Stone of Thieves (Robbin' Hearts Series Book 2) (17 page)

Bravely, I step closer to Alessia and sit down at her feet, searching her dark eyes to make contact.

“Mother?” I say, hearing the heartbreak in my voice. I stroke her thin leg, feeling self-conscious and almost guilty, like I’ve dared to touch a rare and priceless statue. She doesn’t flinch.

“Doyle—my daddy—he stole me back,” I confess. “Don’t you understand? He never stopped loving you, Mommy. Or me. He kept the ruby stone all these years. He kept
you
.”

Impulsively, I grab her hands, but they’re stiff in my palms.

Even so, I relish actually touching my mother. Her skin is smooth, despite the 18 years she has on me, and her hands feel warmer than I expected. I jiggle them a little to see if I can get a response. But her eyes seem flatter than Zuhna’s—vacant, even.

This is totally hopeless.

I probably have only five more minutes, so I inhale a deep breath of defeat and let it go. I want to cherish looking at her. To simply linger and harvest this memory in my heart that’s going to have to last me a lifetime.

Yet as I gaze at her, trying to memorize the curve of her cheeks and nose and distinctive arch of her brows, tears keep blurring my vision, in spite of my efforts to hold them back.

Dammit—

This is the
only
chance I have to be with my mom, and I can’t even see well enough to store her image inside! She’s become as hazy and gray as her cold, stone room that holds no personal possessions except for a bible, a comb and a ceramic wash basin. With a sigh, and painfully aware I’m torn and waffling, I decide to go for it and make every last second count.

Biting my lip, I stand up and give her fragile body a hug, squeezing her with everything I’ve got.

“Mom, I want you to know I love you,” I say, certain of the clock ticking. “Even if you can’t hear me, I hope you feel it—in your soul.”

I rock her in my arms a little inside her wheelchair. It’s like cradling a wooden board.

“And I know what love is now, because Creek loves me, too. Thanks to him, I repaired my relationship with Doyle. And he introduced me to all the folks at Turtle Shores who remember you. They miss you, Mommy. Creek brought me here to find you. He’s my husband, now—we got married in a gypsy wedding, just like you did with Doyle at Bender Lake. Creek’s my angel.”

My breath halts.

I can’t quite be sure, but I thought I felt her body tremble.

Just a slight tremor, almost like the wobble of a heartbeat.

“
Angelo?
”

She whispered the word, light as a breath, into my ear.

Yes, Creek’s my angel! I want to scream. But I know I’d scare her witless. I have to take this delicately, with what little time I have left.

“Alessia,” I say tenderly, taking her hands again in mine. “Creek’s waiting for me outside. And so is Doyle, back at home at Bender Lake.”

I swallow the sob that’s trying to work its way up my throat, ready to stop any nun who attempts to interrupt me. I’ve probably gone over my time limit, but this must be said.

“I know this sounds crazy, Mommy. But if you agree to go with me, I can reunite you with Doyle. The love of your life. You can let your soul out of that ruby heart to really feel again—”

Are those tears I see moistening her eyes?

“
Mi
Angelo?
” she whispers so softly I have to blink to be certain I heard it.

I’m trembling so hard now I can barely think.

“
Sì mama
,” I say carefully, oh-so carefully, daring to pull down the fabric nun’s coif from over her head to reveal her wild, curly hair like mine. Hair that was meant to feel lake breezes, hair that was meant to feel a daughter’s loving touch—

And just then, I hear a loud pop.

Shaken, I dash over to her window, where I see Creek in the small clearing beside the convent. He drops to the ground, blood blooming from his chest. In front of him are two large men who look like thugs.

The scream that erupts from my throat feels disembodied, as if it’s come from the howl of a wild animal. Yet it fills the stone room with such blood-curdling echoes that it rattles my chest for what feels like eternity.

When I turn, breathless and frightened out of my mind, to face Alessia, the silence between us suddenly seems overwhelming—as large as any ocean.

Yet her vision has become flat as a piece of paper.

And that’s when I hear the cold click of the lock at her door.

I am Alessia now.

And she is me.

We are as cold as stones.

Devastated, interchangeable. And unable to move, perhaps forever . . .

The Conté is very good at what he does.

