Page 384 of Filthy Elites

Broken Brutal Hearts – Eva Chance

The Rosano brothers ruined me... and now they're going to pay.

The Rosanos were always among my family's strongest allies in the criminal underworld. As a teen I visited their home every summer, escaping my father's judgmental glare... and falling for the three heirs to the empire.

But stealing my innocence was a joke to the brothers. When I found out they'd used me, I hid my humiliation, walked away, and never looked back.

Until now.

The business partnership between our families is fracturing. A routine deal fell apart in a hail of bullets. I'm the only one who can venture onto the Rosanos' turf to get to the root of the disaster.

No one will suspect a woman of being a major player—especially not delicate, recently widowed Anthea Noble.

I'll find out who's out to screw us over and take care of them by my own special means. I'll also get my revenge on the men who ruined me years ago. Justice has been a long time coming.

Darius, Lucan, and Felix have only gotten more gorgeous since I last saw them—and they're just as eager to crush me as I am to destroy them. But the deeper I tumble into our heated game of cat and mouse, the more pieces I uncover that don't add up.

Nothing here is as it seems. And my only hope of preventing all-out war may be trusting the men I've both loved and hated.

ONE

Anthea

As I watchedthe coroner load my husband’s black-bagged body into his van, the last thing I expected was to find myself crying. But when emotion welled up at the base of my throat and in a prickling heat behind my eyes, I let the tears trickle out.

It would look good to the police officer who was just finishing up the rounds he’d made of the house. It’d look like I was grieving. Particularly important when the widow was forty years her husband’s junior, and therefore people might be prone to speculation.

He wouldn’t be able to tell that the sensation welling up inside me had nothing to do with loss. It was pure, bone-deep relief.

Clyde was gone. After five years of jumping at his every call and submitting myself to his whims, I was free. And after the initial inspection, the police didn’t appear to be concerned that there was foul play involved.

I’d chosen my poisons very carefully. Not a single thing the medical examiner would find should point to anything other than a totally natural heart attack. The toxin had merely primed his heart to fail, after all, not outright killed him.

I’d gotten to throw the final trigger right in his face. Bursting into the bathroom where earlier I’d polished the tiles extra slick, yelling at that asshole exactly what I thought of him and how he’d treated me after bottling up all that venom for our entire marriage. Spitting with anger, he’d stormed out of the shower and immediately slipped hard on the floor. The physical exertion combined with the emotional distress had been the final stab to the weakened organ.

To everyone else, it looked like he’d simply stumbled getting out of the shower and the jolt alone had set off the attack. Nothing particularly surprising in a man just past sixty who was at least fifty pounds overweight and who considered the walk from the front door to his chauffeured car a good day’s exercise. That was why I’d picked it.

The most important part of making a death look like something other than murder was to go with a story that would make people sigh and nod as if they’d seen it coming from a mile away.

The cop nodded to me with obvious sympathy as he walked by, and I offered a dip of my head in return. Maybe I should have felt victorious as well as relieved. I’d succeeded, hadn’t I? But I couldn’t dredge up even a flicker of triumph. Mostly I felt exhausted.

Clyde was gone and I was free, but fresh bruises mottled the inside of my arm, just below the pit, where my sleeve covered them. When I shifted my weight, my hip still twinged with a pain that’d never quite healed.

He’d left a mark on me I wasn’t sure I’d ever completely shed.

At least I could move forward, onward to better things now. Or things I was choosing for myself, anyway.

“Are you going to be all right here on your own, Mrs. Hoffman?” the cop asked, pausing by his car.

One of my first acts as a free woman was going to be changing my name back to the one that actually belonged to me.

I swiped at my eyes and gave him a wobbly smile intended to look grateful. “I won’t be on my own for very long. My brother is on his way.”

The cop gave another respectful nod. “Good to have family support at times like these.”

I’d have agreed more if it hadn’t been family who’d sent me here in the first place.

As I gave the cop a little wave farewell, a black sedan pulled into the drive, leaving room for the coroner’s van and the police car to depart. I waited on the front steps as my brother Ezra stepped out.

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