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New York Times bestselling author Christine Feehan has had over thirty novels published and has thrilled legions of fans with her seductive Dark Carpathian tales. She has received numerous honours throughout her career, including being a nominee for the Romance Writers of America RITA and receiving a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times, and has been published in multiple languages.
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‘The amazingly prolific author’s ability to create captivating
and adrenaline-raising worlds is unsurpassed’
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By Christine Feehan
Torpedo Ink series:
Judgment Road
Vengeance Road
Shadow series:
Shadow Rider
Shadow Reaper
Shadow Keeper
Shadow Warrior
‘Dark’ Carpathian
series:
Dark Prince
Dark Desire
Dark Gold
Dark Magic
Dark Challenge
Dark Fire
Dark Legend
Dark Guardian
Dark Symphony
Dark Melody
Dark Destiny
Dark Secret
Dark Demon
Dark Celebration
Dark Possession
Dark Curse
Dark Slayer
Dark Peril
Dark Predator
Dark Storm
Dark Lycan
Dark Wolf
Dark Blood
Dark Ghost
Dark Promises
Dark Carousel
Dark Legacy
Dark Sentinel
Dark Nights
Darkest at Dawn
(omnibus)
Sea Haven series:
Water Bound
Spirit Bound
Air Bound
Earth Bound
Fire Bound
Bound Together
GhostWalker series:
Shadow Game
Mind Game
Night Game
Conspiracy Game
Deadly Game
Predatory Game
Murder Game
Street Game
Ruthless Game
Samurai Game
Viper Game
Spider Game
Power Game
Covert Game
Toxic Game
Drake Sisters series:
Oceans of Fire
Dangerous Tides
Safe Harbour
Turbulent Sea
Hidden Currents
Magic Before
Christmas
Leopard People
series:
Fever
Burning Wild
Wild Fire
Savage Nature
Leopard’s Prey
Cat’s Lair
Wild Cat
Leopard’s Fury
Leopard’s Blood
Leopard’s Run
The Scarletti Curse
Lair of the Lion
PIATKUS
First published in the US in 2019 by Jove
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Piatkus
Copyright © 2019 by Christine Feehan
Excerpt from Dark Illusion copyright © 2019 by Christine Feehan
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those
clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without
the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-349-42318-0
Piatkus
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
For Katie, my beautiful niece who handles
her complicated life with grace.
CONTENTS
For My Readers
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
FOR MY READERS
Be sure to go to christinefeehan.com/members/ to sign up for my PRIVATE book announcement list and download the FREE ebook of Dark Desserts. Join my community and get firsthand news, enter the book discussions, ask your questions and chat with me. Please feel free to email me at
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. I would love to hear from you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with any book, there are so many people to thank, and this one is no exception. Brian, thank you for challenging me to write faster and better. Domini, as always, your editing was invaluable. Sheila, thank you for the notes you put together for me in one place when I thought I might lose my mind because they were scattered everywhere after the computer crash! Katie, thank you for all the advice on handling major events. I had no idea how difficult that business truly is. Cheryl and Denise, what would I do without you?
CHAPTER ONE
Vittorio Ferraro stood in the shadows, his skin crawling with the need to move. Something was wrong. Not just wrong. Whatever his churning gut was about, he’d never quite felt the urgency of finding the source of the trouble as he did right then.
He’d come home from work exhausted. Work had been in Los Angeles this time. He’d been there numerous times, but this particular one had been a bloodbath. He was a shadow rider, one of the very few in existence worldwide. With that came tremendous responsibilities and absolute secrecy. He’d begun his training at the age of two and continued every day of his l
ife since. Now, after carrying out justice in Los Angeles, he’d been more than happy to get home. His house was his sanctuary, and usually, once inside, he felt peace, not this terrible sense of impending doom.
He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling, so he got dressed and followed the dark dread that strengthened as he approached the nightclub his family owned. The Ferraro Club was in full swing, the music loud, the laughter and conversation blending with the energy of the music.
The nightclub was the most popular in Chicago and people stood in lines, sometimes for hours, on the chance of getting in. Celebrities frequented the Ferraro Club, and there was always the possibility that one might catch a glimpse of a member of the famous Ferraro family. Tonight, the place was packed.