All the de Bargonas have known how to keep their power—and destroy the
Thagarnis
—for centuries.

What made me think I would be any different?

Creek is gone.

The ruby heart is gone.

And so am I.

Whoever Robin or Rubina was—or could be—she’s been erased, nowhere to be found.

In her place is a bruised and battered girl with zip ties around her body and a blindfold over her eyes who stands in the dark, tethered to a cold wall. She’s lost the love of her life, and it’s shattered her heart into a million pieces.

Beside her is her mother, whose own heart was crushed long ago.

Near as I can tell, we’ve been in this basement, cold and starving, for days. At first, I lingered in and out of consciousness, no doubt from the beatings we suffered when they took us hostage from the convent and loaded us, blindfolded and at gunpoint, into their vehicle. I have vague memories of hearing nuns screaming and then falling into total darkness, later being tied down here against a wall. Occasionally, I’d hear someone shuffle into the room to give us water or crackers, which I’ve barely touched. Yet time has stretched into something I don’t recognize—hours of blackness and pain pass without rhyme or reason, with no way of telling one minute from the other, or day from night. But as the haziness from my head wounds slowly begins to subside, it dawns on me what de Bargona is really up to. This is his unique brand of psychological warfare. He wants to beat us into submission and make us believe we’ve been totally abandoned to his own custom-made version of hell.

And he’s right.

I don’t know if we’ll make it out alive. Or even
why
we’re alive—

Now that I’m becoming more alert, the same thought keeps circling around my foggy brain: Why does Vittorio de Bargona bother—why didn’t he shoot us along with Creek?

We’d hardly be the first people he’s buried. What’s two more?

But then it hits me.

And I realize my precious, extraordinary and beyond beautiful Creek was a fucking genius. Like always.

Tears slip from my eyes and bleed through my blindfold in a stream, but I’m numb to their wetness against my cheeks. I’m so in shock that a nail could be hammered through my hand right now and I wouldn’t wince. But I slowly piece together the truth.

Creek must have hidden the stone.

That’s the only reason Vittorio would keep us alive.

Creek must have seen his men coming, and acted quickly.

I try to swallow back my tears, but my throat is too dry. I feel like I’m choking on gravel.

Even so, I realize the best way to keep from being murdered is to pretend I know where the stone is. For a girl who grew up acting her way through high society, this kind of charade used to be a walk in the park.

But do I have the strength to want to live that much? Without my Creek?

My body racks in sobs as I finally allow the tears to come full force, every part of me aching with loss. Until now, I stayed strong for my mother whenever I dimly rose to consciousness, stuffing back emotions to be brave for her sake. But what’s the point anymore—no one’s bothered to speak to us since we’ve been bound, and for all I know we might starve to death down here. Trembling, I reach out my hand to feel for from my mother, bruising my skin against the zip ties that fasten my wrists. Grabbing Alessia’s fingers, I give them a squeeze to remind her that I’m here.

She doesn’t return the gesture.

I know she’s still alive because I can feel her pulse. Yet her fingers are as slack as a rag doll’s.

“I love you, Mom,” I say, squeezing her fingers again as I hear my words travel and grow thin in the darkness. “Don’t ever forget that. No matter how many times they beat us.”

And I smell him before I hear him.

A complex, leathery cologne that drifts into the damp room we’re imprisoned in, about an hour’s drive from the mountains. When de Bargona’s burly men unloaded us from their vehicle, I could smell the sea air of Venice all around us, so I assume we’re in the watery basement of de Bargona’s
palazzo,
because they don’t exactly build warehouses on pricey real estate near the Grand Canal
.
My feet have been wet ever since we arrived, and this place reeks of seaweed and algae and something else—like the odd scent of stale blood. As the precise footsteps of the intruder advances down the stairs, I’m reminded of the Conté de Bargona’s stiff manner and tailored suits, and I’m almost certain it’s him. His measured gait is followed by the lumbering echo of heavier men—no doubt his goons.

“
Ora!
” I hear him command sharply as they come closer.

The next thing I know, my face burns like I’ve been struck by a hot poker. One of his men has hit me—or perhaps it’s Vittorio himself. But these aren’t tears that seep through my blindfold anymore. It’s blood.

