Born in Blood Collection Volume 1 - Cora Reilly Page 0,196

needed him on my side, and he wouldn’t take being lied to kindly. “Yes,” I said softly.

“You didn’t tell me about it because you knew it was your chance to help Bibiana, so you took it to her and told her to blame it on Raffaele.”

“Did she say that?”

“She mentioned Raffaele visited them yesterday when my men took her to her parents, but she was too hysterical to say much.”

Was Bibi regretting what she’d done? Or had her breakdown been for show? “So why don’t you believe it was Raffaele?”

Dante’s eyes narrowed. “Because he would have mentioned it when I interrogated him.”

I nodded. “So what now?”

Dante shook his head. “Goddamnit, Valentina. You should have come to me.”

“I did come to you. I asked you if there was something you could do against Tommaso, but you said there wasn’t.”

“You asked me to kill him and I told you I couldn’t because he wasn’t a traitor.”

I scoffed. “As if that matters. You are a killer, Dante. You can kill whoever you want. Don’t tell me you’ve never killed for other reasons than protecting the Outfit.”

Dante gripped my shoulders, bringing us even closer. “Of course, I have. But I told you ‘no’ and you should have listened to me.”

“Because your word is law,” I said mockingly.

“Yes,” Dante said in a low voice. “Even for you.”

“I would do it again. I don’t regret freeing Bibi of that cruel bastard. I only regret that I had to go behind your back, but you left me no choice.”

Dante’s eyes flashed. “I left you no choice? You can’t go around killing my men!”

“He deserved it. You should have seen what he did to Bibi. You should have wanted to kill him for how he treated an innocent woman, wife or not.”

“If I killed every man in the Outfit who treated women badly, I’d be left with half of my soldiers. This is a life of brutality and cruelty, and many soldiers don’t understand that as Made Men we should protect our family from it, and not unleash our anger on them. They know I don’t approve of their actions. That’s all I can do.”

“But I was handed the chance to do something, and I did.”

“You helped a wife murder her husband. Some men in my position would find it unsettling to be with a woman who doesn’t hesitate to use poison.”

My eyes grew wide. “I gave Bibi a chance, a choice. That doesn’t mean I would kill you. I would fight you if you ever treated me like Tommaso did with Bibi. Tommaso preyed on Bibi’s weakness. She was given to that old bastard when she was only eighteen, and she never knew how to defend herself against him. He’s had four years to be a better man, to treat her decently. He failed. Our marriage has nothing to do with theirs. You don’t need to beat and rape me to feel like a man, and I wouldn’t let you. And anyway, I’m not vengeful, or I wouldn’t have swallowed how you treated me the last few months, how you accused me of cheating. And Bibi never loved Tommaso, so…” I trailed off, clamping my lips shut. The last part wasn’t supposed to slip out.

Dante’s fingers on my shoulders loosened. I looked away from his penetrating gaze, unable to stand it.

“I’m not worried that you’d poison me. As I said before, I trust you,” he said after a while, dropping his hands from my shoulders. “But I’ll have to investigate Tommaso’s death.”

“You won’t punish Bibi, will you?” I asked, terrified. “Please, Dante, if you care about me at all, you’ll rule that Tommaso’s murder was related to the traitors and that Bibi is innocent. She’s gone through too much already.”

“There might be people out there who won’t believe Bibiana wasn’t involved in Tommaso’s death, for exactly the reasons you stated before. She had reason to hate him. She had reason to kill him.”

“Then blame it on me. I could have done it behind Bibi’s back to help her.”

“And then what?” Dante asked quietly.

“Then you punish me and not her.”

“And what if punishment for such a crime would be death in turn? Eye for an eye, Valentina.”

I stared, tears brimming in my eyes. “Don’t hurt Bibi. Just don’t. Without me, she would have never found a way to kill him. It was as much my fault as it was hers. I will share whatever punishment you inflict on her.”

“I fear you’re saying that because you know I won’t