Page 104 of Wicked Roses

“Jon, pick up! This is important. Some men came by and destroyed the loft. They were sent by your father.”

A beep noise sounds and the automated voice comes on to tell me I’ve run out of time to record my message. I swear under my breath and move into Salvatore’s bedroom—the bedroom we basically share since we’ve blurred lines.

It hasn’t been spared. Distress twinges inside my chest at the sight of the torn up bedding. The jerks even destroyed Salt and Pepa’s cat posts. I pick up the fallen cat posts and set to cleaning up the rest of the room.

There’s not much I can do on my own except grab broken things off the floor. Salvatore’s going to need to completely refurbish everything. I make it to the closet, gathering the heaps of clothes off the floor. They’ve snapped almost every hanger.

Eventually, as I move through the loft cleaning up as much as I can, I make my way into a room Salvatore usually keeps locked—his home office.

His father’s men broke the door down.

If any room looks like it’s been accosted by savages, it’s this room. They must’ve suspected he’d keep whatever they were looking for inside. Every stick of furniture is snapped in half. They’ve stolen whatever was inside a lockbox, its door hanging open. Next to it is a knocked over filing cabinet.

I bend down and pick up the mess strewn across the floor. When they yanked drawers out from his desk and filing cabinet, the contents inside spilled out. Most of it are documents I don’t read closely (the less details I know on Salvatore’s business dealings, the better). I move to set the thick stacks of papers on the broken hunk of wood once known as Salvatore’s desk. A few pages slip out from the middle and float back to the ground.

My hand freezes as I go to pick them up.

Business documents aren’t the only thing in the stack. Photographs skid across the floor, standing out among the other sheets of paper.

It’s nothing I’d think twice about until I recognize the facesinthe photos.

Mine.

Mom and Dad.

My entire graduating class from Dupoint Law.

I study the photos with a frown and mounting sense of disbelief. What are these and how did Salvatore get them?

I’m no photography expert, but these were taken by a long-range camera. Someone watching from afar and snapping photos. The last time I spoke to Salvatore, I was almost nineteen and still in my freshman year at college.

I didn’t graduate from law school for several more years. He’d become a ghost in my life by that point; someone who no longer existed in my world... or so I thought. If we were no longer on speaking terms, what is he doing with photographs of my graduation?

Since he’s returned to Northam, he’s kept the details of our twelve years apart vague. He’s refrained from talking much about the large gap in time, though the more I think about it, he’s seemed surprisingly familiar with me and my life.

Does that mean he was... all this time...

I snatch up more of the fallen documents and rifle through them. The breath in my lungs hitches as I gasp at what I find.

My whole life laid out before me.

29. salvatore

For the secondtime in weeks, Lucius has tested me. First, he dared enter Club Nirvana and kick up his feet in my office, smoking my cigars and drinking my liquor. He’d had his men posted in the room like the place was his and not mine.

Now, he’s gone too far. He had the audacity to bulldoze his way into my private compound and tear up the place. His guys destroyed everything inside the loft, searching high and low for the one thing he wants most—his kryptonite that I’m in possession of.

He’s refused to play by the rules and abide by the agreed upon terms.

I guess this means we’re at war with each other. If he steps any more out of line, I’ll unleash the kryptonite for the masses to see. It’ll be his worst fucking nightmare, and I’ll win regardless of what happens to me afterward.

There’s nothing Lucius values more than his big, fat ego. Than his precious formidable reputation. If everybody knew the truth about our family—the twisted truth about him—it’d obliterate him in every sense of the word. He’d become a joke. Alaughing stockin Northam’s criminal world.

The tires on my Mustang screech as I slam on the brakes outside his house in Westoria. I know he’s home because the light glows in the window that’s his office. Probably celebrating his victory from earlier where his guys got to tear apart my loft, terrify Delphine, and break Stitches’ glasses.

Florina, the head caretaker, doesn’t even bother trying to stop me. She opens with a startled expression on her chubby-cheeked face and then steps aside to let me blow past her. I develop tunnel vision as I storm down the halls with pure rage pulsing through my body. The surroundings don’t matter nor do they register.

I might as well be seeing red.