My own expression, I’m sure, was filled with horror.
Seamus Moore.
The father I hadn’t seen in nearly six years.
I wasn’t surprised when fight won out for flight. There was a reason my mother called me her lottatrice, her fighter.
Mouth pursed against the force of the fury building on my tongue, I stalked through the café, burst through the doors, and turned to face my father.
Only to find him backing away with his hands in his pockets farther down the street, a sly smile on his face I recognized too well. When he ducked into an alley, I allowed impulse to rule me, and I followed.
He was leaning against the wall deep in the shadows of the narrow brick corridor. I took a single moment to stare at him, noting with disdain that he was still as handsome as ever despite living hard for much of his life. He was classically beautiful; his coloring striking and features finely honed. His hair was longer than he’d worn it when I’d known him, brushing the upturned collar of his black peacoat, and there was a thick, deliberately groomed beard over his jaw, but the sight of those gray eyes sucking up the shadows were the very same ones that had haunted me for years, even after he’d gone.
He watched me silently as I unfroze and stalked toward him, but I knew he wasn’t prepared for what I did next.
I punched him.
As hard as I possibly could, remembering my years of self-defense classes in the torque of my hips and the angle of the blow to the underside of his left cheekbone.
Pain exploded in my hand at the same time air burst from his mouth at the impact.
When I recoiled to do it again, fury blazing over every inch of my scream, he grabbed my wrist in an iron vise and yanked me closer so that I didn’t have the space to strike him again.
“My little fighter.” He had the audacity to chuckle in my face. “I should have known you’d hit me.”
“Not hard enough,” I hissed as I jammed the hard spike of my six-inch heels into his tender instep.
He cursed viciously in Italian and shoved me off. I staggered, then caught myself on my back heel, fishing in my bag for the pepper spray I carried with me religiously.
When I aimed it at Seamus, he blinked in total shock then slowly lifted his hands.
“Dai, Elena, it’s me. What the fuck are you doing?”
It was my turn to blink incredulously. “I’m protecting myself from a man who is a stranger now and a monster from my past. What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
“I’m your father, Elena, put that shit down,” he demanded in that patriarchal way he had of ordering his children around.
It never worked, not then and certainly not now after years of negligence followed by years of abandonment.
It disgusted me how obsessed he was with being Italian, how he still punctuated his speech with it. He was an actor typecasting himself in a role he’d never fit.
“I’ll put it down when you tell me what you’re doing here.”
He barely resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. “Here in New York or here attempting to have a conversation with my firstborn?”
“Both,” I bit out behind my bared teeth.
It hurt to look at him, to see the resemblance on the surface and to know that his tainted blood was also inside me. He was everything I reviled in this life, and I truly thought I’d never see him again. When he disappeared after Cosima moved away to model at eighteen, I’d just assumed he would end up in some ditch somewhere, killed by the Camorra or some other wastrel he’d gotten too involved with.
Our reunion only served to emphasize that I’d actually hoped he was dead all these years. Even living and breathing in front of me, looking at me from the same stormy gray eyes as my own, he was still dead to me.
He dropped his hands in exasperation, treating me like an unruly child. I was reminded that he’d never favored me, not like he did Cosima for her beauty and Sebastian for his maleness, not even like Giselle who had appealed to him for the longest, holding out hope he might one day change. Seamus had never liked me because from the time I could cogitate, I was smart enough not to like him.
“I moved to New York shortly after you did, figlia mia. I wanted to keep an eye on you and your mother.” He ignored my uncharacteristic snort of disdain. “Before you hit me with that poison, you should know. Cosima made me swear not to contact any of you again.”
Every atom of my body stilled then burst into a flurry of movement as thoughts fell like dominos in my path of understanding.