Page 42 of Luca
“No jobs back home?”
My eyes lowered to my stomach. “Not for me,” I answered.
He lifted his face towards the sky, a pensive expression coloring it.
“Maybe I can help you, Margaret,” he said, my name uttered slowly. My head whipped his way, eyeing him suspiciously. Before I could ask him how he knew my name, he continued. “I know everything that happens on my island, bella ragazza.”
My brows furrowed.
Luca King was the only man who ever called mebellabefore.
“What’s your name?” I asked suspiciously.
“Pascale DiMauro.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar. I searched my memory. The Irish mafia kept away from the Italian criminal organization, but I could have sworn DiMauro was one of the families that ran the Sicilian mafia.
I shook my head. Surely it couldn’t be the very same DiMauro family.
I must have uttered the words out loud because he nodded. “It’s exactly the same family.”
Well, shit.
ChapterEighteen
MARGARET
It was a small world.
Never in a million years had I thought I’d find myself face-to-face with Luca King’s grandfather. The stories of the Sicilian mafia families were notorious, although I didn’t know much about Pascale DiMauro.
And here I was.
“Don’t worry, bella,” he assured, smiling. “You have nothing to fear.”
“Famous last words,” I muttered. Next thing you knew, I’d find myself in some dark ditch, on the side of the road. He kept watching me, making me more uncomfortable by the minute until I couldn’t hold back my words. “I hate everything Benito King.”
Jesus, maybe my goal was to get killed. “Me too.”
My brows furrowed at that reply. “But your daughter and he–”
The pain that crossed his expression had me pausing. “My daughter was a good woman. Very delicate. Too delicate for this world. But I hoped she’d find a worthy man to nurture her. Benito was a cold-hearted bastard and he wanted a cold-hearted woman. Benito King murdered the vital part of my daughter even before she took her own life.”
My heart clenched at the pain in his voice and without thinking, I reached out for his wrinkled hand and squeezed it gently.
“I’m so sorry,” I croaked, feeling compassion for this old man. He was no longer the head of the DiMauro mafia. He was a grieving father. “I know how much it hurts to lose the ones we love.”
I knew it firsthand. He must have read it in my eyes because he nodded.
“My daughter loved her sons more than anything in the world,” he barreled. “If only she’d have taken them and brought them here, I’d have gone to war for her. But she didn’t. It broke my heart to hear the news. It hurt my grandsons, too. They were left to their father’s cruelty.”
It was that part that I struggled with. When I looked at Cassio and Luca King, I didn’t see grieving sons. I didn’t see anything but their father.
As if he read my mind, he continued. “My grandsons are mine.” He pounded his chest, his strength frail. He must have been a force to reckon with once upon a time. “They are DiMauro. Their last name might be King, but the blood in their veins is DiMauro. They are their mother’s sons.”
Maybe Pascale DiMauro was right. Maybe I was too wrapped up into the King brothers’ physical similarities to see the other differences from their father.
“You never worried about them becoming like him?” I questioned in a tentative voice. “Like Benito?”
