Page 72 of Dance of Deception

I flinch when his voice ripples over my skin like silk. Even Naomi gasps at the way he just materializes behind us as we reach the other side of the street.

Swallowing, I turn, feeling my bottom lip retreat between my teeth as I look up into Carmine’s piercing, vicious eyes.

I gasp as he plucks me away from Naomi and wraps an arm around my waist, so tight I might as well be handcuffed to him.

“…Which is why you’ll be staying close to me while we’re in there,” he growls, dropping his gaze back to mine. “Veryclose.”

13

CARMINE

I’ve always knownI was…different.

Most people move through life guided by certain precepts—empathy, fear, guilt.

I’m unencumbered by such things.

I learned young that most people flinch when they see pain. Hesitate before hurting someone. Question their own anger.

I never did.

Not once.

Vito saw it early on, though he never called it what it was.

“Rambunctious,”he said when I was a kid, after I broke some other kid’s nose for who-even-remembers-what at the playground.

“Hot-blooded, like your grandfather,”when at fifteen I sent a rival’s son to the ER for looking at me the wrong way.

“Driven for success,”when I buried my first body three years later and felt less than nothing.

He never admitted it outright. Even the couple of times he took me wolf hunting up in Alaska, which I know was probably his way of “letting me” get my “urges” out. It’s never been anything explicitly said.

He’s never looked me in the eye and said, “My son is a psychopath.”

But he knows.

And I’ve always known, too.

It’s not just that I was born into the mafia world. That’s a lie we tell ourselves—that it makes us more ruthless, that power warps us, that the rules we live by are different because they have to be.

But it’s not just that.

It’s what’s inside you.

And insidemeis an empty space where thereshouldbe the switch that stops certain impulses in most people.

Other men—like my father, even like Nico or Dante—calculate the risk. Weigh their morality against their ambition. Debate how far they’re willing to go.

I don’t.

I want something? I take it.

Someone crosses me? I erase them.

The only thing that’s ever mattered is winning.

And I always,alwayswin.

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