Page 158 of Sin & Sapphire

“Don’t be foolish,” my father said, waving me to sit back down. “No need to posture and pretend you’ll give up anything for the slut. She’s going to marry Tchérnov and that’ll be the end of that. I understand you don’t want to marry Baresi’s daughter.”

I blinked, surprised at my father’s nonchalance and hurt that he knew me so poorly after all these years.

“Tony,” Mamma said, “please don’t use that word to speak about women.”

“You’re not marrying Ana Costa, and that’s final,” he said, looking back at me.

My heart broke. His words might not sound like an ultimatum, but he was wrong. Ana was my wife, even if she didn’t know it yet. I’d let her walk away once. I wouldn’t make that mistake a second time.

I spun on my heel, then strode out of his office.

“Luca Russo, you get back here,” my father roared.

His soldiers looked at me with surprise as I hopped on my bike.

As I gunned the engine, he followed me out the front door. “If you leave right now, you better not ever come back,” he threatened.

My mother grasped his arm, murmuring quietly in his ear. But Papà wouldn’t back down. Rigid and righteous until the bitter end, he’d let his children waltz out of his life rather than admit he was wrong.

I spun out on the long driveway and sped toward the gate, wondering if he’d tell the guard to keep me in, but it lurched open just in time for me to speed through.

Twenty minutes later, Valentin answered the door when I pounded on it. Apparently I’d been added to the building’s guest list.

“Ah, c’est toi,” he said with a sigh, stepping aside so I could enter the spartan suite. “What brings you to my doorstep, puppy?”

Ana was in danger, and Valentin and Angelo had the best shot of helping me save her.

My father disinherited me when I told him I intended to marry her.

I needed to be close to those who were closest to her right now.

“I need a place to stay.”

59

ANGELO

I droppedto my knees in the receiving room of the sprawling home my father had built over the Sicilian vineyards where he’d gotten his start, howling with fury that once again, a parent had been taken from me. His staff had cleaned the blood out of the stone flooring and replaced the carpet, but they could never clean the stain on my soul.

I’d been in America. Frolicking with Ana. Indulging myself and my obsession instead of defending my father and enforcing his rule over his own empire.

“Angelo?”

Evangelina, the woman who’d run my father’s house since long before he adopted me, rushed to take me in her arms.

“Zia,” I murmured, holding her against me before peering at her face, her eyes red and puffy with tears.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she continued in Italian.

I led her to the sofa and gently pushed on her shoulders until she sat, ratcheting down the fury that threatened to explode everywhere. “What happened?”

“They took him,” she wailed. “They came for a meeting, and when he refused to call you, they took him. Just like they tookher!”

I closed my eyes, agony sluicing through my veins like gasoline. He’d been taken defending me, protecting me from my own bad decisions. Mother had done the same for my father.

She’d died for it.

I couldn’t let my father die too.

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