Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
“I can’t allow anyone else to take a chance. I do know without a doubt that she’s lethal. She may look like a fragile little dancer, but I know in my gut she’s anything but.” Geno was certain he was right.
“Let’s take this back to the house,” Stefano said. He didn’t wait for Geno’s agreement, he simply stepped into a shadow and disappeared.
Geno watched the woman for a few more minutes, wondering if it would be better to simply kill her than take a chance on her killing anyone else he loved. Shadow riders executed criminals—men and women who had committed heinous crimes. Those criminals had somehow managed to escape justice and the riders had been called in as a last resort. He didn’t know for absolute certain Amaranthe was guilty of any crime. He couldn’t sentence her to death.
Swearing under his breath, he stepped into the nearest shadow and allowed the familiar wrenching pain to tear him apart, take his mind from the puzzle of the woman, to be replaced by a grid of the city as he made his way home.
Stefano waited for him in a chair in front of the fireplace in one of his three libraries. Geno preferred open spaces as a rule, but this library appeared small, mostly because of the tall walls of books surrounding him on every side. Geno liked real books. He had one wall that was enclosed and temperature-controlled so the vintage books were preserved carefully from the sun and no further damage could be done to them. He preferred to read them in the language they were originally written in and went to great lengths to acquire them.
“Tell me about the night your parents were murdered,” Stefano said.
Geno poured two small glasses of scotch and handed one to his cousin. “We’d taken an assignment in San Francisco. I was the primary rider. Salvatore and Lucca were the alibi with our cousins there.”
Shadow riders rarely meted out justice in their own cities. They investigated and brought riders in from another city to do the actual assassination. If Stefano came in from Chicago to fulfill the assignment, he would do so with his brothers on a private jet. Several family members would come to party. One member would ride the shadows to the jet and board unseen. While the others partied in front of the paparazzi all night with the cousins in that city in front of cameras, the one in the shadows would dispense justice to the criminal. No one would ever know the Ferraros had anything to do with the death. They simply looked like they had too much money and too many toys.
“I appeared to stay home that night. Our parents always visited their friends and the priest in the evenings and took a walk around the neighborhood. Papa had a prosthetic leg, but at night he often used a wheelchair. He was doing so the night they were killed. They liked to go to the park after they visited the priest. That’s where the assassin caught up with them.”
“Even at their age and with your father in a wheelchair, he still had to be dangerous,” Stefano pointed out. “Your mother was a rider as well, Geno. I don’t care if this killer surprised them, how was he or she able to kill both? You had to have seen the reports. You know the sequence of events.”
“Just as with the first two murders, Papa was killed first with a slash to the throat from behind. He was jabbed twice more, once to the jugular and once under his arm. That attack took seconds.”
“In those seconds your mother had to have been alerted.”
Geno nodded, swirling the scotch. “I’ve thought of this a hundred times. The killer rode a shadow right up behind my father’s chair. That’s the only explanation, or he would have known. My mother was facing my father.”
“There was a second killer,” Stefano concluded. “He or she came out of the shadows behind your mother.”
“It had to have happened that way. The police had no idea my parents had the skills they did. If Mama was facing Papa and the killer emerged from the shadows to cut his throat . . .”
“He would have had to carry a knife through the shadows, Geno,” Stefano said. “That would have been impossible. How would he have been able to do that? What composition would that have been?”
“It is possible. You know there are ways to make weapons out of natural materials. Our cousin Damian Ferraro has done it,” Geno objected.
“He’s a jeweler,” Stefano said. “And yes, he does experiment for us. A good man.”
“He can’t be the only one able to come up with ideas like that. Your own brothers experiment.”
Stefano took a drink of the scotch. “Suppose they managed to come up with a way to take a knife through the shadows and there are two of them. One emerges behind your mother. She’s facing your father. How is it the police have no inkling there’s a second killer?”