They didn’t know Amedeo Salvatore wasn’t dead. I doubted even Cosima knew I was aware of her ruse.
No man as clever as the Napoli capo went into a situation unarmed out of concern for his estranged daughter.
It was a set-up, and though amateurly thought up, it was fairly well-executed.
The fact of it was, I didn’t much care.
There was very little to make me believe anymore that Salvatore was the one who killed my mother. There was little motive, and my own gut coiled at the idea.
It was wrong.
I had more important things than Salvatore on my mind at the time, but I knew where he was when the time came to confront him.
Now that Cosima was gone, finding her was my only focus, and Salvatore was at the bottom of my list of suspects based on one simple fact. Not even her birth father could have convinced Cosima to run away from me hours after we’d married.
Snapping the whip forward with complete accuracy, I broke a branch arching above Simon Wentworth’s prone form and watched as leaves fell over him like macabre confetti.
“Let’s begin,” I intoned, just as mightily as Sherwood, striding forward and taking my place behind Wentworth’s back.
Unlike mine, his was smooth and unblemished. He had never been punished for defending a woman as I had for Yana and Cosima.
Unbidden, I wondered what kind of man he was, and remorse scored through me like talons over my innards. Then I remembered that he had tried to claim Cosima in The Hunt, and anger blazed through me, eradicating the wounds.
“Just do it,” he whispered brokenly. “She’s gone, and I don’t…I don’t want to be anymore.”
“Disgusting,” someone called out.
Another spit at him.
“Pathetic wanker,” someone else shouted.
“Silence,” I ordered, the boom of my voice like a sonic bomb quelling every noise in the vicinity.
Even the wind died suddenly, and the animals obeyed, frozen in the trees like ornaments.
I let the banked rage at losing Cosima overcome me as I lifted my arm and brought the deadliest whip in my arsenal down on Simon Wentworth’s back.
His screams exploded in the silence, louder than my command, filling the quiet like a waterfall into a cup, his agony so forceful it seemed to tear through my eardrums.
I continued ceaselessly.
My mind focused not on the wet thwack and thud of the whip on his torn back or his banshee wails but on the face of a woman who was young enough to be a girl but wise enough to be a goddess.
I thought of the way she slept curled in my arms as if I was her protector. For a girl with a life filled with monsters, the idea that she thought I could keep her safe from harm was so heady, it made my head fucking spin.
I thought of her hair wrapped around my fingers as she babbled on about her day cooking with Douglas, attempting needlepoint with Mrs. White, and fencing with Riddick. How those words gave life to my house, to Pearl Hall, in a way nothing ever had before. How her words made my house a home.
I thought about Cosima until my arm was weak with strain and my white shirt was stained with red like a Jackson Pollack painting. I thought of her as Simon Wentworth’s breath turned to a wet rattle, and then I thought of her as my mind seized with the knowledge that this person she had turned me into could not live with beating Wentworth to death for committing an act I was guilty of myself.
“Davenport?” someone called.
I realized that my arm had dropped, and I was heaving for breath as I stared at the mutilated mess I’d made of the man before me.
“Can’t stomach it?” Sherwood asked smugly.
If I couldn’t, I would be signing my own death warrant.
I looked up at him, trying to veil the hatred I felt for him and his well up like a spring river over the protective banks I’d erected over the years.
“I have a better idea,” I said softly, dropping the whip, ignoring the way my hand cramped into a curled position from holding it so tightly for so long.
The Order watched wearily as I moved around Wentworth, dropping to my knees before I called to Noel, “Bring me a knife.”
My father strode forward as if he had been prepared all along for this exact eventuality, a gleaming hunting knife with an ivory and golden handle already brandished in his hand. It was the knife passed down the Greythorn line since its inception in the 1500s.
The handle was warm as he passed it over to me, his eyes cold with violent pride as he placed his other hand on my shoulder, and said, “That’s my boy.”
That’s my boy.
Proud of me for one-upping the Order’s prescribed punishment to one even more cruel, even more steeped in the society’s brutal history.