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He would not react. He refused.

“I grew up sleeping on a lumpy mattress,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was only a single bed, and I had to share it with my cousin, and be grateful to actually have a bed to sleep on while you and the rest of your family slept on the finest mattresses money can buy. I never had anything that was my own, not even my books.

“Your book collection looks amazing,” she added, her eyes suddenly dancing again. “I’d heard you were well-read but hadn’t realised you had your own library! And now it all belongs to me! Aren’t I a lucky girl?”

“Is there a reason you decided to lay claim to all my possessions rather than my siblings’?” he drawled, more determined than ever not to react to her dispassionately relayed anecdote about her childhood or the latest twist of the knife she’d plunged into his back.

“Sure there is. It’s because I can, and because the so-called clever Esposito only had one measly property in his sole name. Everything else was bought through the legitimate company which we now own, or bought jointly with your father. The contracts gave him all the power over them, making them ours now too!” She pulled a faux sympathetic face before plunging the knife in deeper. “Your sister was much cannier, wasn’t she? She bought loads of properties in her own name, and all with your father’s blessing. It’s just a shame none of them are in Naples, what with her not being allowed to leave our city. Still, if she survives your reckless kidnapping of me, she can always rent them out and get an income. If you survive this, all you’ll have is that shitty little apartment even rats would turn their noses up at. What on earth possessed you to buy it?”

He refused to answer. The tension in his body had hardened to concrete.

“Going by the date you bought it, you were nineteen…” Her eyebrows drew together in thought. “Did you buy it with your parents’ blessing or behind their backs? My guess would be behind their backs. Vincent knew nothing about it, and it’s not listed anywhere. Did you ever tell them about it?”

He clamped his lips even tighter, not even pretending to smile.

“I’ll take your silence as a no.”

Resting the gun on the arm of the sofa, although keeping her finger on the trigger, she added, “Why the secrecy about it? You’ve never rented it out, so that suggests you’ve been saving it as a bolt hole to use if ever needed, but not just that, a bolt hole you hoped your father never learned of. Were you scared of him?”

Staring straight into her eyes, he said, “Were you scared of your father? Can you even remember him?”

His reward was a slight tightening of her kissable lips. “No. I can’t remember him.”

Now it was his turn to go for the jugular. He made sure not to miss. “You know he died at my father’s hand?”

Her lips were now as tight as his had been only moments ago. And so was her voice. “So we were told.”

“But not your mother. She only died on my father’s orders. I’m sure he would have relished the chance to pull the trigger himself, but he was at the hospital – my mother gave birth to Siena that very day. What do you think of that symmetry? My sister taking her first breath while your mother took her last?”

Elvira’s face had whitened. Mattia waited for satisfaction to hit him, but nothing came.

He would not feel guilty for using the only tools he had at his disposal to regain the upper hand. If she could use his dead father to twist the knife and provoke him then he would damned well react in kind. Until he had that gun off her, nothing was off limits.

Except…

Something bitter-tasting had flooded his mouth, similar to the taste he’d experienced those long days spent alone in his poky apartment. It tasted very much of self-recrimination.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that Siena had no more choice in being born than my mother had in dying. The only person – people – who had real choices were your parents. They chose for your father to murder his best friend and frame my father for it. Their so-called revenge wiped out my family, and I think, too, whether or not you knew the slaughter of my family was based on a lie, that you always knew your parents couldn’t be trusted, or you wouldn’t have paid cash for a secret bolt hole the moment you could afford it.”

He had to force himself to maintain eye contact, but damn, it was hard. It was like Elvira had found a portal into his mind and could read thoughts he barely allowed himself to acknowledge, let alone share with anyone. “None of us knew our father killed Fabio. Like everyone, we believed your father had done it.”

“Not everyone,” she stated with only a hint of emotion in her voice. “Your mother always knew.”

He found himself nodding. When his brother Tommaso had revealed the truth of the war with the Ranieris to the Esposito siblings only months ago, there had been no doubt their mother had known.

Augustus hadn’t just had Agrippa as his brains; he’d had his wife Livia. Mattia’s mother had been his father’s Livia. Mattia’s mother had probably been the one to plot the whole thing.

Thinking about it dispassionately, he understood why Elvira had wanted to kill her.

Ice-cold, calculating and murderous though his mother was, it didn’t change that she was his mother. The brains behind the power though she was, his father had been the power, and if he hadn’t suffered a fatal cardiac arrest earlier that year, the Ranieris revenge would have played out very differently. It would have had to. His father had been an icon in Italy. The people had loved him for his generous philanthropy. The authorities and many politicians had loved him for the money he secretly funnelled to them.

His death had done the Ranieris a favour. Mattia despised himself for even thinking it, but his father’s death had done him a favour too.

He’d loved his father but, God, he’d hated him too, in a way that probably only the Ranieris could understand, which made him feel even more despicable.

Loving or loathing him didn’t change that he was Lorenzo’s son. Loyalty to family trumped personal feelings about the individual members.

He had a loyalty, too, to his father’s memory, but, God, it was hard maintaining it. Learning how the foundations of his father’s empire had been built had only made it harder. The beautiful woman sitting in front of him had been orphaned as a toddler to make it happen.