A Scandal in the Headlines(57)

“Get in the car,” he ordered her in a voice she’d never heard before. As if the man she knew was gone and in his place was this frigid and furious stranger, capable of anything. As if Niccolo was right, and she didn’t know him at all. As if she never had. “Do it now.”

And she didn’t know how to reach him, or if she could. She didn’t understand what was happening here, only that she shouldn’t let him do the things she saw promised on his hard face, in those deadly eyes….

But he didn’t love her. She was a temporary wife, at best.

And for all she knew, he’d married her for the land and this was simply another truth she’d been too blind to see. His true face, after all.

It ripped her up inside, but she obeyed him.


Alessandro wanted to kill Niccolo Falco. Very, very slowly.

“My congratulations,” the little pissant sneered, puffing out his chest and stepping suicidally close. “You keep her on a tight leash.”

His father would have simply kicked in one of Niccolo’s kneecaps, the better to drag him off and beat the life out of him in a more private place. Alessandro had seen Carlo do exactly that when he was fourteen.

“Men deal with problems like men, boy,” Carlo had told him, clearly disappointed that Alessandro hadn’t reacted better. “Take that scared look off your face. You’re a Corretti. Act like one.”

And Alessandro had never felt more like a Corretti, with all of the blood and graft and misery that implied, than he did right now.

Retribution. Revenge. Finally, he understood both.

“Be very careful,” Alessandro said through his teeth, trying to push back the red haze that obscured his vision. “You’re talking about my wife.”

Niccolo’s neck was flushed. His black eyes were slits of rage, and his thick hands were in fists. Alessandro knew he’d used one of those meaty hands on Elena, once before and once today, and had to battle back the urge to break the both of them.

He had no doubt at all that he could. He hadn’t fought in over forty days now—but he wasn’t drunk this time.

“I had her first,” Niccolo threw at him, a sly look in his eyes. “In every possible—”

“I won’t warn you again.”

It would be so easy. To simply end this man, as he richly deserved. He was nothing but a parasite, a lowlife. Alessandro didn’t even have to get his hands dirty, the way his father had so enjoyed. He knew which former associates of his father’s he could call to “handle” this. It was part and parcel of his blackened family legacy. It would take a single phone call.

This was who he was. Just as his mother had told him. Just as Elena had accused him. Just as he had always feared.

But this would be justice, that seductive darkness whispered. Simple. Earned.

Alessandro had to force air into his lungs. All the choices his father and uncle and grandfather had made, all the blood that stained their hands as they’d built this family up from nothing and punished whoever dared stand in their way—he’d always looked down on them for it.

He’d never understood how easy it might be to step across that line. He’d never understood the temptation. Or that it could seem not only right to exterminate a cockroach like Niccolo Falco, but inarguably just.

Necessary.

That darkness in him didn’t even seem particularly dark to him today as he stared at the bastard who’d terrorized Elena. It seemed like a choice. The right choice.

But.

But Elena had cried in his arms, and then she’d trusted him when he didn’t deserve it at all. When he’d given her no reason to trust him. She’d married him. He couldn’t understand why she’d done it. He wasn’t sure he ever would.

But it burned in him. It lived in him, bright like hope.

“Be the man who does the right thing,” she’d said once. And her eyes were the perfect blue of all his favorite summers, and she’d looked at him as if he could never be a man like his father.

As if she had some kind of faith in him, after all.

“Why take her at all?” Niccolo demanded, stepping even closer, tempting fate. “Because she was mine?”

Alessandro smiled at him, cold and vicious. “Because I can.”

Niccolo snorted. “You’re nothing but a thug in fancy clothes, aren’t you?”

Alessandro was done then. With Niccolo, with all of this. With who he’d nearly become. With that dark spiral he’d almost lost himself in today, that he could still feel inside of him.