As a rule, his family didn’t make it a habit to interfere in the running of the club—they had managers who ran the place far better than any of them ever could—but they dropped in when they needed to be visible. The paparazzi always swarmed around them, giving them better alibis for their work than anything else ever could. Right now, visibility was the last thing Vittorio wanted. The sense of urgency was growing stronger, not weaker, and that meant he needed to find whatever was wrong and fix it before it was too late. That something was here. In his club. Close now.
He moved from shadow to shadow without being seen. It was a slow process and his body was already torn up from doing this very thing in Los Angeles. Still, this wasn’t about work. This wasn’t about bringing justice to criminals no one else could get to. This was about the knots in his gut that coiled tighter and tighter, and felt personal. Very personal. And that in itself was shocking.
Vittorio was the largest of the Ferraro men. He was tall, broad-shouldered and very fit, as all riders had to be. He was also a man who knew himself very well. Every strength. Every flaw. What he wanted in life, what he needed—both were impossible, and he’d accepted that he would never have a wife and family the way his brothers Stefano, Ricco and Giovanni had. Even Taviano had a much better chance than he would ever have. It was just this growing feeling that this portent of trouble was connected to him personally.
He was a man apart—even within his family, he stood apart. Maybe they all did. It was possible their women strengthened the connection between them in some way. Certainly, Francesca, Stefano’s wife, did. Vittorio loved her—they all did—but at the same time, it only emphasized his loneliness.
He knew it would already be nearly impossible to find a woman he could love the way he needed to love her. Finding a woman who could ride shadows was in and of itself extremely difficult, but finding one who would suit his peculiarities, that was asking far too much. He knew the odds, and they weren’t in his favor.
Shadow riders were obligated to have children, so if they weren’t married to a suitable woman by a certain age—one he was approaching—an arranged marriage would follow. For a man like Vittorio, that would be an utter disaster.
For a moment he stood in the shadows watching the women dancing, knowing not a single one of them would ever tolerate him as a life partner. He had to find a woman who would have the genetics to produce children capable of riding the shadows and carrying on their work. That was his obligation. He could never simply fall in love; he had to fall in love with the right person. The odds of finding that were so slim, most riders never believed it could happen.
For Vittorio, the odds were even slimmer. He didn’t want a traditional partnership. He didn’t have that kind of personality. He needed his woman to trust him implicitly and allow him to care for her. For every aspect of her life. Where, in the modern world, could a woman like that be found? That would be impossible as well. Two impossibilities meant it wasn’t going to happen for him. He would be in a loveless, arranged marriage for the rest of his life.
He sighed and turned his attention back to that whisper of impending danger that had drawn him to the club. The floor plan had three tiers. The top tier was extremely expensive but provided the most privacy. Most of the celebrities stayed there to party. Bodyguards were prevalent, and the club’s highly trained security were visible as well. The third tier wasn’t a place Vittorio would expect to have any real trouble, but his every instinct pointed him in that direction.
He waited for the music to change and the light show to begin. The dancing colors cast all kinds of shadows throughout the large club, giving him plenty of choices. He selected a shadow that cut through the bar on the second-tier landing and zigzagged its way up to the highest tier where the Ferraros kept a table reserved just for family.
He stepped into a thin, dark streak and instantly his body was sucked into the tube, pulled apart and flung through tables and chairs and up two winding staircases to the top tier. Standing in the mouth of the tube, he needed a few seconds for his body to feel as if it had come back together. There was always the sick feeling that came with fast travel, with being pulled apart and put back together.
The moment Vittorio was up on the top floor, the sense of conspiracy, of danger, became overwhelming. He closed himself off from the noise and concentrated on that feeling of trouble. Of a fated doom. At the third table from the Ferraros’ exclusive seating sat three men. He recognized two as enforcers for the Saldi family. Just seeing them in his club caused the knots in his gut to tighten.
No one could keep drugs out of a club, but they didn’t allow sales there. The Saldis, a notorious crime family, brought drugs in and sold them from streets and alleys to the private parties of the rich. Every kind of drug anyone could possibly want, they provided. But not in a Ferraro club. It was one of the few things the Saldis knew the Ferraros would go to war with them over.
