He knows I'll protect her with my life.
That was the sentence that had arrived at three in the morning and hadn't left since. Simple, clean, devastating in its implications. Because whoever had planned last night had understood something about me that most people spent considerable time and resources trying to understand, the architecture of what I would and wouldn't do, where my limits were, what could move me. And the Salvatore name came with certain traditions that were perhaps too gentle a word. Certainties. Our wives and children come first. It had been true of my father and his father before him, it had been the one constant in a family that had operated in inconstancy, and it was apparently now publicly known enough to be weaponized.
Which meant someone had done their homework.
W
