Page 1 of The Killer Cupcake (Poison Cherry #3)

T he promise of a day of fun in the sun did not go as planned. Carmelo had insisted on sailing despite the reports of rain.

"I want to take Nino fishing," he announced after lunch and wiggled his brows.

"Melo? Again?” she sighed.

“What? He wants to fish?” Carmelo shrugged.

“What about the phone? We’re getting it installed today, remember,” she reasoned. “You've taken him three times already.”

"Four times is what I promised," he said with a wink.

"What about your promises to me?" she teased, not wanting to mention the phone again, but she was anxious. She needed to call her baby girl.

He stared at her in a way that warmed her all over.

"Later, I'll fulfill my promise and get my reward. You can count on it," he said.

She shook her head, believing every word. So, they went sailing. And after the rain, the boys were left to their fishing games. From the upper deck that the staff had wiped and dried, she gazed down at them.

Carmelo, with his cigar tucked in the side of his jaw and his hands gripping the large fishing reel as he struggled to pull in some catch.

He was shirtless, except for his long, white linen pants and the fisherman's hat his older brother loved for him to wear, while Nino walked around in a captain's uniform and hat.

Carmelo would do anything to make his brother smile.

Nino, nearly six feet four and 330 pounds, jumped up and down at Carmelo's side. He clapped with excitement. Both of them were speaking in rapid Italian as Carmelo's men cheered on their boss for his big catch.

Kathy smiled and reclined into her bliss.

At forty-eight, she rarely allowed herself such moments of peace, especially not vacations that stretched beyond three or four days.

But these were different times. Her husband had earned the right to peace.

He’d done the hard work to amend every broken promise or betrayal.

Now he needed her. With the war between her community and his escalating into arrests and federal indictments, she lived in constant fear of losing him.

Then came the news that he and Nino had been killed in a car bombing.

For two days, she teetered on the edge of madness, unable to reconcile the mere thought that he would be dead.

Not after everything they'd survived in the past thirty years.

How could it all end this way? But the news stations and every print magazine or paper in New York insisted he was dead.

He was just… gone, ripped away from her. Game over.

Then, the call came.

An F.B.I. agent demanded a meeting.

In the dim glow of her bakery, long after closing, with Brother in the storage room stocking shelves, Debbie at the salon with Daphne tending to customers, and Junior in the streets, the agent delivered the impossible news: her lover, her secret husband, her best friend, was alive in protective custody. And he needed her.

Now.

She wanted to tell Brother, but the agent said no.

She needed to call Sandy and prepare her, but the agent said there was no time.

The only way she could see Carmelo was in complete secrecy.

She agreed.

Jersey. A plane. Him. It all happened so fast.

She didn't hesitate to celebrate his resurrection by pampering him, spoiling him, holding her tongue from voicing the questions pounding in the back of her mind. He always swore that he was a Wolf, not a Rat. He would never turn against Omertà or La Cosa Nostra. And she believed him.

She couldn't tell Debbie why she was leaving.

She couldn't explain to Sandy, still in D.C.

, how long she'd be gone. None of that mattered.

She had to reach him—to care for him, like she always had because loving the Wolf meant tending to the boy trapped inside the man—the boy whose father had tried so hard to destroy.

Now, stranded in Quebec, she hadn't spoken to her family in two weeks.

How much longer could the silence last? There had been no plan.

No F.B.I. operatives with secret deals to protect him, no whispered strategies to reclaim his life.

Just endless, suffocating stillness—broken only by the desperate, love-starved hunger they had for each other.

Morning, noon, night—he consumed her. Sex was always on the menu, as if touch alone could erase the hurt they carried from betraying each other in the past. Between stolen passionate moments on the yacht, in his bed, in the garden, even on the kitchen floor when she escaped him to get something to eat, he crafted distractions: lazy riverside picnics, impulsive drives through the mountains, laughter-filled evenings with Nino in town watching a play reserved for children or a picture show.

And the days blurred into a sunlit purgatory.

No news. No contact. No way out. No phone!

