Page 109 of Heir of Darkness

Tears filled her eyes. She sat on the floor, bracing her back against the cabinets. “As long as he is around to hurt me or Valerio, there will be no baby. Did you know about what he did to me? How he hired someone to hurt me?”

“I knew he hired someone. I didn’t know it was to harm you. I would never want you harmed.”

Luna’s heart broke. She swallowed down the sob, unwilling to let her mother hear her breakdown. “I almost died. How could you let him do that to me? How could you be willing to let him sell me off to a horrible man? How could you try to push me to leave Valerio knowing the alternative? You’re my mother; you should be protecting me. I would never let anything like that happen to my daughter, ever.” Her voice was full of venom, full of the hurt she had been feeling since she was a child herself when her mother chose to leave her with random staff and nannies rather than support her children.

“I know I failed you. I know that. But I did what I had to do to survive,” Eleanora cried out, the biggest reaction Luna had ever heard from her.

She laughed sinisterly. “And where did that get you?”

“I never had a choice in anything either, Luna. I was younger than you, but I was completely alone. I had to adapt and learn everything on my own. If he knew that I loved my own children, he would have used you against me. Don’t you understand that? Everything is a game to him. I was playing it just like you were.” Luna heard the sob on the other end. “Please don’t blame me. Please, how can I fix it? Tell me, what can I do?”

She looked down at the rings on her finger: her engagement ring and her wedding band.

She took a sharp breath. “There’s nothing to be done. As long as he is alive and you continue standing by his side, you will never see me. Goodbye.”

Luna hung up without another word, finally allowing the tears to escape her eyes and the sobs to find their way out of her chest. She cried for the little girl who always needed her mother, and now for the twenty-three-year-old who wanted her mother, but would never have her.

When arms wrapped around her, she knew it was Valerio. He didn’t say a word. He just held her as if he could make up for the loss she had felt throughout her life.

“She’s been hurt herself,” Valerio said. “That doesn’t excuse what she has done, but it means she knows what it feels like to hurt, to feel hopeless.”

“She’ll never change,” she said, leaning on his chest for support. “None of them will.”

“Maybe she will,” he said. He ran his fingers through her hair, soothing her. “People have a way of surprising us.”

Only time would tell.

FORTY-THREE

LUNA

“Our father will be backfrom his trip to Italy tomorrow,” Dante said. “It’ll be a good chance to surround him. He won’t see it coming.”

Valerio shook his head, leaning on the table. “He’ll still see us coming. He has security everywhere. Probably even more so now.”

“Does he think you’re alive or dead? I mean, have you heard anything from him?” Finn asked.

Luna listened in, her head already pounding from the hours of planning they had been doing. They enjoyed one night off just to be thrown into the thick of it.

“Not a single word,” Valerio confirmed.

“Same here,” Dante said.

“We have to assume he thinks I’m dead, or at the very least severely injured,” he said.

“Then he wouldn’t expect to see you, but he would expect to see Dante,” Allister said, tapping a pen against his lip.

“If Allister and I go in first, maybe we could disarm the system,” Dante said. “And then you could sneak in or something.”

“How high tech is the system?” Blair asked. She had her arms crossed, a serious look on her face. The fact the girls wanted any part of the planning meant a lot to Luna. It wasn’t an easy subject and she wouldn’t have blamed them if they decided to ditch it for their own peace of mind. “Maybe Augustus could disarm it himself?”

He snorted. “Uh, yeah, if I had a million hours to work on it.”

“You’ve hacked through sketchier shit before,” Finn said.

Augustus pushed him. “And I’m not trying to go to prison for it, so shut the fuck up.”

“I could help you get through most of it, since I’m the most familiar with it,” Valerio told him. “At least until I have to leave.”

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