He said it so matter-of-factly that she almost didn’t understand. He even gave a little shrug, as if his childhood were of no consequence. Vienna said nothing because she wanted him to continue and was afraid if she said anything, he might stop.
“There was a bakery that sold all kinds of fresh-baked bread on the corner of the street. Below it, in the basement, were the ovens where they made the bread. The ovens were hot and the pipes ran under the bakery. I’d discovered them by accident. I had all the bread I could eat and there was a water spigot right outside the shop. No one could see me in my little space beside the pipe. Once I got rid of the diaper, I was able to run around at night and explore. I found a way into the basement and then into the bakery.”
Vienna wished she could read him, but there was little inflection in his voice. He might have been telling her about another child—not a toddler—finding his way on his own in a city. He fell silent, continuing to knead up her calves.
“You can’t stop there. I know you have a good education. How did you manage to go to the schools you went to?”
“The bakery. I learned by watching how to make bread and listening to people talk. I heard them reading. That was easy enough. Math was extremely easy for me. I could pick up languages. So many different people came into the bakery, and all of them spoke different languages. I stole clothes and then books. I knew the neighborhood like the back of my hand. I found out about school at a very early age and I snuck in and sat in on classes. I liked when the teachers read to everyone, but it was frustrating to me, so eventually I borrowed the books every night until I could read them all myself.”
“Weren’t you ever caught?”
A ghost of a smile touched his eyes. “Yeah, a few times. I had to bring papers home to my ‘parents.’ This sweet old lady owned the bakery. She knew I was hanging around by that time, and I helped out by dumping the garbage and doing odd jobs. I took the papers to her, didn’t say a word. I think the first time, I was so little I didn’t even come up to the top of the counter. I just pushed the papers up to her, didn’t say a thing. She filled them out and pushed them back to me. I gave them to the teacher. I had no idea what they said at that time.”
Vienna found herself a little shocked that the woman would fill out parental papers for a child she knew was living on the streets rather than report him to child services. “Why didn’t she turn you in?”
“I would have run. She knew that already. We ended up having a loose relationship. I was more like a wild animal at first, and she was gruff. Had no kids of her own. I lived in the basement in a small room there and she pretended she didn’t know. She bought me clothes and I pretended I didn’t know, although I wore them.”
“Did you continue to go to school?”
He nodded. “I learned at a very fast rate, and I needed to learn. I discovered the library and computers, which gave me access to the internet. That opened up a new world of learning to me. I excelled in math and languages and jumped grades. I had no real idea what that meant, and I didn’t care as long as I could keep learning. I was working for Sophia in the ovens baking bread for her, and sometimes I’d go translate if she needed it. Mostly, I stayed out of sight.”
Sophia. She liked that name. She liked that Sophia had taken care of him. It might not have been the care others would have approved of, but she’d done her best when others might have looked the other way or abandoned him.
“One day some men came to the neighborhood and demanded Sophia give them her special focaccia bread. She had her own special twist she put on it, and it’s renowned. We were out of it, and she told them she would have the bakers make extra for them if they wanted to come back the next day. One of them, the youngest, a man of about twenty, pulled out a gun and shot her. Just like that. And he laughed. He called her a bitch and then spit on her.”
Vienna’s heart nearly stopped beating. She started to pull her feet back so she could go to him, but he clamped his fingers around her ankles like a vise.
“No, Snowflake, you have to hear this. All of it. You have to know who I am. What kind of man I am. I was down in the basement and I heard the gunshot. I ran upstairs and saw the car racing away. I have a good memory and recorded the license plate. I could see Sophia on the floor and I went to her. She was dying. I held her until she passed, and I promised her that I would get the bastards who killed her. Then I went to the security tape and played it. I’ll never forget those faces. There were four of them. The twenty-year-old who pulled the trigger was the son of a local gangster and thought he was untouchable.”
Vienna pressed her fist to her wildly beating heart. Zale’s eyes moved over her face, a moody, brewing storm in their dark depths. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him to her. How easily someone had taken Sophia’s life, a woman who had been kind to a little boy, giving him what he so desperately needed, a home of sorts. A place where he was safe from the streets. A chance to go to school and learn when it meant so much to him. She’d been killed for no reason at all.
“I knew who the gangsters were. Everyone on the street knew. Giovi Vella was a big man with a big mouth. He scared everyone into doing what he wanted them to do. We weren’t anywhere near his original territory but he kept spreading out, claiming more and more. I guess the block where Sophia’s bakery was located was next on his list. It was just his bad luck that they didn’t know I lived in her basement.”