The Saldis were recognized as a branch of the largest crime family in the States. Giuseppi Saldi was the acknowledged leader and was certainly the biggest crime boss in Chicago. These particular men worked for his brother, Miceli Saldi. The big question was, why were two of Saldi’s goons sitting in the Ferraro nightclub making a deal with some lowlife junkie? Clearly they were conducting business of sorts. The Saldi enforcers blended in, with their expensive suits and Rolex watches, but the man sitting across from them was, by comparison, in disheveled clothes that had seen better days.
Vittorio was going to have to review the security tapes. There were certain protocols in place. Every doorman, every bouncer and every security guard was required to be familiar with the Saldis and their employees. If they entered the nightclub, the Ferraro family was to be informed immediately. That hadn’t happened.
The fact that the two Saldi enforcers sat in the VIP section on the third tier and no one had called a family member to let them know added an additional sin against the club’s security measures—or the Saldis had paid off someone high enough up in the nightclub’s management that they were able to sneak through. If that were the case, who else had they allowed in?
Vittorio needed to move around and listen to the conversations. The sale of drugs was always going to be a problem in clubs the world over, but the Saldis blatantly selling in the Ferraro nightclub was going to start a war no one wanted, and it didn’t make sense.
Vittorio stayed in the shadows and moved as close as possible in order to hear the conversation over the pounding beat of the music. He recognized Ale Sarto and Lando Gori, Miceli Saldi’s top enforcers. If either or both showed up at your door, chances were you weren’t going to survive the encounter. They were dressed in suits and looked sharp and handsome, but Vittorio had seen their work. There was nothing remotely civilized or benevolent about what they did to human beings. They wouldn’t be sent on some small errand. Not ever.
“She’s worth every cent of the money,” the stranger in disheveled clothes assured. He twitched a couple of times but kept direct eye contact.
Anyone sitting with Sarto and Gori should have been intimidated, especially a two-bit pimp who seemed to be talking about his prostitute.
Ale Sarto hitched forward. “You’re pushing your luck, Haydon. Her service is for your past debts, n
ot any new ones you incur.”
Vittorio suppressed a groan of annoyance. The Saldis had stooped to an all-time low, negotiating for prostitutes in the Ferraro Club. He didn’t turn away, his gut still screaming at him. Nothing really made sense about the small exchange he’d overheard. Top-level enforcers like Sarto and Gori didn’t get involved in such mundane matters as acquiring another prostitute for the Saldi stables.
“I can get her to see reason and go along with you without any trouble,” Haydon responded. “She’ll do whatever I tell her.” He poured confidence into his voice. “That’s got to be worth another two hundred and fifty thousand.”
Lando Gori drew back and pinned Haydon with cold, dead eyes. “You’re really pushing your luck. We’re taking her tonight, and this new crap you’re trying to pull is going to get you killed. Take the deal wiping out your past debt for the woman’s services and walk away. We don’t need you. We can pick her up anytime and just cut you out of the transaction altogether.”
Haydon sat back immediately and threw his hands into the air as if in surrender. “Fine. Fine. But at least talk to him about the possibility of giving me a two-hundred-andfifty-thousand-dollar credit. I brought the deal to him.”
Lando stood up, ending the conversation. “You didn’t bring the deal to him, Haydon. He gave you no choice. The woman, or we break every bone in your body. Personally, I think it should be both, but he’s a compassionate man.”
“Where is she?” Ale Sarto demanded, standing as well.
Haydon flashed a grin, revealing dark, stained teeth. “She wasn’t as cooperative as I would have liked, and I didn’t think she’d sit through negotiations, so I stashed her somewhere safe.”
“You’re a lying asshole, Haydon. You just told us she’d do anything for you. Now she’s not being cooperative. Which is it?” Lando snapped.
Vittorio stiffened. That didn’t sound like the woman was privy to what these men had said. Worse, it didn’t sound as if she was in any way cooperating.
“You’d better not be playing games, Haydon,” Ale warned. “Let’s go. I want to see her right now.”
Haydon’s cocky smile faded as he got to his feet as well. “You don’t understand. Grace would do just about anything for me, but she can get stubborn. Sometimes she needs a little persuasion.”