Page 126 of Forsaking All Others

And not menacing at all, if that was his point in wearing it.

He had been through an X-ray machine and physical pat down before setting foot in my office. I had a gun under my desk and the one Luca gave me strapped to my thigh under my dress. Luigi and Stefan were in the outer office, no doubt flirting harmlessly with Alessia even as they kept an ear out for any sign of my distress. Finally, Cerberus sat beside me, having unraveled from his dog bed as soon as the stranger entered to take up sentry beside my desk chair. He was tall enough that he could rest his sleek head on the surface, and he did that now, upper lips trembling slightly to reveal sharp white teeth as he stared the man down.

I was as unafraid of this stranger as I was terrified of the one I’d left at home.

Still the mask muffled his voice and the tone when he said, “The first time they tried to kill me was at a wedding.”

He paused, but I had nothing to follow up with.

“It was the wedding of a very famous family in my hometown to one from across the sea,” he countered slowly, words weighted by the fake accent. “I was in love with the bride, you see. She was meant to be mine.”

The air seemed to leave the room from one second to the next.

When I tried to suck in a breath, nothing filled my lungs.

He continued.

“The family was attacked after the ceremony by the very same people we were meant to break bread with.”

I could barely hear him through the mask, through the clashing clamor of my blood rushing through my head.

“I was shot,” he said, pressing a hand to his chest. “And fell down the steps. I broke ribs, my clavicle, and the bullet punctured my liver. I was in the hospital for weeks. Long enough for them to whisk my bride away from me. When I recovered, I learned she believed me to be dead. It broke my heart.”

“Take off your mask,” I demanded, one hand dipping under my desk to grab the gun I had hidden to the bottom. In one smooth move I dislodged it, flipped the safety, and raised it level with the masked man’s face. “I said, take off your damn mask.”

Another rough little chuckle before he slowly opened his hands to the skin in surrender and lifted them to his mask.

My head felt like an untethered balloon on my shoulders, and I realized it had been too long since I breathed.

But I couldn’t find breath when the man called Orpheus pulled his mask off and revealed a beautiful face that had once been so dear to me.

“Niccolo,” I said on the last of the oxygen in my lungs.

He smiled softly, sadly, an expression I had never seen before on features that had aged but not changed.

“Ciao, cara.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Fiammetta

Years ago, when I first came to the United States, I used to imagine that one of my brothers or Niccolo had survived the shooting at Palermo’s Cathedral. I would envision them coming to find me in Chicago to whisk me away back to Sicily and the safe life of comfortable confinement I had once known. In those fantasies, Niccolo was still young and smiling, as pretty as Prince Charming from a storybook.

He didn’t look like that anymore.

There were severe brackets around his mouth and two sharp creases between his brows, his mouth set as if he never smiled, and his eyes squinted as if even the soft light of my office was hurting his head.

Six years was a long time.

He had clearly been through just as much as I had.

“You’re alive,” I said almost woodenly as I processed the fact.

He smiled at me warmly, an incongruous expression now that he was essentially a stranger. “They kept that from you, did they? I figured as much. It wouldn’t be any good for you to know your childhood sweetheart was still alive and pining for you in Sicily.”

It was hard to argue that or even summon the necessary anger toward the Ferrettis. Foolish young Fiammetta would have held on to that knowledge like a life vest in a tumultuous sea, pinning every hope and dream on the man I’d believed myself so in love with. It would have made me stagnant, I thought, to know he was alive and could rescue me at any moment.

He hadn’t.