Page 100 of Captured Innocence

“I’ll make note. Anything else?”

“Dinner. Make her dinner. Don’t just take her to some fancy place,” D’Artagnan added.

“True, brother,” Enzo quipped. “It doesn’t matter what it is. You need to make the effort. That’s all a woman cares about. But a real effort.” He glanced toward Dar and grinned.

“Shit. Now I’m not so certain I can do it. I can’t cook, you know. She might die of food poisoning.” I grinned, glancing from one to the other. Getting through the ridiculous situation was getting more and more on my nerves.

“Hell. You can do anything,” Enzo teased.

I grabbed my phone, needing to hear Sophia’s voice when Luis called.

Then the sound of a message coming in to Dar’s phone surprised him.

“Luis. What?” I answered my phone, immediately on edge.

“We’ve been compromised,” he said, his voice hitching.

“What are you talking about?”

Boom!

The sound in the distance instantly sent up a red flag. “What the fuck is going on?”

Enzo jerked at my arm. “What is it?”

“An explosion. We need to get there. Now.”

“Yeah, we do. I know who the Ghost is. Remember a tattoo, Mattia? The one he got in defiance of our father?” Dar said.

“An upside-down skull by a cross, blood dripping down the crucifix.” I glanced at him and suddenly I knew. And ice ran through my veins. We’d been idiots, but how was it possible?

Ghosts really did exist.

* * *

There was some sense of beauty in the art of revenge, especially when it took a significant period of time to bring it to fruition. Granted, I’d learned the hard way that it also created a rift in life, as if the only thing that mattered was exacting retaliation. But given that’s what I’d grown up believing, I could certainly understand the desire and the joy it brought.

I’d wanted nothing more than to tear my father apart limb by limb. I’d planned it, imagined it, dreamt it, and hungered to the point that I’d lost several years of living my life planning to end one. Now that he was rotting in his grave, I realized it had given me almost zero satisfaction. I’d gotten a piece of advice from a professor of mine that had taken me until only a few years before to truly understand let alone embrace.

Living well was the best revenge.

But when someone was psychotic like my brother had to be, there were no rules, no other desires that came close to causing destruction and bloodshed. At least I could understand the need that burned deep inside.

I had a beast lurking in the darkness of my being much like Enzo and D’Artagnan did. Dar had been correct in that the women we cared about kept us from going over the edge completely. Maybe if my father had embraced the love of another woman, things would be different.

Maybes.

There were too many of those in my life with almost no answers.

While I still found it impossible to believe that Tommaso was still alive, the pieces all fit. Now I stood in the middle of the office at the DeLuca estate, trying to control my breathing.

“What the fuck?” Enzo snarled as he crouched down, picking up the explosive device. “It’s little more than a goddamn smoke bomb.”

I raked my fingers across the desk, pulling them closer to my face. “Blood.”

“Goddamn it!” Dar yelled, tossing a lamp across the room. “We need to find them now. How could they ambush us? How?”

“That’s what I want to know. Where the fuck are they?” I yelled, taking long strides toward the door. The second Vincenzo stumbled into the office I had him by the throat, pitching him against the wall in two seconds. “What the hell happened? Why weren’t they protected?”

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