to inherit everything. It’s not the same for me as it is for you.”
That was the difference between them. Alessandro had achieved what he’d always wanted. But she had never wanted anything, least of all this. Only him. Very, very, very much.
For all their disagreement on that one point, however, something else bound them together. Neither wanted to change the other. Perhaps that was the very reason she felt so at ease with him.
There was a thoughtful expression on his face. Difficult subject number one, business. Difficult subject number two, his family. Their discussions suffered from the same kind of ups and downs as their sex life—except that their conversations at least actually happened, while their sex life wasn’t much more than speculation. They both had their ideas of what it would feel like—if and when it came to anything. Not having snake scales or panther hairs in your mouth would be a plus.
“I’ve begun cleaning up,” he said quietly. “Clearing away some of the mess left by Cesare and my father.” For decades, the Carnevares had dealt with the bodies of other clans’ victims for them, burying them under the asphalt of highways or embedding them in the concrete of ruinous gray buildings. It was a profitable business. Alessandro was no saint, but he wanted nothing to do with the money his clan earned that way. Not all the other members of the family and its capodecini agreed.
She took his hand again, hesitated for a moment, and dropped a quick kiss on his cheek. “I guess that hasn’t made you any friends, huh?”
“It’s getting worse. Even the few who did accept me as capo are beginning to turn away. Not openly, but most of them are too stupid to be subtle about it.” He seldom complained, and even now his eyes were clear as glass and his voice determined. “Sometimes I don’t know if this is really what I wanted.”
Rosa often wondered whether his wish to succeed his father as capo might just have been because he needed to avenge his mother. Now that his father’s cousin Cesare was dead, Alessandro wasn’t really sure what to do with the Carnevare inheritance. He had known he wanted it, but now that he had it, it was much larger and more complicated than he had expected.
“Cesare got what he deserved,” she said.
“Yes, but did we get what we deserve?” He raised one hand and caressed her cheek. “Maybe I ought to come with you. Just to be somewhere else for a few days, and maybe after that—”
“Go away forever?” Smiling, she shook her head. “I know you better than that.”
“At this moment, the idea that you’ll be on the other side of the world while I’m still here is driving me crazy.”
She put her finger to his lips and moved it gently down to his chin. “How many times a week do we see each other? Three? And not always even that much. I’ll only be gone a few days. You won’t even notice it.”
“That’s not fair.”
Of course it wasn’t fair. But much as she, too, longed to be near him when he wasn’t in the same room—and even more so when he was—she didn’t want him on this flight with her today. Not on her way to New York. On her way to see her mother.
“I could cancel a few meetings,” he added. “I’m still their capo, whether they like it or not.”
“That’s nonsense; you know it is. They’d like to be rid of you yesterday.” Rosa held his glance, marveling at the intense, bright green of his eyes. “What would they say if you flew off on vacation with an Alcantara, with things here the way they are?”
When Zoe was dying in her sister’s arms, she had made Rosa promise something: to find out what linked their dead father to TABULA, the mysterious organization secretly at war with the Arcadian dynasties. It was Rosa’s bad luck that she could think of only one place to begin, only one person who could tell her more about their father, and that was their mother.
There was no one in the world Rosa wanted to see less. Not after all that had happened. Not after Gemma had refused to come to Sicily even for Zoe’s funeral. Bitch.
Alessandro sighed. “I wanted to be in charge of my family, and now it’s in charge of me.”
“Well,” she said with a glance of wide-eyed innocence—she’d worked hard on perfecting that—“you should have thought of that before,