Diamond Kisses - Page 210

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Q

A year and a half later…

I’D BEEN THE MASTER OF MY own darkness for many years, yet it wasn’t until my brother came along that I realised I didn’t have to always live in that darkness.

Tess had given me a heart.

Lino had given me a home.

But Henri taught me how to trust that I deserved them.

Despite what we did during the day and the blood that coated our hands, we came home to our wives and shut out the despicable world.

Every day the software—that Ben and Stew had designed—flagged new traffickers and flesh peddlers, I cursed my own species. Every night that I went to bed, I was fucking furious that men like them existed.

I still had nightmares of losing Tess to them.

I still had flashbacks of bastards coming to take my son.

I’d always had fairly good instincts. I chalked such a talent down to being in tune with the animal inside me and using my primitive senses more than others. Therefore, the moment I received that phone call from Henri. The second I heard Victor Grand snickering in the background and suffered through him congratulating me on propagating, I’d snapped my fingers at Franco and initiated a plan I’d had in place ever since Tess told me she was pregnant.

She didn’t appreciate using our son as bait.

She sat beside me in the car staked outside Lino’s school, day after day, just waiting for the inevitable abduction.

Franco and a few mercenaries rested on rooftops around the school. I’d equipped all his teachers with walkie-talkies and the principal knew what would happen. And to let it happen when it did.

I didn’t have to wait long.

I had to give it to Victor’s men: they weren’t obvious.

They didn’t pull up in a white van or go charging into the school.

Only one man went in, dressed in a perfect pinstripe suit holding a letter forged with my signature. It said he was there to take Lino to me, seeing as I was too busy to collect my own son.

As fucking if.

Only two things trumped everything in my world.

My wife and my son.

I would drop everything for them.

I always would.

We let it play out.

The principal took the lying bastard to Lino’s classroom.

He ordered my son to gather his things and go with the cunt.

The radio in our car crackled with Lino’s third period teacher as Lino left very unwillingly. According to her, the man smiled with all the airs and graces of a well-trained nanny, but his eyes were dead. His voice nothing but evil.

She hated that I’d given her instructions to let them take him.

She almost went after them as Lino shouted in the corridor and fought the bastard’s hold.