Page 18 of Brutal Legacy

She’d held my gaze while the priest intoned his sacraments. The rest of the church lowered their heads obediently to pray and left us alone, in a room full of people. We were the only two people in the world for that stolen moment.

Then she stuck out her pointy pink tongue, rolled her eyes back like she was dying along to the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and pulled a rusty laugh from my lonely chest.

And just like that, I’d fallen.

5

ELIO

Now

Ileft Naples a few hours after Renato’s orders. Since keeping a low profile was important, considering that we didn’t know what force the Ravelli family had sent to capture the prosecutor’s daughter, I flew commercial.

Without exception, being in a crowded airport and stuffed into too small a space with other people meant I was tense. I also had to leave my favorite guns on Renato’s jet to make the return flight to New Jersey.

My hands itched without my means to defend myself.

In the stifling Naples airport, I set up my laptop at a coffee shop and downloaded the file my sister had sent me only minutes before.

I drank three espressos while waiting for the damn airport Wi-Fi to download the large file.

Georgia Conti.

And there it was, suddenly sitting on my desktop.

There had once been another with the same name, long since deleted. I’d asked my sister for it when I’d left the Col Moschin, Italy’s very own Special Forces unit. Finally a civilian once more, my debts all paid and left behind, I’d been prepared to find her. I’d find her and she’d answer for the past. It was all I’d thought about for years while in active service. The thought of being face-to-face once more had kept me warm many a night, sleeping outside in the rain and cold. It had lulled me to sleep while in active conflict zones and soothed my brow when I’d lain in medical for weeks at a time, my body injured once again.

Then, the day I’d walked free, I’d sat in a coffee shop, just like the one I was in now, and opened the file for an excruciating couple of seconds before closing it and deleting the entire thing.

The first image that had popped up was Georgia, holding her husband’s hand, beaming at the camera.

In the military, I’d learned how to control myself. I hadn’t thought anything could crack that calm, until I saw that photograph.

In seconds, my blood pressure had risen, and anger like nothing I’d ever felt had flooded me. It tasted like blood and ashes on my tongue. I’d slammed the laptop closed and then picked the entire thing up and smacked it against the table.

When that hadn’t worked, I’d bent the entire fucking thing in half.

As the stunned coffee shop had gone silent and everyone stared at me, I’d sat there feeling like a landmine. Lethal, unpredictable. Unacceptable.

“Dude, if you’ve got a virus, just restarting usually works.”

I could still hear the exact perplexed timbre of the guy working at the table next to me. Normal people didn’t carry rage like that inside them. Normal people didn’t feel like they could light the sky up just by looking at a photograph.

If you’ve got a virus.It was a very fitting way of thinking about the woman who’d destroyed me so completely. Wiped me clean. The military had been a clean slate. A total reboot. I couldn’t afford to be reinfected with Georgia’s poison.

I’d finally wiped the virus from my OS. I couldn’t go back.

That was when I’d realized that it was too dangerous for me to search for Georgia. I had my freedom from the Col Moschin, and Renato De Sanctis waiting for me to take up the role ofsottocapoin his Cosa Nostra. I’d learned how to live emotionlessly, in the eye of the storm, where nothing hurt.

I wasn’t giving that up for anyone.

Especially not her.

Now, fate, and my capo, had brought her back into my life, and I had no choice but to see her or defy orders.

I opened the folder, and there she was.

This time, the picture wasn’t anything glamorous. Black-and-white CCTV footage of her arriving at a dressmaking studio. Giada, my sister, was a tech genius. If there was a camera within a viable radius of her target, she’d find them.

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