Page 48 of Reckless Sinner

I blinked. “What?”

She didn’t seem to care that I’d gone behind her back to find out personal information about her.

Delaney looked at me with somber dark eyes. “What do you owe your father now, because of me?”

I swallowed. “He wants me to—to kill your father.”

I could hear Delaney’s sharp inhale. “You’re not a killer.”

Her complete conviction behind those words soothed me. “I could be. For your sake.”

I felt that I should be honest. And when I’d seen those photos… and hearing what her father had done to her… looking at her now, still exhausted, starving until I’d fed her, blisters all over her feet and scratches all over her face and arms from the ivy… I did want to kill Alan Weston. I really, truly did.

Delaney nodded, almost to herself.

“I’m not the… knight in pure shining armor,” I admitted. “I have a darker side. You’ve seen it.”

“And I’ve told you—”

“I just said I’d kill a man for you,” I interrupted her, wanting her to acknowledge that confession. “That doesn’t make you think—maybe I’m more like my family than I want to admit?”

“You want to kill the man who abused someone you care about.”

“Someone I love,” I corrected, knowing without a doubt it was true.

Delaney blushed furiously. I allowed myself a small, triumphant smile.

“Still,” she said quickly, recovering, “wanting to kill someone who’s abused a person you love—I think everyone feels that way at some point in time, Dante. That’s different from wanting to be a part of organized crime. Why has your father killed people?”

My father didn’t really do his own dirty work anymore, hadn’t for years. It was one of the perks of beingil capo. You made other people pick up the dry cleaning, do the grocery shopping, and bump off the competition.

But back when he’d been younger, my age, and his father had been in charge, my father had done his fair share of bloody work. I knew both Vincent and Marco did the same now (Marco more than Vincent, since Marco was asoldato, right there in the trenches). My father believed that you shouldn’t ask a man to do anything you hadn’t done yourself, so he had definitely personally killed a few men in his time on top of the ones he’d had killed on his orders or had simply ended up dying in the course of business.

“For business,” I said, answering Delaney’s question. “Because they disobeyed, or failed him, or they were rivals, or it was to send a message to his actual rivals. It was… itis… cold-blooded.”

“That’s very different to me,” Delaney said. “I’m not saying it’s not darkness. But it’s a different kind of darkness. And I think far more people feel the kind of darkness inside of them that you do than the kind that your father does.”

I nodded absently.

Delaney took a deep breath. “So we… we have the facts now. My father is awful. He’s going to come for us and he won’t stop until he drives us into the ground. I know he wants you and your family in prison but I’m not sure exactly what he wants to do to me. I doubt it will be pleasant. Your father wants you to kill my father and I doubt your father will be lenient if you tell him ‘no’.”

“Don’t forget there’s an FBI agent sniffing around me,” I added. I pulled out Kaminsky’s card and showed it to her.

Delaney sighed. “So what do we do?”

“We?” That surprised me. “Delaney, are you really sure you want to—to hitch yourself to me? You should just sell the jewelry and leave, get a new identity, move across the country.”

“And be all alone in a world I don’t know how to navigate?”

I gently touched my fingers to her warm, soft cheek. “You’re smarter than you think, you’d figure it out.”

“I’ve never been alone. I’ve never done anything myself, really. My father made sure of that. I don’t want to remake my life on my own.” She paused, blushed again, and looked away. “And I don’t… I don’t want to leave you.”

My heart ached. I was never letting this woman go. If I had to—of course I would do what was best for her. But if she didn’t want to leave me—God Himself wasn’t going to tear me away from her.

I took her chin in my hand, gently turning her face so that she looked at me again. “Then we’ll stay together. And we’ll figure it out.”

Delaney gave me a soft, watery smile.

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