Page 41 of The Killer Cupcake
Her elaborate plan to ignore, tease, and slowly torture him with calculated indifference had backfired spectacularly. Worse, he'd turned her own weapon against her—now she was the one being ignored, the one left wondering and wanting.
She showered. Her confidence from that morning was crumbling like sand. When she slipped between the cool sheets alone, the vast bed felt like an ocean of loneliness. Every sound in the villa made her hope he was finally coming to her, but the hours crawled by in silence.
When she woke sometime after midnight and found his side still cold and empty, the tears came without warning. She pressed her face into his pillow, breathing in the faint scent of his cologne, and cried herself back to sleep—not because she missed him, she told herself, but because she'd underestimated her opponent.
The Wolf was playing a much longer game than she'd realized.
Morning.
Kathy woke with a flutter of hope, expecting to find him watching her sleep as he had the previous morning. The bedroom was empty, sunlight streaming through the windows onto cold, untouched sheets. She sat alone in the vast bed as fear began to crawl up her spine like ice water. This wasn't Carmelo pouting like a wounded lover. The Wolf wasn't toying with her emotions for sport.
Something fundamental had shifted, and she could feel it in the very air of the villa.
She slipped from bed and wrapped herself in a silk kimono that felt breezy against her skin, then began a systematic search of their floor. Nothing. She moved through the lower rooms with growing urgency, her bare feet silent on the marble floors. Shecould hear Nino's cheerful chatter from the breakfast room and assumed Carmelo was with him.
He wasn't.
Where the hell was he?
"Marco," she approached the only member of their security detail she truly trusted—a young, imposingly handsome man who'd been with the Ricci family for the past three years. Everyone else was new blood, hired guns with no loyalty beyond their paychecks.
"Where is he?" she asked, trying to keep the desperation from her voice.
"He asked to be left alone, Kathy. If you need him, he said?—"
"Where is he?" The demand came out sharper than intended.
Marco's eyes flicked toward the left, toward the under-construction poolhouse nestled among the trees, then he turned and walked away without another word. Relief flooded through her so powerfully her knees nearly buckled. At least he hadn't abandoned her and Nino completely, hadn't escaped to some unreachable fortress while leaving them trapped here under his control.
But now she faced a more complex problem. How she approached him would determine everything. She had to push aside her mother's careful coaching about managing husbands, ignore Aunt Janey's lessons in emotional manipulation, and forget Debbie's retaliatory tactics with Matteo.
She had to reach him as simply Kathy.
But who was Kathy anymore? After years of survival and strategy, she wasn't sure she remembered that woman.
She walked toward the poolhouse, Bruce Springsteen's gravelly voice drifting through the air at near-deafening volume. Instead of approaching the door directly, she slipped around to peer through the window, some instinct warning her to observe before announcing herself.
He was there, shirtless in the wrinkled linen pants from yesterday, his dark but greying hair disheveled as if he'd been running his hands through it. A massive satellite phone was pressed to his ear while he paced, his free hand gesturing violently as he spoke in rapid, furious Italian to whomever was on the other end. In it, glinting in the morning light, was the hammer.
She froze at the sight of it, her blood turning to ice in her veins. He'd brought that cursed thing with them—the instrument of so much violence and pain in his past? She stepped back instinctively, nearly knocking over a terracotta planter. The thunderous music and his shouted conversation covered any noise she might have made.
Her heart hammering against her ribs, she turned and walked back toward the villa.
"Kathy? Where's Melo?"Nino asked, looking around the dining room with a confused expression.
Kathy gently rubbed his massive hand. "Finish your dinner, sweetheart. He'll be back soon."
Nino returned to his meal, while Kathy pushed the pasta around on her plate, her appetite completely gone. Her mind kept circling back to that satellite phone in the poolhouse. She could slip out there and call Debbie, but then what? Even if Debbie told Matteo everything, what could that possibly change? Carmelo had committed federal crimes—faking his death while under investigation, reneging on his deal to turn against the other families in exchange for Matteo's pardon, robbing a grave, and using a dead woman’s corpse to be her. He'd systematicallytorched his entire life, making sure there was no path back to their old existence.
The finality of it all hit her like a physical blow, and her eyes filled with tears just as she heard his footsteps approaching.
"Melo!" Nino bellowed joyfully, slamming his hand down on the table hard enough to rattle the crystal.
She looked up to see Carmelo freshly shaved and dressed in clean clothes, looking almost normal except for the haunted shadows beneath his eyes.
He walked directly to Nino and allowed his brother to engulf him in an enthusiastic bear hug. He patted Nino's cheek affectionately and promised to take him horseback riding the next morning. When that successfully calmed his brother's agitation, Carmelo's dark gaze found hers across the table.
She met his stare for a moment, then deliberately looked away.
