Page 53 of Reckless Sinner

“We’ll look after each other,” Delaney replied.

Marco slipped out the front door. I looked over at Delaney.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

CHAPTER24

Delaney

“That, my darling, depends entirely on you.”

I was surprised by Dante’s response. When he’d spoken just now with his brother I’d thought he had a plan in mind. Why did it now depend on me?

Dante looked… weighed down. I never wanted him to look like that again. He walked over to me and gently took my shoulders in his hands. “I have an idea of how we can get away from both of our fathers. But if we do it—your father could still possibly get to us. So it’s up to you what you want to do. I don’t need to get revenge on my father. He is what he is. I am what I am. I just want us both to live our lives the way we want to. It’s his choice that means I have to… cut him off and not have him know where I’m going.”

“Know where you’re going?” It must’ve been the exhaustion, the sex, and then Marco showing up out of the blue, because I felt like I couldn’t put the pieces together.

“Delaney, we have to leave.” Dante squeezed my shoulders. “We need to leave, change our names, start a new life. I know a way to do that but it will involve… your father could still find us. So it’s up to you. What do you want to do about him?”

I thought for a long moment. I wanted to be with Dante, and I wanted to be free of my father and of this life. I wanted to finally get to be the person I wanted to be, find out whoever that woman was—not be who I had been taught I should be. And I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my father hated to lose. He would chase me down to the ends of the earth before he would let me get away from him.

He had used me and abused me, he had locked me in my room, pimped me out to another man and thought of me as nothing more than a tool to use for his own ends. Not even Antonio Russo had gone that far with Dante. An actual mob boss was a better man, a better father, than my own supposedly law-abiding parent.

I’m not a knight in shining armor,Dante had said often. We both had our dark places. And maybe my armor was a bit tarnished, too. Maybe I was tired of denying my own darkness, tired of being good daughter Delaney.

I looked up at Dante. “I know what I want to do,” I said.

Dante never tried to dissuade me from my plan. That was what I appreciated most about him. He took care of the other details, and he let me take care of my father.

Dante easily picked the lock on our front door. I was impressed, and a little turned on, I had to admit. “One of those little skills my father thought would come in handy,” he said.

The house was mostly dark, but certainly not silent. I could hear my father’s angry muttering and pacing all the way from the foyer. All my life I would hear him in a rage, making his plans in his office, and I would feel afraid, and then tell myself there was no reason tobeafraid.

I had repressed and ignored so much.

While Dante went about his own business, I walked down the hall to my father’s office. I could see the warm yellow light spilling out from the doorway and took a deep breath.

Did I really want to do this?

Yes.

I pushed open the door. My father, papers in one hand and a phone in the other, froze.

“I’m going to call you back,” he snapped into the receiver, and then hung up. He stared at me.

“Hello,” I said simply.

“Delaney.” The transformation as his face smoothed out was terrifying. How had I never realized he did that, going from angry to soothing and back again, keeping me on my toes? “I see you’ve come to your senses.”

“I have,” I replied.

You have to make it look like a hit,Dante had told me when I’d said what I wanted to do.Whatever you want to do to him, you have to do it like a Russo would.

Well, I was marrying into the family, after all.

Anger was so often described to me as a hot thing, a living thing, but when I raised the gun and fired, all I felt was cold. Cold in my stomach. Cold in my arms. Cold in my eyes.

Surprise was my friend—my father faced me directly, and we were at close range. I was able to hit him in the forehead as Dante had told me was the tradition for carrying out an execution.

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