Page 17 of Beautiful & Dirty

“Everything’s fine, boss. Got her in the cellar.”

I nod and walk toward the front door.

In the house, I lead Giulio down to my wine cellar. As soon as I open the door, I can hear Flavia complaining — always complaining — but her voice is shaking. She’s putting on a good show, but I know that she knows what’s coming, and her voice cuts off when she hears my feet on the stairs.

The cellar is dark, damp. This room smells like earth and fear. I miss the musky brightness of my office at the restaurant, the scent I created with Shae. My hands flex just remembering the way her skin felt under my fingertips.

“You piece of shit,” she spits at me in Italian. “My father should have killed you when he had the chance.”

“But he didn’t,” I respond, my voice cold. “I wish he had tried, then I wouldn’t have been stuck with you for all this time.”

She recoils at my words.

Alfonso places a chair across from Flavia, and I sit. I take my time, crossing my legs, straightening the crease in my slacks since I had to change before I could come out here. I hadn’t wanted to, but I couldn’t show up at a meeting like this smelling like another woman’s cunt. I didn’t want to soil what Shae and I shared with the ugliness of this moment.

I cross my arms in my lap and look at Flavia. “I will admit,” I begin, “that I respect you much more than your father. At least you took a shot. That soft coward of a man didn’t have the balls. Apparently, you do.”

She sniffs and lifts her chin into the air. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I tsk at her and shake my head, smiling ruefully. She flinches at that. How long since I smiled at her? Years? Decades? Never? “Don’t insult me, especially not after I’ve paid you a compliment. We can do this the easy way, out of respect for all our time together. Or we can do this the hard way. The way I did with your father.”

She gulps and begins to shake.

“Which road would you like to travel, wife?”

Six Hours Later

I’m not a man who lives with regrets. My line of work doesn’t allow for that, and neither does my personality. If there was ever a time when I had a functioning conscience, I short-circuited it to get where I am today. I’m brutally honest, with myself, if no one else. I have to be, as a matter of safety. If I delude myself into thinking I’m better than I am, I won’t be able to fully understand who hates me, and why, and who hates me enough to want to kill me.

My moral code is simple because it has to be. I don’t do anything I can’t live with, and I don’t leave room for regrets, not normally.

I should have gotten Shae’s last name. And of all the things I’ve done in my life — all the people I’ve killed, had killed, betrayed, and stolen from — letting Shae walk away from me without a way to contact her is the first mistake I’ve made in so long. It makes even my disaster of a marriage pale in comparison in my chest. How can it not?

I’d married Flavia knowing full well who and what she was, and had planned accordingly. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d always known that this was how it would end, so there’s no room to regret. But I hadn’t had any time to prepare for Shae, and every hour that’s passed since my last look at her, I’m more and more enraged at all the things I should have done.

So, when Flavia finally tells me what I want to hear, my response is maybe not completely in line with my feelings about her.

“It was The Greek,” she says. Her voice is shaking with fear and probably anger. If I were in a better mood, I might have been more grudgingly respectful that even at this moment — even with Giulio and Alfonso standing behind her, guns in hand — she still has the strength to be angry at me and not hide it. When her father was in this position, he was blubbering like a child, and he pissed himself. It was embarrassing.

But I’m not in a better mood, and her anger makes me indignant. If she hadn’t betrayed me, she could have continued draining my bank accounts with her useless designer acquisitions, living in a loveless marriage in style, and I could have continued running my empire, pretending that my personal life had no bearing on my work. And if she’d done that, then maybe today, when I met Shae, I could have done something I promised myself I’d never do; I could have taken a mistress. I could have kept her just a bit longer than an afternoon.

“Tell me everything,” I bite out, barely containing the rising rage coursing through my blood.

“What do I get in return?”

I take a deep breath trying to center myself. I want to yell, but that’s not who I am. Some people call me the Tin Man, because only a man without a heart could be so cold. I wonder if that’s why it’s taken Flavia so long to make this move; she’s taken my calm for weakness. Maybe she’s just as foolish as her father.

“If you tell me everything, I’ll make sure that you have the best doctors to nurse you back to health.”

She blanches, and I watch the blood drain from her face.

I extend my arm to Alfonso, and he steps forward to hand me his gun. I cross my legs at the knee and casually aim the barrel at her.

“If I think there’s even a chance you aren’t telling me everything I want to know…Well, there’s room next to your father’s grave. I’ve been saving it for you.”

The fire in her eyes returns for a brief moment. “Where…?” She stutters as her eyes begin to water. “Where is he?”

This makes me smile, at least. She asked me on our wedding night to tell her where I’d dumped her father’s body, not because she cared, but because her mother did. I imagine that she thinks I don’t know that she promised her mother on her deathbed that she’d find her father’s corpse and have him buried in their family cemetery. It’s given me decades of happiness to deny her that.

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