Page 70 of Forsaking All Others

Apparently, that meant something.

He was like muscle memory or the scent of your own house, something you didn’t recognize until it was lost.

“Why would they send it?” I muttered, working the problem over in my head even as I pulled my phone out and texted Hank over the encrypted software a friend named Obsidian Swan had helped me install last year.

Fiammetta: Why would someone send me my husband’s severed ear without a ransom note?

A moment later, despite the late hour and my shocking non sequitur, Hank responded.

Hank: To make you afraid. They might have Dario, but they’re clearly coming for more.

Yes.

That’s what I’d been afraid of.

Fiammetta: I’m going to find him, Hank.

Hank: Dead or alive?

My heart stuttered as I briefly forgot how to make it beat.

Fiammetta: Whatever it takes.

Hank: We got your back, girlie.

I stared at the screen, rubbed my red-stained thumb over the glowing words, and felt something settle in my chest.

I wasn’t a twenty-year-old girl anymore watching violence rip my family to shreds on the stairs of a cathedral. If someone was coming for my family again, even a family that didn’t really want me, I would go for their throats and make them as afraid of me as they should have been of Dario.

After I coordinated with Walter to come and pick up the Bellocchi flash drive, I spent my hour-long bath on the phone with various connections—Finn at the station, where he was doing what he could to subtly look into Dario’s disappearance without alerting the authorities, Hank at the clubhouse pulling in his club resources, Obsidian Swan through the darknet website I usually contacted her from, and finally, I sent an encrypted email to Felipe Malatesta.

​​Felipe​​, I wrote.

We haven’t talked in many years, and for that, I am sorry. I should have reached out to send my condolences about Niccolo, but it was too raw for too long. Truth be told, it still is. Even six years after the fact, I still find myself daydreaming about what my life would have been like if I had married your son. As it is, the man I did marry is missing, and I would like your help to find him. He isn’t a prince charming like Niccolo was, far from it, but he’s all I have left, and I’d like to have him back.

Un abbraccio,

Fiammetta

By the time I fell asleep around 4:00 a.m., I felt filled with purpose instead of fear, a hound with the scent caught in its nose, ready to hunt.

Dario had once mockingly teased me that I was the only one allowed to hate him, and there was a truth buried in there I didn’t want to examine too closely.

I only knew I wouldn’t lose anyone else.

Papà, Ricco, Beppe, and Niccolo were more than enough in one lifetime.

I hadn’t been able to save them, but I would save my husband.

Chapter Nineteen

Fiammetta

I woke up to warm sunlight on my face, blinking open gritty eyes to gaze blearily out the window, bemoaning the fact that I had forgotten to close the curtains. The clock on my bedside said it was already noon, far later than I usually slept in, but the chaos of last night had taken its toll, and I felt as if I’d been beaten by a sledgehammer.

I groaned as I flopped over, away from the light, intent on going back to sleep for at least another hour.

Only, I turned into something warm and hard on my other side that stopped me mid-movement.