Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 145803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145803 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“I knew who the gangsters were. Everyone on the street knew. Giovi Vella was a big man with a big mouth. He scared everyone into doing what he wanted them to do. We weren’t anywhere near his original territory but he kept spreading out, claiming more and more. I guess the block where Sophia’s bakery was located was next on his list. It was just his bad luck that they didn’t know I lived in her basement.”
He fell silent again, his fingers once more massaging her calves. At times, his thumbs pressed into her muscles just a little too hard, clueing her in to the fact that he might be sitting there looking relaxed, but the things he was telling her were painful to him.
“I hunted them down one by one. I was still in my teens, Vienna. No one really knew about me. That gave me an advantage. I found the blueprints to their homes and studied them first, and then I went in at night and killed them. Five of them. All of the men who were with the man that killed Sophia, then him, and then his father. I killed them all in one night, going from house to house. I used the same knife and then I got rid of it, breaking it up with a hammer and discarding the pieces in various places. I wore gloves and made certain I wasn’t caught on any cameras.”
Vienna knew he was waiting for her reaction, watching her closely to see if she was going to pull away from him. She wished she were touching him. Stroking her fingers along his calf, or massaging his foot. Anything to reassure him she understood. Sophia might not have been a mother to him in the accepted sense of the word, they hadn’t lived together, but she had been all he’d had. Zale was capable of fierce loyalty, and he felt that toward Sophia.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she told him. “That must have been a terrible time for you.”
He rubbed her calf much more gently. “Her lawyer contacted me through the school. She had legally adopted me somehow. Well, she had a birth certificate that appeared legitimate. She was connected to a family in Sicily, and they did the paperwork for her. They hadn’t heard from her until she asked for the papers to make that happen. She left me a letter explaining what she’d asked her uncle to do for her. She left everything she had to me. The bakery, the money. Everything. She had a lot. All that was good, but suddenly I was out in the open, exposed to the world. Sophia had been murdered. Her killer had been murdered. She was connected to a family in Sicily and I was her son.”
“What did you do?” Vienna asked when he went quiet again.
He looked at her again, his dark eyes pure velvet. “No condemnation for anything I told you? Vienna, I just admitted I hunted those men down and killed them.”
She waved his confession away. “I’m sure you’re not supposed to admit things like that. Didn’t they teach you that in secret forces school or wherever you went? You’re intelligent. Never admit to anything. I know you must have continued your education.”
He nodded. “I did. I continued to skip grades and ended up managing to get my bachelor’s in three years. As soon as I had my master’s, I joined the service.”
“Were you recruited or did you join? You had to have been very young.”
“I was restless and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I’d sold Sophia’s bakery. I couldn’t look at it without seeing her lying on the floor. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I needed something to do that would take the edge off. There’s always been a kind of restlessness in me, and I had to find a way to explore that.”
She studied his face. There had been a reluctant note in his voice, as if he hadn’t wanted to share that last piece of information with her. “What happens when we’re together and you start to feel restless, Zale? That could happen, couldn’t it?”
He didn’t so much as blink. “I suppose it could. Life is a risk, Vienna. You know that. If that happens, we talk about it and decide the best way to handle it together. I’m not that young lost kid. I can look at myself and see the things I need to work on. I see the things I want and need in my life. What about you?”
His voice was back to that soft stroke of sensual awareness, brushing over her skin so that she shivered with need. He could bring her nerve endings to instant, vivid life just with that tone of his, but when he added that hungry look from his dark eyes, she got that curious melting sensation in the pit of her stomach as well.