Chapter 6 - The Taste of a Lost Past
Declan’s slate-gray eyes locked onto the towering buttermilk biscuits with an intensity usually reserved for tactical threat assessment. Gabriel’s trademark mocking smile had vanished entirely from his face, replaced by a look of stunned, quiet disbelief. But it was Roman who frightened me the most. He was staring down at the cast-iron skillet of butter-fried potatoes with an expression so fragile, so intensely haunted, that it felt as though I was witnessing a crack in the armor of an impenetrable fortress.
For a long, agonizing moment, nobody spoke. The only sound in the massive kitchen was the gentle sizzle of residual heat coming off the stove and the ticking of the wall clock counting down the final minutes of my forty-eight-hour sentence.
Roman took a slow, hesitant step forward into the kitchen, his gaze never leaving the skillet. He moved with the cautious grace of a man walking through a minefield of painful memories.
“Who...” Roman’s voice caught slightly, rougher than usual, as if the words were struggling to force their way past a throat long unaccustomed to speaking of anything tender. “Who taught you to make potatoes like that?”
I blinked, surprised by the raw vulnerability underlying his tough exterior. I lowered my dish towel and leaned slightly against the edge of the counter.
“My mother,” I answered simply. “She used to make them for us every Sunday morning when we were kids, back before everything fell apart.”
The moment those words left my lips, Roman went completely, terrifyingly still. The color seemed to drain entirely from his sharp face, leaving him looking pale beneath his olive skin. He gripped the edge of the marble island with both hands, his knuckles turning stark white as his breathing hitched audibly.
Then, slowly, he raised his head and looked across the kitchen at his two brothers.
In that single shared glance, all three men communicated a universe of unspoken history. The arrogant, untouchable mafia lords of the eastern seaboard suddenly looked remarkably young, haunted, and—most terrifying of all—afraid. Not afraid of me, and not afraid of their enemies, but afraid of the ghosts of a past they thought they had buried forever.
Declan swallowed hard, his tough-guy facade cracking completely around the edges, while Gabriel stared at me with an expression of profound, aching realization.
May you like
Roman turned his burning gaze back to me, his eyes suspiciously bright in the dim morning light, and asked the one question that would change the trajectory of my entire life forever.
“What was your mother’s name?”