The isolation coiled tighter around her, thick as the forested cliffsides outside their villa. She felt it now—the same disorientation that had once hollowed him out.

What was the plan? There had to be a plan. Right?

She needed to call home. Tell Debbie to talk to Matteo. Together, they had to find a way to save the Wolf. To save her man. It was his turn for rescue.

She closed her eyes and exhaled.

Typically, she would not sunbathe on the upper deck—she was naturally bronzed by the sun and gifted with melanin by her ancestors.

She hated the heat. Hated to sweat or have her hair frizz from the salt of the sea.

The fireball in the sky reminded her of a life entirely different.

Those sweltering days she'd spent down in the Delta on the Jensen farm, once known as the Cloverfield Plantation.

Even working in the washrooms instead of the fields picking cotton or peas, she'd suffered from heat strokes.

Sometimes the labor was so hard she could barely drag herself inside Big Mama's cool house and drop into bed.

It was a long time ago. Thirty-one years since she'd first met Carmelo when she was seventeen and he was nineteen—two kids from different worlds who thought loving each other was the only challenge they faced. Boy, were they wrong.

A time lost to her now, buried beneath recent memories of pain and suffering. All the people she had loved and who loved her were gone, except for her beautiful daughter and the family she, Debbie, and Brother had made.

Were the Freemans cursed?

The thought followed her like a shadow. There had been a time—oh, how clearly, she remembered—when Carmelo had believed both their Dads were cursed, and had passed it down to them.

But curses could be broken. And after decades of longing, she had finally surrendered to the truth her heart had always known.

She had been his wife from the very start.

No curse, no shadow, no force in this world could steal the future she would build with him.

As the yacht swayed gently beneath her, Nino's laughter wrapping around her like sunlight, she let sleep pull her under—dreaming, at last, of tomorrow, and the end of curses.

Carmelo ascended the short staircase to the yacht's upper deck, where a plush lounge area opened onto the breathtaking panoramic view of Lac Tremblant. The vast, glacial lake spread before him, deep and impossibly blue, cradled between mountain ridges like a sapphire held by ancient hands.

This place was a haven for the world's elite—millionaires carving fresh powder on skis during Quebec's brutal winters, oligarchs basking in luxury during the fleeting summer months.

As sunlight danced upon the pristine waters, Carmelo's mind drifted back to his twenty-eighth year, to the winding coastal roads between Sorrento and the Amalfi, and that fateful meeting with Don Tommasino Battaglia after he had accomplished his ultimate revenge. His father's death.

It was 1957. The Castellamare medallion had burned in his pocket then; Mama Stewart’s last words were hard in his ear, her prophecy now visited upon him in her death.

Its weight was heavier than the Beretta gifted to him by Lucky Luciano in Naples.

His heart had pounded—not from fear, but from the heady anticipation of a prince about to seize his rightful throne.

That journey had irrevocably altered his course, more profoundly than discovering his mother's suicide or firing the bullet that sent his father backward out of his chair.

He had justified it all—claimed he acted for his brothers, for the Family, for the sacred crown of la cosa nostra.

But as he stood now, decades later, aboard this luxurious yacht, wealthier than his father could have dreamed, he could finally admit the raw truth: When he'd boarded that plane to Italy after his older brother was forced into joining the Vietnam War, when he'd knelt to kiss Don Tommasino's ring, he'd done it for one reason only—power. Pure, unadulterated power, to take back what was rightfully his. To one day destroy his father’s throne.

Of course, he needed power for her.

By then, she'd already torn his heart out. When the truth exploded between them, she rejected his fairytale love and refused to play her part. Worse—she agreed to marry another man, reducing their love to some bastardized half-lie.

That betrayal ignited something monstrous in him. The rage forced casualties in both their lives. The desperate, clawing need to have her believe him, forgive him, give him peace ate away at his soul. The Wolf was born in that fire.

(She would tell it differently, of course. She always did.)

She had been his last tether to the man he'd hoped to become. If he couldn't be her hero, he'd transform into something far more potent—a force she couldn't look away from, couldn't pretend didn't exist, couldn't deny. And take her back as his wife without her consent.

He approached.