Fearless: Mob Boss Book Two (Volume 2) Read Online Free

she’d thought her association with Nico and everyone in the Vitale family was over.
    She cursed when his voice mail picked up. “Luca, it’s Angel. I just saw the news… What’s going on? Is…” She lowered her voice, like someone might hear her ask about the man who killed her father. Like someone might know she cared so much that her heart was in her throat at the thought of something happening to him. “Is Nico okay? Please… just… call me and let me know, okay?”
    She hung up and walked to the window overlooking the street below. Kids from the nearby college mingled with older people—many of them former students and teachers who had never left. It suddenly seemed so small, so removed from everything that really mattered. What was she doing here? How long was she going to hide?
    She jumped as the phone rang in her hand. “Luca?”
    “Angel,” he said. “Hi.”
    “What’s going on? I just saw the news.” She’d opened her computer as soon she’d gotten home from the record store, devouring everything she could find on the breaking story of Carmine Alfiero’s execution.
    “It’s complicated,” Luca said. “Is something wrong there? Are you okay?”
    His questions threw her. “Me? I’m fine. Tell me what’s going on.”
    He hesitated. “Nico wouldn’t want you involved.”
    “That’s not his call.” She softened her voice. “Is he okay? I need to know, Luca.”
    He sighed, and she could almost see the worry in his blue eyes, the way he set his mouth into a thin line when he was trying to figure out what to do. “I don’t know. He’s not here.”
    “Well… where is he?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. Things have been… unstable.”
    “What does that mean?”
    She heard his voice, muffled as he talked to someone else in the room, before he came back on the line. “It’s a long story, Angel. Someone’s after us, after Nico. We’re not sure what’s going on, but he’s in hiding until we figure out what to do next.”
    “In hiding…” She took a deep breath. “Thanks, Luca.”
    “Angel, what are you—”
    She hung up before he could say anything else, then pulled her overnight bag out of the closet. It took her less than ten minutes to pack and ten more to hit the highway.
    She pulled onto the I84 and veered toward the water just north of Boston. The sun cast a blanket of diamonds over the Atlantic, bluer and brighter than it had been in November. She rolled down her window and let the briny smell of the sea wash over her as Nico’s face filled her mind. She could never be near the ocean without thinking of him now, and she let the memories come, tears rolling down her face as she drove.
    She’d stopped expecting it to make sense a long time ago. She loved him. It wasn’t a product of her captivity or some kind of twisted delusion about who he was inside. She knew him. Knew him like she knew herself. She knew his tenderness and his kindness. Had seen his ferocious protectiveness over those he loved, his determination to do the most right thing in a business that was about as far from right as it could get.
    She knew the other stuff, too. Knew he was a criminal. That he’d hurt and killed people, her father included, and that the work he did was in large part illegal. All of it should have been enough to stop the way she felt about him, especially with the distance between them after her father’s death. But while it had been impossible to stay with him, to look at him in the wake of the loss, she’d never once convinced herself she didn’t love him.
    And there was something else; a question Luca had asked her the last time she’d seen him. They’d been outside the hospital before Dante’s escape. Unable to face Nico, she’d been on her way to the airport to get on a plane back to the US.
    “He did it to protect you, Angel,” Luca had said. “You know that.”
    She had looked away, not wanting to see the plea in Luca’s eyes. “He went too