Demand (Careless Whispers #2)(48)

She nods and then interrupts the conversation, announcing our departure. Kayden leans down and whispers, “I’ll get us out of here soon,” before Sasha links her arm with mine and leads me past the piano and violin, and then down a hallway that is blessedly free of other guests.

“Thank God,” she says, releasing me, her silliness evaporating along with her heavy accent. “These events are exhausting. Everyone wants something, including us.” She gives me a sideways look. “Be careful with Donati. Aside from his preference for quid pro quo, something about that man bothers me, and don’t ask what, because I don’t know. But I’ve been doing this long enough to trust my instincts.”

“How long have you worked for Kayden?”

“Since he took over France a few years back, but my family is made up of generations of Hunters and Hawks, most of them now dead.”

“So you transferred from France?” I ask, wondering if she’s related to the prior Hawk in that region.

“A year ago, after I stupidly tried to seduce Niccolo’s stepbrother.” She snorts. “That went badly.”

“Who is his stepbrother?” I ask, hoping a name might trigger a memory.

“He runs the French mob.”

“Wait. So the French and Italian mobs are one?”

“Oh no,” she says. “That was the idea when the two families married, but it didn’t take long for the parents to end up dead, while their sons claimed control of their own regions.”

I gape. “You’re saying they killed their parents?”

“Without a blink of regret,” she says.

“And who is the head of the French mob?”

She holds up a hand. “I’m sorry. I can’t even speak that man’s name. He’s a monster.”

He obviously hurt her and I hate to push, but . . . “Who—”

She shakes her head at the entry to the bathroom. “Not a topic for a public place.”

Frustrated, I nod and we enter a huge bathroom with green marble floors and at least a dozen stalls. Sasha’s phone rings and she digs it from the silver evening purse hanging from her shoulder. As she sits down on a leather couch, I keep walking toward the row of stalls.

Stepbrothers. Mafia. Murdering your own parents. It’s all insanity, and I’m suddenly transported back to the kitchen of my family home, with my father lying in his own blood. I see the blood. I see the gun. I feel the trigger against my finger when I kill his attacker. Shaking myself, I blink, and I’m standing at a bathroom stall and don’t remember how I got here. The same way I blacked out right after Enzo’s death.

Concerned that Nathan shouldn’t have dismissed that incident as trauma, I enter the stall, then lean my head against the locked door. I know that my flashbacks are always trying to tell me something. My father was murdered, ripped from my life, while these mobsters, these monsters, chose to murder their parents for personal gain. But what does that mean to me? Is this about the men who killed my father? Or . . . maybe this isn’t about my father at all, but some lesson he gave me. I blink, and I’m transported back to the kitchen again, hiding in the pantry with my mother.

There are crashing sounds and muffled gunfire, like a silencer is being used, and my mother and I both jump. And then there is silence. Oh God, the silence is deafening, and I wait for my father to come to us, but he does not. I can’t take it anymore. I jerk away from my mother, every instinct telling me my father needs help.

I open the door and gasp at the sight of him lying in a puddle of blood. I dash forward and fall to my knees.

“Dad. Dad.”

My mother drops down beside me, bursting into tears as she starts begging him to stay alive. “Gun,” my father murmurs. “Ella . . . take . . . gun.”

I look down to find it at his fingers and I take it. “I have it.”

“Two . . . men.”

The kitchen door bursts open, a man in a mask and all black appearing, and my father hisses, “Shoot,” and instinct takes over. I raise the gun and fire at the man in black, and he tumbles forward.

My eyes pop open. Two men. That’s what comes to me. Two men. Is it the stepbrothers?

A knock sounds on the door and I jolt. “Open up,” Sasha says urgently and I immediately comply. She shoves her way into the stall and shuts the door behind her. “We have a problem,” she says very softly.

Alarm bells go off. Is she the problem? “What are you talking about?” I whisper back.

“Niccolo is here.”





thirteen




Sasha might as well have punched me in the chest. “Niccolo can’t be here.”

“And yet he is,” she whispers. “And don’t say his name.”

“You just did.”

“I didn’t have a choice; I needed you to know who exactly I was talking about.”

“Right,” I say, laughing without humor. “He who shall not be named. I thought that was his brother.”

“They’re named Bastard and Bitch,” she says, “and this isn’t Harry Potter. There is no magic wand to make the one that is here disappear.”

“And just so I don’t get confused. Is he the Bastard or the Bitch?”

“The Bastard.”