My head is ringing, thoughts swirling and fuzzy again. I already hurt all over from the battering we received when they barged into Alessia’s room after they were done with Creek.

Done
—

Another sob crawls its way up my throat as I imagine what they did with the love of my life. Could they have thrown him over a cliff, into the forest, or drug him back here and dumped him in the waters of Venice?

I’ll probably never know. And that mystery will eat me alive until the day I die.

Why can’t I just die?

Another strike batters my face, and I feel the blood pool beneath the skin on my cheekbone.

“Where IS IT?” the Conté de Bargona demands, but his words sound muffled in my brain, like they’re far away.

We both know exactly what he’s talking about.

I hang my head like I’ve blacked out to fool him, when I feel another strike.

It’s in my gut this time, and all breath explodes from me like a pricked balloon. I grab my mother’s fingers again to let her know it’s okay—I’m so exhausted and in mourning that I don’t feel much of anything anymore. But I do taste my own blood on my lips. It doesn’t send me into the magic spirals the way Creek’s blood did. But I savor it in my mouth, because this flavor is all I have left to remind me of Creek.

Please God, I beg, let these men kill me.

I want to join Creek in the afterlife. Maybe they’ll shoot Alessia, too, and we can all be together again. We’ll be whole, like Creek always wanted.

Cold fingers grasp my jaw, the way you see in movies when somebody’s about to get their throat or have a bullet plugged in their forehead. But this is no movie. I should be scared out of my mind, but I feel as limp as a puppet on forgotten strings.

“Where is the ruby heart?” the Conté demands, shaking me until my head snaps back against the hard wall.

“C-Convent,” I reply, a wild, reckless guess from a girl who’s no stranger to lying. “Tucked behind a loose stone in the wall near the front door.” Surely that’s where Creek must have left it—or maybe in the courtyard, or beneath a bible someone left on a bench. It doesn’t matter, because I’m certain de Bargona will kill us once he finds it, or even if he doesn’t—and at this point that’s all right with me. I think of my dad back at the trailer park at Bender Lake, how the loss of his daughter and the only woman he truly loved will probably destroy him. But that’s okay, too. I struggle to take a breath, feeling the blood trickle from my mouth down my chin. Then we’ll all be ghosts—and we’ll haunt this asshole de Bargona until we drive him insane. With any luck, we’ll have him begging for his own death in no time.

The Conté shakes my jaw again, then laughs.

It’s a sick kind of laugh that bounces off the walls, changing its high tone to become low and hollow like the moans of a ghost.

“Rubina, Rubina,” he says in an odd, rolling purr, “don’t you know you should never have walked this earth? A poor bastard child with no one to love her.”

A fire rises in my aching gut—

It starts in my heart and takes over my whole being, making every muscle spring tight. Roils of anger swirl in my stomach at the warped and stinging manipulation in his words.

He’s a liar!

He
may not have wanted me, but Creek did. And my daddy did. I may be beaten, and God only knows if my jaw is broken—because the pain that’s pulsing in my face is excruciating. But I’m not going to let this demon from Venetian hell twist what I know is the truth. He might’ve killed my mother’s spirit, but no matter what he says, Creek’s spirit lives on inside of
me
. I tasted his blood. I made love to him like a madwoman—we’re one heart. And all I know is that Creek would never back down to this asshole, even if his whole body was racked in pain.

I shake my head, as much as it hurts under this man’s grip, and picture Creek’s eyes. The crystal blue way he loved me, without a hint of lies, as if giving of his very soul. The way he looked at me at dawn from that rooftop in Venice, like I was the most beautiful creature in the world and capable of just about anything—maybe even flying if I wanted to. It’s tempting to let myself float away to that memory, lapse out of consciousness and allow this man to bring me to my eager, early death. But I know what Creek’s defiant spirit would want me to do. Sucking up a deep breath, I bite down as hard as I can on the Conté’s hand, letting out a rebel yell worthy of the red neck warriors at Turtle Shores.

“Ahhh!” he wails, waving his hand and cursing in a river of Italian.

The inevitable blow comes to my face again, but I don’t care. This is what I’m made of, what the folks at Turtle Shores taught me. And I know Creek—wherever his spirit is—is immensely proud of me right now.