Page 11 of Taming Seraphine

Disgust coils in my gut, and a sour taste spreads across my tongue. I draw back and exhale a shocked breath. He can’t be talking about Seraphine, but she’s the only person I found in the mansion that even vaguely fits the description.

“What did he use her for?” I ask.

“I didn’t ask questions. The less I know, the better.” He clears his throat. “Sniff about. I don’t want her falling into the wrong hands.”

A dozen more questions rise to the surface, such as why the hell Anton trained someone so innocent and young to be a killer, but I bite them back. No one is supposed to know I have Seraphine. That would lead to questions about who killed the Capellos.

“I’ll drop a few hints at poker,” I say, my voice even. “Maybe one of the boys knows something.”

“Doubtful. Are you still in contact with your cousins?”

My eyes narrow. Anton is getting too close to the truth. “I sometimes see Benito and Cesare at the Phoenix. Why?”

“Last night’s slaughter could be revenge for Enzo Montesano.”

“Didn’t he die of a heart attack?” I ask, my brows pulling into a frown.

Anton hesitates. “Capello moved in on Montesano’s empire after he died. Around the same time, his eldest was taken out of the picture with a well-timed death sentence. Then Capello shut out the other two of his sons. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Montesano didn’t die of natural causes.”

“True.” I nod. That much is obvious, but my cousins never voiced their theories on how Capello could have caused Montesano’s heart to fail. “But I doubt Benito and Cesare would admit to anything so incendiary, even to a distant cousin.”

“Keep your eyes open. Upheaval in the underworld is good for business. The fall of such a huge family leads to a power vacuum, and everyone’s going to be scrambling for control.”

He hangs up, leaving me rubbing the spot between my brows. Anton is correct about the Montesano brothers being behind the Capello massacre. The information in those hard drives I took will be enough to get Roman out of jail, but Anton would have said something more if he suspected I was the hired killer.

I set down the phone and walk over to the coffee machine, my mind racing. Seraphine needs to stay somewhere else tonight. It’s the only way to host poker night and keep her safe.

FOUR

SERAPHINE

My head pounds when I wake up in the strange room, but what’s stranger is the freedom of movement around my naked neck. I’m free of the collar, but the situation I’ve landed in might be even worse.

My body still feels weighed down from the sedative, and it takes every effort to drag myself off the bed. I need to get out now and find Gabriel. He’s out there somewhere, clinging to life now that the people who were holding him hostage are dead.

I creep through a bedroom of parquet floors and pale gray walls—a vast upgrade from the basement I was kept in for five years. It’s lit by filtered sunlight, telling me that only hours must have passed since we left Dad’s house.

Leroi, the man who took me, is an assassin. A professional one. Not someone coerced to kill targets with a knife or a poisoned hairpin. He has weapons, explosives, a getaway driver, and a physician who can extract chips.

With as much stealth as I can muster through my wooziness, I step out into an open-plan living room of whitewashed brick walls with enough leather sofas to seat a small army. A long dining table takes up the left side of the space, but there’s no sign of a kitchen. Something tells me that’s not the only place he keeps his knives, but I’m not about to return to the room with all those guns.

Ignoring the floor-to-ceiling windows that provide a hair-raising view of Beaumont city, I ease open the nearest door. At the first sight of the man sleeping in a four-poster bed, my heart jumps to the back of my throat.

After seeing all those guns on the wall, I thought this was some kind of facility, but this is his home.

White bedsheets pool around his waist, exposing sculpted pectoral muscles and defined abs. His chest rises and falls with each light snore, and the effect is hypnotic.

Leroi would make the perfect prey. There’s no thick growth of hair obscuring his anatomy, no greasy layers of fat. He’s textbook perfection, a killer’s dream.

I force myself to look away. The twins aren’t holding me hostage anymore and I don’t even know if Leroi wants to put me to work, or if he has other motives.

Easing the door shut, I move to the next room, until I find the kitchen.

Bright light bounces off pristine white cabinets, creating a glare so intense that I have to squint. I rush past the breakfast bar and move to where a knife block sits beside a stainless steel stove. I pull on each handle and examine the implements until I find a boning knife.

Its blade is long and thin and flexible, with a tip sharp enough to slice through ligaments and glide through the ribs to reach the heart. After checking through the other blades, I open the drawers and extract a steak knife, which is small enough to conceal in my pocket.

I should search through the apartment for cards, cash, a phone—anything that could help me find Gabriel, but I don’t want to risk waking Leroi. Waking up with only a pounding in my head tells me he isn’t the type of predator who thinks with his dick. Though I don’t doubt he’s the type who would hunt me down in a second if I stole anything valuable.

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