The Betrayal (Darkest Obsession #2)

Chapter 1

ELIO

The water hits me like a fist.

Cold and industrial, faintly chemical. The kind of cold that doesn't wake you so much as drag you back to a place you don't want to be. It floods my nose, my mouth, mixes with the blood I've been swallowing for however long I've been hanging here.

I know this ceiling. The rusted beam, the hook where the chain loops over, the cracked concrete floor with the drain that never quite drains all the way.

I know this place the way you know a recurring nightmare, every detail burned in, nothing you can do with the knowledge except endure it.

The warehouse on Via Lenora, three miles from the port, where my father has been teaching me lessons since before I could legally drive.

My wrists are numb. That's the first thing.

The second thing, clawing through the fog of whatever they drugged me with, is the question.

The accounts. Does he know?

Fourteen offshore accounts spread across six jurisdictions.

Three hundred and twelve million euros siphoned over four years, routed through shell companies in Cyprus, the Caymans, and a boutique bank in Liechtenstein that asks no questions because I own forty percent of it. If Cicero found even one thread—

I blink. Water runs into my eyes. The fluorescent light buzzes and flickers, same as it did when I was sixteen and chained to this exact beam for the first time.

Back then it was a shipping container at the port.

And it was about fourteen girls from Moldova, the oldest maybe fifteen.

I'd called the Carabinieri from a burner phone, an anonymous tip I didn't think could be traced back to me.

I was wrong. Cicero broke two of my ribs and fractured my orbital bone and told me I'd cost the family three hundred thousand euros.

He said I'd learn.

I did. Just not what he wanted me to.

The door opens as three men walk in, rotating faces I half recognize from the outer circles.

Not Cicero. He never comes himself, that would require getting blood on his Brioni suit.

These guys are his dispensable soldiers.

Nobodies. The kind who follow orders because thinking for themselves was never an option.

The biggest one steps forward. He's carrying a length of pipe.

"Your father sends a message."

"The wedding will happen at the end of this month" He rolls the pipe between his palms. "Get the American whore out of your head, or he'll get her out for you."

Not the siphoning then.

Violet.

The relief is cold and immediate. Four years of work, intact. Then the next thought, right behind it—where is she? Still at the estate? Did Cicero move her as insurance, or is this just the message? Take the beating, get your head right, the woman stays put?

"Where is she." Not a question. The big one doesn't answer. Keeps rolling the pipe between his palms.

That's an answer too.

The pipe connects with my left side. Same ribs as last time. They always aim for the same ribs.

At twenty-two, I'd refused to execute a man's wife, as a result I spent a week in this place.

When Valente managed to finally get me out I found the couple had been dealt with by someone with fewer principles.

Once, after my mother's funeral, I made the mistake of asking the coroner questions he didn't have answers for.

Cicero doesn't argue. He sends me here instead.

This is his language. Pain as punctuation. I learned it young enough that I stopped finding it remarkable.

I don't scream. Haven't in years. Silence is its own kind of weapon, it takes the transaction out of it. They want sound. I give them nothing. My thoughts circling to Violet, focusing on the memory of her body against mine instead.

My memory gets unreliable.

Not because I lose consciousness, though I do, twice, the second time for long enough that I wake to a different man holding the pipe and a fresh cut above my eye I don't remember earning.

It gets unreliable because the body starts lying to you.

Tells you the pain is less than it is so you can keep functioning.

Tells you the ribs are bruised, not broken, even when you can hear the grinding every time you try to draw a full breath and can't. My left eye has swollen to a slit.

My jaw keeps trying to lock. At some point one of my shoulders dislocates, not cleanly, not dramatically, just a slow wrong slide as my weight shifts in the chains, and for twenty minutes the pain is so specific and total that I stop thinking about anything at all.

Just the shoulder. Just that one white point of it.

They don't fix it. They don't have to. My body eventually does something on its own, some small mercy of anatomy, and it grinds back into place when one of the guards grabs my arm to reposition me for a better angle.

