Reynard nods slowly, holding my gaze, the meaning in his eyes unmistakable, and all that I am or ever thought I was is gone with an intake of breath.
I push him away, screaming, “NO!”
“I told you she’d overreact,” Capo says, moving around me to stand beside Reynard. Standing next to each other like that, looking at me with identical expressions of calm inevitability, the resemblance is clear.
If I hadn’t just regurgitated the contents of my stomach, I’d do it now.
“Impossible. Impossible.” I keep repeating it in a ragged whisper as I back away, my mind going a million miles per hour in a desperate quest to make sense of this insanity.
Reynard takes a step toward me. “Mariana—”
“You saved me from him!” I scream, pointing at Capo.
“Yes,” he replies calmly. “I did. Were it not for me, you’d have been chewed up and spit out years ago, like all the others. Like your sister would’ve been, had she not taken her own life.”
The tears are coming now. I can’t stop them, or the ugly way my voice breaks, betrayal and disbelief warping my words as they’re coursing like poison through my body. “This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. You raised me like your own daughter!”
Reynard nods, and his eyes are kind. “I always wanted a daughter. My wife died giving birth to our only child.”
He lifts his hand and rests it on Capo’s shoulder.
The sound I make is one of pure anguish, ripping from my throat the way my heart is being ripped right out of my chest. I stagger backward, my hands pressed to my ears, shaking my head and sobbing.
Aroused by my distress, Capo licks his lips. He takes a step forward, but Reynard stops him with an arm held out over Capo’s chest.
“Have you ever wondered what stayed my hand all these years?”
Here, then, is the answer.
Reynard, who isn’t Reynard, but Vincent Moreno’s father, the real capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses. He’s the head of the snake, the power behind the throne, the secret leader of an international empire of human and drug trafficking. A master of disguise and the man I have loved my entire life.
The man responsible for my sister’s death and oceans of human suffering.
Tears stream down my cheeks, blurring my vision and dripping from my jaw. My chest heaves with my hitching breaths. I’m hot and cold, sick with rage and heartbreak, everything inside me screaming NO! straight down to the marrow of my bones.
I bump against the glass coffee table with the bowl of grapes. I pick up the bowl—it’s crystal, heavy—and hurl it at Reynard with a guttural roar of pain.
He and Capo jump aside, easily avoiding the bowl and the flying grapes. With a crash, it shatters into a million glinting splinters on the marble floor. Reynard sighs as if I’m testing his patience. “I want you to listen to me now, Mariana—”
“Why? Why would you do this? Why would you save me and raise me and pretend to love me?”
He blinks at my screamed accusation, genuinely surprised. “I do love you, my darling. I’ve always loved you, from the moment you were dropped at my feet. You looked up at me with those huge brown eyes like I was a god, like I was your savior, and I was moved. I’d never felt a thing for any of the other girls in my stable, but you touched me.”
When I groan at the way he refers to his victims as stock—like horses, only less valuable—his expression hardens.
“Your problem, my darling—aside from a ridiculous sentimental streak I was never able to train out of you despite my determined efforts—is that you think only in terms of black and white. Good and bad. People aren’t black or white, and neither is life. It’s like the title of that book, Fifty Shades of Grey. Everything is a sliding scale of gray, some paler, some darker, but nothing pitch black or pure white. Those extremes don’t exist, except in your mind. Take me, for example. Haven’t I cared for you? Haven’t I shown you love, given you skills, a job, a life?”
“Lies,” I whisper, breaking apart, piece by jagged piece. “All of it was lies.”
“No,” he says firmly, shaking his head. “It was real. And when you get over this little shock, you’ll realize it.”
“Little shock?” I repeat, a crazy laugh bubbling out of me. “Little fucking shock?”
He makes a dismissive motion with his hand, like he’s tiring of the conversation and my lack of cooperation in moving it along. “You took an oath years ago, and now by bringing us the Hope, your marker is honored. Don’t pull that face at the mention of honor, Mariana. It’s second only to family in importance to me. I grant that the blood oath you took was under clouded circumstances—”
“I thought I was saving your life!”
