Page 101 of Forsaking All Others

My hands shook as I took photos of the box before I set my phone out to record as I opened the parcel with numb fingers.

“Fia?” Ciro asked, having followed me into the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

Cerberus pressed into my side, his nose tipped in the air for a moment before he offered a quiet snarl.

“This was waiting for me here,” I murmured. “Find out who brought it in.”

He didn’t obey. Instead, he moved into my space and surprised me by grabbing a pair of plastic gloves from his back pocket before handing them to me.

“Occupational hazard,” he explained.

I snorted despite myself and put on the gloves before I proceeded to open the box.

Inside, clouds of white tissue paper.

My heavy breaths stirred the delicate filaments as I lifted them from the box, revealing a richly glossed mahogany box within. It was heavy when I pulled it out, and the lid snapped open with a click that sounded to my ears like a gunshot.

“Santo cielo,” I breathed out as I saw the contents of the jewelry box.

Two fingers lay nestled within, lightly furred at the base with black hair, tanned and strong. A pinky and a ring finger from the left hand, that digit laden with a heavy gold wedding band.

“No.” The word escaped me like air from a punctured balloon, and I had to catch myself against the island as my knees went weak.

My own fingers reached out to hover over Dario’s severed appendages.

First his ear, and now this?

They were lopping off pieces of him for sport.

This present wasn’t bloody as the other had been, but the fingers were cut almost surgically like the ear had been, before they were cleaned up, so they seemed almost fake lying in the satin jewelry box.

Cerberus growled savagely, lunging at the offending items before I could quell him with a single hand gesture. Whimpering slightly, he sat on my feet between me and the box as if he could keep it from getting to me.

“Why don’t you sit down, Fia?” Ciro suggested, his hand on my arm.

It was the jolt I needed to remember I wasn’t twenty years old and naive anymore.

Someone had maimed my fucking husband and was terrorizing me with pieces of him.

“No fucking ransom note,” I growled as I ripped the rest of the paper from the cardboard with the fingers cradled carefully in my other hand. “What the fuck do they want from us? What are they going to do with him?”

“Fia, settle—”

“Don’t you dare,” I hissed, closing the box with a snap. “If you value your position in this family, you’ll have someone take me to ‘my husband’ right this fucking second.”

Ciro stared at me for a moment, reluctant admiration in his gaze. “You always have been stronger than they give you credit for.”

“Yippee for me,” I drawled sarcastically. “Take me to him, Ciro, I won’t take no for an answer.”

Thirty minutes later, I was slamming the door to the car shut before Luigi could come around to open it for me. Ferretti Corp. was housed in an early Chicago School–style building in the Loop, with offices taking up the top three floors. I took the elevator, disregarding Ciro and Luigi’s presence entirely as I worked myself up to confront the impostor.

The receptionist, Marta, smiled as she greeted me when the doors opened, but I only shot her a thin smile before I was striding through the office to the back, where Dario’s glass-enclosed office sat in the corner. The glass was frosted for privacy, and I ignored his assistant’s protest when I grabbed the handle and barged right in.

Luca stood behind his desk at the glass walls, looking out at the gray-and-silver cityscape like some kind of brooding hero. Someone was talking in Russian over the phone speaker, but the moment I stormed inside, Luca murmured something in the same language and cut the line.

He studied me implacably as I strode across the room and stopped in front of the desk, throwing the mahogany box on the surface as I snarled, “Someone sent me another present.”

“Leave us,” he told whoever waited over my shoulder. “Close the door and do not disturb us.”