I don't make a sound. But my vision goes gray at the edges for a long moment, and when it clears I'm biting through the inside of my cheek and the blood is running down my throat and I can't actually remember deciding to do that.

Hours pass, maybe. Time doesn't work the same way in the warehouse.

They rotate. One hits while two rest. Efficient. Methodical. They don't enjoy it, which in some ways makes it worse. This isn't violence. It's maintenance. Cicero servicing his investment.

Between the blows, I go somewhere else.

Her hands in my hair. Those callused fingers, rougher than they should be, tracing patterns against my scalp. Her mouth on mine. The way she says my name. Elio. Like she hasn't decided if it's a prayer or a curse, and she's comfortable in the ambiguity.

Mine.

Another blow. I grit my teeth. The dislocated shoulder screams its own separate frequency.

Where is she right now? She better be safe in my estate, or there will be a price to pay.

I hold on to that thought. The vicious, almost-smile that forms on my face. Because they can torture me, beat me, starve me… but if they dare touch what's mine, they'll never see it coming.

This game Cicero and I are playing is getting tiring now.

The beatings are predictable, a chore. I can't kill his men, he'll just send more.

I can't kill him, the Syndicate would descend.

So like the pawn he thinks I am, I never fight back, keeping him complacent, while in the background I'm planning to ruin him.

Just a few more months before I can unleash what I've been building beneath his floor.

Patience.

Even here. Even bleeding. Even with my shoulder grinding and my ribs knitting wrong and blood pooling in the floor drain that never quite drains.

I wake just as the door comes off its hinges.

It does not open, it detonates inward, the top hinge shearing clean off. Valente comes through with his Beretta up, shooting the stunned guards before they have a chance to react.

Two men flank him. My men, loyal to me.

He takes in the room. Me hanging, blood on the floor, the pipe in the corner. His expression doesn't change. This is the fourth time he's cut me down from this beam. He knows the choreography.

"How many?"

"Three outside. Two in here. The third one ran." He pulls bolt cutters from inside his jacket. Always prepared. "He won't get far."

The chains give. I drop, my knees hit concrete. My hands, swollen and slow, catch me before my face does.

Valente doesn't help me up. He knows better. He stands close, blocking me from the two men's view, giving me the thirty seconds I need to force my body vertical through sheer stubbornness. The shoulder objects loudly. I tell it to shut the fuck up.

When I stand, everything registers at once—ribs, kidneys, the eye swollen to nothing, the shoulder with its own persistent opinion about whether I should be upright.

I stand anyway. Take one step toward the door and have to put my hand on the wall, just for a second, just until the gray at the edges of my vision decides to clear.

It clears.

"Phone."

He hands me the encrypted device. Twenty-six character passcode by muscle memory. I miss a digit. Start over. My fingers are thick and stupid and I don't have time for that so I breathe through it and try again. Get it on the third attempt.

All accounts look fine. Cicero is still in the dark. Which means this time he's beaten me bloody over a woman. He chained his only son to a beam and had him worked over for god knows how long because I'm refusing to marry Gabriella Rossi.

I lock the phone and hand it back. I think about that for exactly as long as it takes me to register what Valente's expression is doing.

"Is Violet okay?" I ask.

His jaw tightens just a fraction.

"What."

"The gates were open when Ric arrived thirty minutes ago."

The gates don't open. Not without a code, a retinal scan, verbal authorization from me or Valente. The gates are always closed.

"How long was I here?"

A beat. "Forty-seven hours."

I look at him. He doesn't look away.

"I had eyes on the warehouse from hour three," he says, flat and steady. "Twelve men on rotation outside, two on the main doors, snipers on the eastern approach. There was no clean window until forty minutes ago. I did not leave you in there a single hour longer than I had to."

I believe him. It doesn't help. Because it means he left Violet. I left Violet.

