Not the front door, though, and with gut cramping affirmation, I knew it wasn’t Dante or Xan who had caught me up to save me.
It was one of the masked men.
I screamed as I was hefted over his shoulder, kicking out and punching deeply into his kidneys in an attempt to get free. He didn’t hesitate a moment, spraying bullets over the area of the room where my two beloved men were hidden.
I heard Dante swear loudly in Italian and then Xan call, “You take her now, and I will end not just you, but every single fucking person you have ever loved.”
The man holding me paused for one brief second, his gun silent, his feet heavy in their tread. I thought maybe the dominant, arctic voice of my Master would be enough to halt him, but even Alexander’s power had limits.
A moment later, amid a hail of gunfire, he was running us across the floor under cover from the other men and out the door into an alleyway. He took the steps to the street level two by two and then wrenched open a car door before tossing me roughly inside.
I righted myself quickly, pushing my rumpled hair out of my face with one hand while grabbing the knife from my ankle holster with the other. A flicker of movement across the interior had me moving in a flash, holding the knife up under the throat of my captor, my body spilled like an oil slick over his lap.
Only then did I look up into the face of my abductor.
“Good evening, carina,” Seamus Moore said in mild greeting. “Look how you’ve grown.”
Cosima
Seamus Moore was five years older, and apparently, none the wiser. The moment Alexander and Dante discovered he had taken me, he was a dead man, which, maybe unsurprisingly, did not incite feelings of woe in my heart. Time, it seemed, did not heal all wounds. I found only an astonishing amount of hate and dread toward the man who had acted as my father—however abysmally—since birth.
Unfortunately, it seemed time hadn’t touched Seamus in other ways either. His thick hair was still the gleaming colour of candle lit copper in the low light of the limousine, his handsome features strikingly Celtic to my now trained eye; from the russet freckles on his pale skin, as vaguely sweet and contrasting as cereal in milk, to the perfectly formed small rosebud of his pink mouth. He and Elena looked so much alike, especially in the low light. For some immutable reason, they both looked even more beautiful in shadow.
It was such a shocking blow to see him again, let alone know that he had orchestrated the entire holdup in the backroom just to have a private moment with me. Some other daughter might have thought of him more often, in the moments when his choices on her behalf from the past echoed into her future. But there was more than one villain in my life, and Seamus was the least pertinent and the least malicious.
Or so I’d thought.
Sitting across from him now, his long body leaning against the expensive leather interior as if he’d been born to riches, his lips half-smiling as he sipped from a glass of champagne, I had to wonder if he’d come back to ruin my life all over again.
“Celebrating something?” I asked before I could help myself.
I’d taken my knife from his neck, but that didn’t mean I was eager for a chummy father/daughter catch up.
“I’m reuniting with my long-lost daughter. I would say that’s reason to celebrate,” he proclaimed with the same level of showmanship he always had, as if everything in his life was happening just as he wished it to.
“I believe I told you I never wanted to see you again,” I reminded him, proud of my composure when my insides roiled like a washing machine filled with rocks.
“As a matter of fact, you told me never to see the rest of our family again,” he corrected with that smug mischievous twinkle in his dark grey eyes. “A promise I’ve upheld.”
“Am I supposed to commend you for that? It’s the first promise you’ve ever kept and the only kind thing you’ve ever done for our family.”
I felt physically ill with resentment as I stared at his creased, handsome face arranged in his coy, carefree smirk.
Did nothing matter to this man?
Was he just as sociopathic as Noel, but cut into a different shape by his emotional impotence?
“You should.” He cocked his head, a thick hank of ginger hair falling into eyes the very same dark grey as Elena’s. “Do you think it is easy for a father to abandon his family?”
“Do you think it’s easy to be abandoned?” I shot back, leaning forward to bare my teeth at him. “And don’t give me any cazzate about me forcing you to leave. You abandoned your responsibilities to our family long before you actually left Napoli.”