Riding The Edge - Elise Faber Page 0,39

was where I wanted, since out might get us out of this fucking hell hole, I didn’t fight the pull, even when the sharp movements made agony scorch through my body.

Biting my cheek until it bled, I held back the instinctive cry of pain.

The cell door slammed closed.

I looked to my right, my left.

No Dan.

He was alone in the dark.

And I was standing toe-to-toe with my father.

I was in the chair.

Metal cuffs wrapped around my wrists, rough wood against my bare skin, my legs hanging toward the ground, my ankle swelling more by the second.

And my father was going through his routine.

Peeling off his jacket, rolling up his shirt sleeves, turning to face me, and casually crossing his arms over his chest. “I didn’t expect us to be back in this place.”

I snorted. “Preaching to the choir,” I muttered.

Him closing the distance between us and getting in my face wasn’t a surprise, neither was the bruising grip on my jaw, the fingers tangling in my hair and yanking my head back.

“I didn’t say you could speak.”

“I stopped listening to your orders a long time ago.”

The fingers tightened, pinpricks of pain dotting my scalp. “Tell me why you are in Italy.”

“I was taking a vacation with my boyfriend.” I glared up at him. “Congrats for kidnapping two lovebirds on vacation.”

Dark brows drawing down, brown eyes sparking with fury.

I braced myself for the blow that was sure to come my way. Instead, he released me, a small smile curving his lips. “Always so much fire inside you, my Eva. Just like all the Toscalos before you. Fury and cruelty are your constant companions.”

“That’s not my name anymore.”

“You can try to deny your heritage, my daughter, but that’s all it will be. A denial.”

I didn’t bother answering. It wasn’t like anything I could say would change his mind or convince him to let us go. I’d been in this room before, often and long enough before my eye injury to have counted the stones forming each wall. So, I didn’t need my glasses—lost somewhere during the fight or my removal from the hotel—to see that there were two hundred and six rocks on the one directly in front of me, three hundred and eighty-seven on the one to my right, three hundred and twelve to my left, one hundred and ninety-two behind me. All flat chunks of gray stone joined together with mortar, but in a variety of sizes. Not the polished finish of the house above, but older construction from centuries before.

Even old, the stones made for excellent sound-proofing.

I knew.

I’d lived that.

Just as I knew there was a heavy wooden door in the middle of the wall behind me, dark mahogany and scarred from years of use. The knob was heavy and stained black from the years, as hard to turn as the ancient key my father carried around for this purpose.

Just as the cell was my uncle’s favorite form of torture—dark, silent, isolated, cramped—this room was my father’s.

In another life, the well-lit space could pose as a tasting room at a winery, a long-standing space in some old Tuscan villa. There were even tables and chairs, built-in wooden shelves to hold things. Only, the items they were holding weren’t bottles of wine or glasses or corkscrews.

Instead, there were shining rows of knives, different lengths of rope, drills and hammers, scissors, and saws.

Oh, and there was the odd corkscrew.

Just for fun.

“I would like to know how you came to the hotel,” my father said, his tone soft. The gentle question didn’t fool me. I knew all about this soft and gentle side, knew how he could flip the switch in an instant, turn vicious and as dangerous as a snake.

“I told you,” I said. “Vacation.”

“With three teams from that useless agency you joined after leaving here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

One second, he was spinning away from me, his gaze on the racks on the far wall. The next, he’d spun back and his fist was descending toward me.

I flinched back, but realistically, I had nowhere to go. My head hit the back of the chair, and a heartbeat later, his fist collided with my cheek. Here was the weird thing about getting punched in the face. For a moment, I felt nothing. No impact. No pain. Nothing at all. Then my nerves exploded, fire burning through my skin. The force of his fist crunching my skull into the wood of the chair.

I’d like to pretend it was no big deal.

But