Page 100 of Forsaking All Others

Twisting back to the nightstand, I took the Polaroid from the charity event out from under my Italian-language Bible and studied it again.

Don’t trust your husband.

Now, knowing what I did, the message had extra meaning.

Did whoever sent it know I was essentially married to two different men?

I scanned the photo with my tablet and attached it to a new message to Obsidian Swan.

Fiammetta: Can you find out who slipped this to me at the bar at the Edge Foundation Event three days ago? Also, have you found any further information on Lo Spettro? I’ll pay you for this, OS. It’s important.

I didn’t know much about Obsidian Swan other than that the hacker was a woman. We’d stumbled across each other when I was trying to track down the son of the Chicago Triad’s boss, who’d been kidnapped. Since then, over eighteen months ago, she had come through for me again and again. I liked to think we were friends, of a sort, even though we went by fake names and didn’t share intimate details.

We knew some of each other’s secrets, and that was its own kind of intimacy.

She responded that she was on it, and I closed the window to email a few of my other contacts for information about Lo Spettro. I’d pressed them all over the years, but I had to believe one day, he would slip up and leave a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow.

Hank: Why are you asking about a ghost, girly? Don’t want to draw attention to yourself and bring his haunting ass to your door.

Too late for that.

I assured him I was being careful, but that a new project had come across my desk that made me curious about the infamous assassin.

If I was going to figure out what the hell had happened to Dario, I needed to know as much as I could about Luca. Who was to say that I could trust him just because he looked exactly like his brother? I barely trusted Dario, and now I was expected to treat this man with the same respect and occasional intimacy?

But you have already, a little voice whispered like a devil on my shoulder.

You’ve had more fun with your husband in the last four days than you have in six years.

He took you to a burger joint and told you that you were a storm.

I put the Polaroid back inside the Bible in the drawer and tossed my tablet to its surface before I collapsed back on the mound of goose-feathered pillows and blew a raspberry.

Even as a woman who loved puzzles, this was a lot.

If I had any hope of immediate answers, I had to get them from Luca.

With a heavy sigh, I dragged myself up from the bed and went downstairs to look for him. Instead, I found Bonnie with her head bent toward Ciro, speaking in whispers. Cerberus, who was sleeping on his velvet dog bed in the corner, stirred first, offering me a soft woof of acknowledgment that alerted the other two to my presence.

“Hello, love,” she said with a weak smile. “Time for something to eat?”

“Is Dario in his office?” I asked instead, sliding an unimpressed look at them both.

They’d known this whole time about the deception, and it hurt, especially from Bonnie, who I had thought was my first real friend in America.

“He left,” Ciro said, crossing his lean, tattooed arms. “To go to the office.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Things are busy,” he said with meaning, referring of course to the fact the real boss was missing. “He needed to take care of some business.”

I rolled my lips between my teeth but only shook my head at them before I turned on my heel to go into the kitchen. Chef was already done cooking for the day, but breakfast was warming in the oven, a baked oatmeal with bananas and chocolate.

I pulled it out and sat down to eat the sweet treat, when I noticed a gift-wrapped box on the island. My heart started beating overly fast as I got up to inspect it.

For my wife, the card read.

Hadn’t the last gift been dedicated to me too?