She's been alone for two days.

I'm already moving. Valente is right behind me, picking up the pipe from the corner as we leave. He'll add this to our "Cicero artifacts" collection. I do love to remind myself why I hate that son of a bitch on occasion. The twelve pipes do the job beautifully, thirteen now.

We take fourteen minutes on a twenty-two-minute road.

I sit in the back and fight the body's insistence on cataloguing damage, the ribs won't let me take a full breath, the shoulder keeps aching, and the eye on the left side means my depth perception is compromised enough to misjudge a strike by centimeters, which is the kind of margin that gets you buried.

I account for it. I don't think about the guards down on the east wall or the gate standing open or the amount of time I've been gone.

I think about where I told her to stay. My room.

I'd asked her before I left. She wasn't going to stay in one room for two days like a very beautiful, very hostile house cat.

But I pray to a god I don't believe in anyway, pray that she's there.

safe in my room, waiting for me, like she promised.

The estate comes into view. The gates are open. The guardhouse is dark.

Two of my men are down by the east wall. More in the courtyard. I don't stop though, my focus on one thing only—my room.

The stairs are harder than they should be.

The shoulder is useless on the left side and the ribs make each step a specific transaction, breathe in, pay for it, breathe out, pay again.

With one hand on the rail, not from caution but because the gray at the edges of my vision hasn't fully retreated and I'd rather grip something than find out the hard way what my skull sounds like on marble, I keep moving.

The door is closed, which means nothing. I push it open.

The bed is in disarray, dark linens twisted into a knot on one side, half pulled off the mattress entirely.

The room still smells like us. Sex and sleep and the warmth of two bodies in a space for long enough that the air takes it on.

I stand in the doorway and breathe it in, feeling something tighten in my chest that has nothing to do with the cracked ribs.

I should have ignored the summons.

I've been calculating my father's power against mine for four years. I should have let him come to me. Should have stayed in this bed, with her in it, and made Cicero drag me out himself. The worst he could have done is what he did anyway. And she would have been here. Safe. Present.

You left. You went when he called.

Like you always do.

The pillow on her side still holds the shape of her head. I look at it for exactly as long as I can afford to, two seconds, maybe three. and then I push off the doorframe and go.

Her room is in the East wing. The ribs charge me for every single step it takes me to get to it

The door is open, not ajar, open, standing wide, which means someone left in a hurry or someone else came through it.

The bed is made the way she makes it, which is carelessly, the duvet pulled up but not straightened, a pillow slightly off-center.

She'd been here last. Sleeping in her own room. Not mine.

Her sketchbook is on the floor by the bed. It shouldn't be here, it lives in the studio with her supplies. She must have brought it in the day she came into my room.

It's open, I look at it without picking it up.

Two hands. Hers and mine, fingers loosely entwined, rendered in that precise architectural way she draws everything, every tendon recorded, every knuckle considered.

I recognize mine by the signet ring first, the Marchetti crest she'd asked about once and I'd given her half an answer.

Then the crooked knuckle on the right ring finger, broken at twenty-three and never set properly.

She'd drawn it true. Both hands the same size on the page, neither one holding the other down.

I don't touch it.

My gaze moves to the wardrobe. It's been left open, clothes undisturbed except for one gap, the jeans she wore most, gone.

There's a white button-up shirt, crumpled on the floor.

She must have been wearing it before she changed.

I walk over, and pick it up. It's one of mine.

Was she wearing my shirt? I press it against the side of my face and inhale her scent.

Did you run away or did they take you?

She changed. She was thinking. She wasn't panicking, or she was panicking and she was thinking through it at the same time, which is exactly her.

I set the shirt on the bed. Look at the room. The bed. The open sketchbook.

Valente is in the doorway.

"Security room," he says. "Paolo has the footage."

I take one more look at the shirt. At both hands on the page, the same size, neither one holding the other down.

"Let's see it," I say, and follow him out.