He smiles. “But in reality, you were saving your life. You were proving your loyalty to me and your worth to the organization. You were earning your spot at the table.”
I have an inkling where he’s going with this and I can’t help but stare at him, speechless, powerless to grasp the real scope of his plan. But he lays it all out for me neatly so my battered brain doesn’t have to do any work at all.
“Outsiders aren’t allowed to do business with the family, except in very rare circumstances where their loyalty and value can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Once you’d grown to adulthood and I’d seen countless times how clever you were, how quickly you learned and mastered all the tasks I set before you, I decided it was time to see if you could be trusted. Not trusted the way thieves or criminals trust each other, trusted the way family is trusted.”
Trust. Fucking trust. I think if I ever hear that word again, I’ll lose my mind.
His tone slightly more somber, he continues. “But there are rules that govern these things. Even I must abide by them. So an oath was made and your name was entered into the logbook. Now there’s only one final thing you must do to close the log and satisfy the marker, and properly join the family. Only blood can pay for blood.”
When I just stare at him, he says, “You need to kill your American.”
My mouth falls open. Every drop of color drains from my face.
Capo chuckles. “God, look at her. She didn’t see that coming.”
“Prove your loyalty to me,” murmurs Reynard, his gaze hypnotic, “and inherit an empire.”
“You’re insane,” I whisper.
He flips his hand. “Hardly. I’m a businessman. You know me, Mariana. This is me.”
I snap. “Yes, I do know you! And you’re nothing but a pimp and a liar and a despicable piece of shit!”
He strides toward me. Before I can lift my arm to defend myself, he slaps me hard across the face.
It’s so sudden and violent, I lose my footing and fall on my ass, the breath knocked out of my lungs in a gust. Shocked, I touch my fingers to my nose. They come away bloody.
Looming over me with a red face and wild eyes, Reynard thunders, “Show some respect for your father!”
Behind him, Capo is excited by seeing me stricken and bleeding on the floor. He reaches between his legs and fondles himself, stroking his growing erection through his trousers.
Something inside my mind snaps.
I feel it go, like a tether unwinding and pulling free, a spool abruptly spinning out of thread. In an instant, I’m blank and emotionless, a robot with no heart or soul, no past or future, no hope or love or fear. I look up into Reynard’s face, feeling as calm as morning.
“I’ll show you the same respect you showed my sister, Dad.”
I curl my hand around the gun shoved into the waistband of my jeans, in the small of my back, hidden under my sweatshirt. I pinched it from the assassin on the plane when he forced me to press against him and point it now at the chest of the man who taught me how to expertly steal things right off people’s bodies without them ever knowing.
Capo screams, “No!” and lunges at me.
Without a breath of hesitation, I pull the trigger.
Thirty-One
Ryan
I’m an hour behind her. Only a single hour, but sixty minutes has never felt so goddamn long.
I’m at the rinky-dink airport in Abruzzo, Italy, where Mariana touched down briefly before taking off again, heading east. I hitched a ride out of New York with an old military buddy I once took a belly of lead for in a firefight against insurgents in Iraq, who now flies a transatlantic run for FedEx. But this is as far as his route goes, and I need another plane.
Fast.
“She’s on a yacht in the Adriatic Sea, just off the island of Vis, in Croatia,” Connor tells me over the sat phone. “We’ve got it up on the satellite now. I’m sending you the coordinates.”
“A yacht? Fuck.”
“Yep,” says Connor, sounding grim. “You’re gonna have to jump in. And watch your six, brother, because some of these big-ass megayachts like the one we’re looking at are equipped with surface-to-air missiles.”
“Jesus! Why the hell would you need a missile defense system on a nonmilitary boat?”
“Because, as a for instance, you’re the paranoid head of an international criminal empire and lots of people would like to see you dead.”
“Good point.”
“Even if there aren’t missiles, there will definitely be a bunch of hired guns. Wait there for the rest of the team, I don’t want you going in alone. They’ll be to you in less than—”