Trygg was right. He didn’t know her now.
How the girl he once adored had ended up in the hands of a thug like Vito Massioni, he could only guess.
And it didn’t matter.
Savage had a job to do.
That’s what he told himself, even as he pulled the binoculars away from his face and hissed a sharp curse into the darkness.
The Bella he’d known as a girl all those years ago was just a memory. This Bella was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and on the dead wrong side of the law.
Collateral damage, just like Trygg said.
Savage knew what he had to do. The Order might never have the chance to get this close to Massioni and his lieutenants again. Everything was in place. The mission was moments away from success. All he had to do was hit the detonator.
He picked it up, staring at the trigger that would erase Massioni and his entire operation from the face of the Earth.
And, now, Bella too.
“Fuck.”
Savage raked a hand over his tightly clamped jaw. His pulse was banging in his temples, his heart slamming against his ribs with each heavy beat.
“Status,” Trygg said, a note of warning in the warrior’s gravel voice. “I don’t like what I’m hearing over there, Savage.”
He didn’t answer. Nothing he said now would put his comrade or anyone else at the command center in Rome at ease.
Savage set aside the binoculars. Then he carefully deactivated the detonator and slipped the remote into his back pocket.
“Stand by, base. I’m going back in.”
Chapter 2
Arabella held her composure until she had reached her private quarters on the villa’s second floor. Once inside, she leaned against the closed door and let her revulsion leak out of her on a shudder. At least she was getting better at the charade. There was a time when she might have had to bite back a scream.
Her skin crawled everywhere Vito had touched her. She could still feel his hard fingers on her body, on her breast. The sting of his offensive smack to her backside burned her dignity even more than it did her ass.
She hated being trotted out in front of his friends as his personal show pony, forced to dress and act as if she belonged to the coarse, criminal Breed male.
Though to be fair, in many ways Massioni did own her. Her life. Her freedom. Her unique Breedmate gift for premonition—the thing that first brought her to his attention three years ago. He owned all of that, no matter how much she despised him.
He might have owned her body, too, if she hadn’t found a way to convince him that the price of taking that part of her would cost him the one thing he couldn’t afford to lose.
The threat had kept her out of his reach so far, but there were times when she knew he’d been tempted to test her. She only hoped she wouldn’t kill him if he tried. Because no matter how clever she wanted to think she was in dealing with him, Vito Massioni always had one final, terrible card to play.
And so long as he held that over her head, she had no choice but to serve him.
She could never escape him, not even in death.
He’d made certain of that.
Arabella knew better than to keep Massioni waiting. He’d sent her away to fetch her scrying bowl while he entertained his boot-licking cronies in the grand salon. They were gloating over a large payout from a shipment of Red Dragon to the States and the United Kingdom—a narcotic that destroyed the minds of their own kind, the Breed, creating blood-addicted monsters from just the smallest dose. They didn’t care that their sudden windfall came at the expense of both Breed and human lives. She had learned a long time ago that Vito Massioni’s greed knew no bounds.
Nor did his violence.
That her gift had helped him amass his growing fortune, and the power that came with it, made Arabella want to retch.
How often had she thought about giving him a false reading from her scrying bowl?
How many times had she dreaded that her visions would one day prove incorrect?
But she hadn’t deceived him, not once.
And, thankfully, her visions had never been wrong.
Either of those failings would come at the cost of innocent lives. Not her own, but the people she cared about most in the world. The only family she had left now.
It was those precious lives she held close in her heart as she walked over to the cabinet across the room and retrieved the hammered gold bowl she would need for her reading downstairs. In reality, her gift would awaken when she peered into any standing pool of liquid, but Massioni insisted she use the ridiculous carnival fortune-teller’s style bowl for dramatic effect whenever she performed a public reading.
Cradling the shallow bowl in her palms, she drew the empty vessel out of the cabinet. Her own face stared back at her in the reflection on the polished gold basin—but that wasn’t all.