He fell silent again, his fingers once more massaging her calves. At times, his thumbs pressed into her muscles just a little too hard, clueing her in to the fact that he might be sitting there looking relaxed, but the things he was telling her were painful to him.
“I hunted them down one by one. I was still in my teens, Vienna. No one really knew about me. That gave me an advantage. I found the blueprints to their homes and studied them first, and then I went in at night and killed them. Five of them. All of the men who were with the man that killed Sophia, then him, and then his father. I killed them all in one night, going from house to house. I used the same knife and then I got rid of it, breaking it up with a hammer and discarding the pieces in various places. I wore gloves and made certain I wasn’t caught on any cameras.”
Vienna knew he was waiting for her reaction, watching her closely to see if she was going to pull away from him. She wished she were touching him. Stroking her fingers along his calf, or massaging his foot. Anything to reassure him she understood. Sophia might not have been a mother to him in the accepted sense of the word, they hadn’t lived together, but she had been all he’d had. Zale was capable of fierce loyalty, and he felt that toward Sophia.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she told him. “That must have been a terrible time for you.”
He rubbed her calf much more gently. “Her lawyer contacted me through the school. She had legally adopted me somehow. Well, she had a birth certificate that appeared legitimate. She was connected to a family in Sicily, and they did the paperwork for her. They hadn’t heard from her until she asked for the papers to make that happen. She left me a letter explaining what she’d asked her uncle to do for her. She left everything she had to me. The bakery, the money. Everything. She had a lot. All that was good, but suddenly I was out in the open, exposed to the world. Sophia had been murdered. Her killer had been murdered. She was connected to a family in Sicily and I was her son.”
“What did you do?” Vienna asked when he went quiet again.
He looked at her again, his dark eyes pure velvet. “No condemnation for anything I told you? Vienna, I just admitted I hunted those men down and killed them.”
She waved his confession away. “I’m sure you’re not supposed to admit things like that. Didn’t they teach you that in secret forces school or wherever you went? You’re intelligent. Never admit to anything. I know you must have continued your education.”
He nodded. “I did. I continued to skip grades and ended up managing to get my bachelor’s in three years. As soon as I had my master’s, I joined the service.”
“Were you recruited or did you join? You had to have been very young.”
“I was restless and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I’d sold Sophia’s bakery. I couldn’t look at it without seeing her lying on the floor. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I needed something to do that would take the edge off. There’s always been a kind of restlessness in me, and I had to find a way to explore that.”
She studied his face. There had been a reluctant note in his voice, as if he hadn’t wanted to share that last piece of information with her. “What happens when we’re together and you start to feel restless, Zale? That could happen, couldn’t it?”
He didn’t so much as blink. “I suppose it could. Life is a risk, Vienna. You know that. If that happens, we talk about it and decide the best way to handle it together. I’m not that young lost kid. I can look at myself and see the things I need to work on. I see the things I want and need in my life. What about you?”
His voice was back to that soft stroke of sensual awareness, brushing over her skin so that she shivered with need. He could bring her nerve endings to instant, vivid life just with that tone of his, but when he added that hungry look from his dark eyes, she got that curious melting sensation in the pit of her stomach as well.
The last was a deliberate challenge. What about her? Everything she wanted was sitting right in front of her. “Stop looking at me like that.”
He knew she’d already made up her mind. Hot flames began to flicker in his dark eyes. She felt those flames licking at her skin, tiny flicks that ignited a wildfire on her nerve endings. That was how it had started before, when he’d annoyed her by tossing her over his shoulder like some caveman.
“How am I looking at you, Vienna?”
Those dark, sinful eyes of his moved over her body as if he stroked her with a physical touch. She felt the lick of a flame on her throat, her breast, her nipple, her belly button, lower still until she wanted to moan and writhe right there in her cuddle chair.
“You know exactly how you’re looking at me.”
She knew she’d been doing the same thing to him—maybe worse. She couldn’t stop devouring him with hungry eyes, moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue and deliberately staring at his chest and then lowering her gaze.
He put her feet on the floor and stood up, stalked to her chair and then lifted her easily. He had the caveman carry perfected like no one else. Upside down, she was laughing and trying to strip her shirt off by the time they hit the master bedroom.