.

Her dyed red hair had taken on more of a brittle aspect but, no matter how she behaved, it was undeniable that Marie-Laure Gerber was a startlingly beautiful woman who wore her sensuality like both a weapon and a shield. And while it hadn’t been his first sexual experience, it had been ironically his most honest. Proved perfectly by the way she had ruthlessly ignored him the following year.

But it would be wrong to mistake Marie-Laure as simply the lonely widow of one of Switzerland’s richest financiers. There was a reason the blundering, bulbous man had reached such dizzying heights before his death; his wife was sharper than honed steel and just as dangerous.

‘Tell me,tesorina, what has your claws out so early this evening?’ Santo asked.

The delighted peal of her laugh was as fake as his term of endearment had been.

‘Rumour has it that Edward Carson’s precious princess of a daughter is making her first appearance.’

Santo’s gut clenched instinctively, but only bland indifference marked his features. ‘Is she?’

Marie-Laure cut a side glance at him, her eyebrow raised. ‘They say she is absolutely exquisite.’

Santo gave a shrug of his shoulder. ‘Not my type,’ he dismissed.

‘They all say that.At first.’ Marie-Laure’s tone took on a diamond-hard edge, before she turned to look out across the hall. ‘The children have been talking of nothing else all evening.’

Santo looked over to where the progeny of the twelve families in attendance had gathered. Or, more accurately, eleven families. He was the last and only descendant of the Sabatinis. And it would remain that way too, he swore.

The group of young twenty-somethings were the heirs of the elite. They would grow up to become the wealth of Europe, the decision-makers of millions. And each and every one of them was a spoilt brat with absolutely no idea of what hard work was.

‘You think I pay even the slightest bit of notice to what they say?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said, turning back to Santo fully. ‘You don’t. It’s why I like you so much.’

‘You only like cold, sharp, shiny things,’ he dismissed.

‘Exactly,’ she said, patting his chest just above his heart, and left him to stand staring at the group of young men and women whispering and gossiping, a few daring to send a glance his way once in a while.

With barely veiled scorn, he turned back to the gold-embossed display of Renaissance architecture and artwork covering every inch of the large hall. It was gaudy, it was impressive, awesome in the traditional sense of the word and, as much as he disliked every single bit of it, he respected the history of it, he respectedhistory. He had to, in order not to repeat it.

Munich was as beautiful as Helsinki had been the year before and Stockholm had been the year before that. Each New Year’s Eve celebration was held in a different European city, by a different family. But Marie-Laure was right; the Albrechtshadoutdone themselves this year.

No one outside of the twelve families knew of, or even heard of, what happened here. And not because it was some bacchanalian event shrouded in generations of inherited wealth, hidden behind secret handshakes or cult-like devotion. Even though, deep down, Santo had expected as much the first time he’d attended the event.

No, what happened every year on the thirty-first of December, in a different European city, hosted by each different family, was simply this: the exchange and investment of money formoremoney.

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