Where the Sun Hides (Seasons of Betrayal #1)(17)

He looked exactly like her father did at that very moment while Alberto stared her down.

Alberto’s spacious office was decorated in warm, earthy tones with bookshelves lining one entire wall from floor to ceiling. A sitting area with a leather loveseat and matching chairs sat in front of a floor to ceiling window that nearly covered another wall and overlooked the entire front of the property.

As a child, her father’s office had always been a safe place for Violet. She would hide under his desk as he made phone calls or shuffled through papers. She remembered being about six and finding him counting stacks of money; he gave her one so she could count, too.

The office did not feel like that safe place today.

Sitting on the loveseat were her brother and her father’s consigliere, Christian. While her brother was looking over his phone in his hand, Christian was scowling into his glass of whiskey.

“How do you feel?” her father asked.

Violet found her father’s brown stare to be cold and hard as he looked her up and down, taking in the mess she clearly was. Swallowing hard, she felt the wetness prickle at her eyes again, and she dropped her father’s stare.

“Awful,” she admitted.

“Fifteen minutes was long enough, I suspect,” Alberto noted. “You have another five to explain exactly what happened last night that led you, Nicole, and Amelia down to Coney Island where you are well aware you are not permitted to go.”

Violet didn’t even hesitate to start talking like her father wanted. Alberto’s tone brokered no room for argument, and when he was in that sort of mood, it was not time to start testing her father’s limits. As it was, she had pushed them enough.

“After we had dinner here for my birthday, we went back to my place,” Violet said.

“And?” her father pressed.

“Amelia—”

Alberto held up a hand, stopping her.

“What?” she dared to ask.

“Do not put blame on one of those girls, Violet. Do not tell me that they convinced you to do something you already knew was wrong. Years, ragazza. I have explicitly forbade you for years from entering the lower part of Brooklyn. And if, for one second, you say it was someone else’s fault that you went down there—knowing that you could have refused and chosen a venue I approved of—then we’re going to have a problem.”

Violet corrected herself immediately. This was not the man she was used to. Only a handful of times in her life had she come face to face with this man.

He wasn’t Alberto Gallucci, her father.

No, he was Alberto Gallucci, Cosa Nostra Don.

“We decided to go to the club in Coney,” Violet said quietly. “It’s a new place. Everyone is talking about it. We didn’t know it was owned by the Russians. I swear, Daddy—”

Again, Alberto held up a hand. This time, he stood slowly from his desk, keeping his sharp, cold brown eyes on her all the while. Violet flinched away from her father when he walked around his desk and came a little closer to her. Even when she was an unruly child, he never raised a hand to her.

She shouldn’t be afraid of him.

But right then? Yeah, she was.

“Violet,” Alberto said harshly, coming close enough to grab her chin and force her head up. “You will look at me right now while we’re speaking. Do you understand that?”

She nodded.

“Continue,” he ordered.

“We took a cab because we knew we were going to be drinking. And after we had been there a while, something happened with Amelia. Like, somebody spiked her drink and we were trying to get out to come home.”

Alberto pursed his lips, clearly unhappy. He released her chin, and Violet immediately put her head back down. “I already know what came after that, thanks to both Nicole and Amelia.”

“She’s okay?” Violet asked.

She hadn’t even gotten the chance to call her friend that morning, and all of her calls from the night before had gone completely unanswered.

“Do you care?” Alberto asked, seemingly calm. “Because when you allowed your friends to be toted off by strange men—”

“I wasn’t exactly given a choice,” she interrupted softly.

Alberto scowled. “Get out of my office right now.”

Violet’s head snapped up. “What?”

Her father wasn’t looking at her. He was waving at the two men sitting on the loveseat. “Out, I said! Adesso, stoltos!”

Carmine and Christian discarded their glasses on the black coffee table and left the office without needing to be told again. Once Violet was alone with her father, the sickness in her stomach only seemed to increase even more.

“I am so sorry, Daddy,” she said.

“You are a mess,” Alberto murmured.

Violet cringed. “I know.”

“I have never been so disappointed or more embarrassed by you than I am today, Violet.”

“I’m sorry. We didn’t know, Daddy.”

Alberto tipped her chin up again with a softer touch than the first time. “You didn’t need to know, dolcezza. You shouldn’t have been down there in the first place. As you already know.”

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am.” Alberto sighed, eyeing her smeared makeup. His thumb swept the corner of her mouth like he wanted to will the smudge of lipstick there away. “And now, because of your actions, I have to answer to men who are beneath me for their daughters’ injuries and other problems.”