7. Chapter 2
Lorenzo
That same night
My father is dead. Those are terrible words, an awful truth I can’t begin to acknowledge. Father is dead, and I couldn’t do anything to save him.
I watch in painful helplessness as the paramedics take him away, concealed in a dark bag. They want to take me to the hospital, they say I need treatment, but I ignore them. They know who I am, and they don’t fight me about it. I’ll go to the hospital when I’m damn well ready to go to the hospital.
He summoned me to the house this evening, saying he wanted to meet with me to talk about something important. Now I’ll never know what it was he wanted to discuss. The fire had just started when I arrived, and though Mother tried to stop me, I rushed into the house without a moment’s hesitation.
My father might not have been a perfect man—hell, he was objectively not a good man—but he was my father, and I’d be damned before I let him die without trying to save him.
But I couldn’t save him.
Mother finds me sitting on the grass, as far away from the house as I can get. The firefighters have killed the fire by now and started the process of picking through the smoldering skeleton of the house. Fire investigators are here too, and the police.
“Lorenzo,” she says quietly, sitting beside me.
I can’t imagine the pain she must feel right now.
She knew fully what sort of man my father was, what he did for a living, what our family does, but she loved him anyway, for all his flaws and mistakes.
They had a relationship of unconditional trust and respect, and now he’s gone.
That pain is beyond what I can comprehend. It’s a pain I never want to feel—one of the reasons that, even at thirty-seven, I’ve refused to ever give my heart away to someone else.
“You did everything you could,” she says gently, touching my arm.
“I didn’t. I could’ve saved him.”
Mother catches my chin in her fingers and forces me to look at her. She’s the only person who can do that—anyone else would lose their hand if they dared touch me like that. “My son. Look at me.”
I meet her gaze—eyes black as night, like mine.
“You could not have saved him,” she says in a soft, devastated voice. “And I’m just glad I don’t have to bury both a son and a husband.”
I close my eyes, the grief over Father’s death warring with barely contained rage at whoever did this. “What happened?” I manage to growl. “How’d the fire start?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “It must’ve been an accident.”
An accident. Doubtful. Nothing in our lives is an accident. We’re the Diamante Family, one of the most powerful criminal organizations on the West Coast, and we have many enemies.
My hands clench in the grass, tearing up blades because there’s nothing else I can destroy right now. “It was the Volkovs. I’ll prove it.”
Mother’s voice is full of weary grief. “Don’t start a blood war because of this, my son.”
Finally, I open my eyes and settle my glare on what remains of our family’s home. “I didn’t start this war, Mother. But I will be the one to end it.”
She sighs. “You sound like your brother.”
My brother. Giovanni Diamante. The heir to the Diamante Family—and now, I suppose, the Don of our organization. Where is he right now? Doubtless he’s heard the news and is probably racing here even as I wonder.
But he wasn’t here.
He wasn’t here when I heard Father’s weak cries on the other side of the door.
He wasn’t here when I almost killed myself trying to get Father out.
He wasn’t here to do his goddamn job.
“Please,” Mother says. “Go to the hospital. And then we can feel our grief.”
Because I know it will make her feel better—and because I’m not a total idiot, and my body really does need medical attention—I agree. “I’ll go.”
As I stand, I find myself looking for that firefighter who saved my life.
He was so much younger than I expected. So small.
He looked barely older than a boy, hardly more than twenty years old.
And yet, he had such strength in him. My blood still boils at how he wouldn’t listen to me, refused to obey me when I said I wouldn’t leave.
I don’t blame him for my father’s death—I’m not stupid.
If he’d let me stay, there wouldn’t have been anything I could’ve done to help those firefighters get Father out.
But what I said to him is true.
I owe him a life debt, and I don’t forget those.
He looked so shocked when I said that, his big hazel eyes wide and almost afraid.
Good, I think.
He should be afraid of me. I am far more powerful than him, both in body and in influence.
I could destroy him easily, and that thought gives me more than a small amount of pleasure.
I should take that beautiful boy, who thought he could order me around in my own home even as it burned around me, and I should teach him a lesson.
Show him what it’s really like to be powerless and obedient.
Oh, I would enjoy that. I would enjoy seeing those hazel eyes terrified, that lovely face contorted in pain as I show him what happens when you don’t obey Lorenzo Diamante, and then that pretty mouth open in ecstatic pleasure when I—
“Lorenzo,” Mother says, snapping me back to the dark present moment. Where had my mind gone? What was I doing, thinking like that in a moment like this?
“The hospital,” Mother repeats, and points to the paramedics and their ambulances.
“Yes. I’ll go.”
But I won’t forget this firefighter.