Page 166 of Uprising

“My Rose.” I gasp. “My woman.”

She buries her face into the space between my shoulder and my neck. I pick her up, push her into the wall, fucking her like a mad man. She throws her head back, she arches her back, her muscles inside grip me so tightly it steals my breath.

“I’m yours Roman.” She says. “I’ve always been yours.”

My thumb reaches down, massaging her clit and her body jolts as she cries out.

“Come for me Rose, come like you love me.”

She shudders, blinking, opening her eyes and catches my face in her hands. “I love you.” She says over and over. Screaming it as she falls apart and as I pound into her until I’m so lost in my own pleasure that when I finally come it feels like I really have died and gone to heaven.

Roman

Ileave Rose sleeping.

It’s the early hours. Too early to be awake but my mind is working something out. The clogs are turning and I can’t shut them up.

Any ordinary day I’d wake Rose up and spend the next god knows how many hours easing that tension out of myself in the best way possible.

But right now I need it. I like it. I want it.

I walk into the office, turning the laptop on, and pour myself a drink.

Carla said something. Something that stuck more than anything else. That she got caught with Darius at a cabin. That her father had caught them there.

Carla married Ignatio when she was seventeen. Her parents had to give permission because she was technically underage.

If she and Darius were hooking up before that then they needed it to be somewhere close, somewhere they both could get to without being absent too long.

But a cabin? Nowhere in Verona fits that description. It’s all skyrises and duplexes. Even back then every piece of real estate was being developed. Anywhere that didn’t fit the bill was either pulled down and redone or sold and turned into mansions.

So it couldn’t have been in the city. It had to be somewhere else. Somewhere discreet too.

My mind keeps going to the mountains. To where a few hours’ drive from here are chalets used for skiing in the winter and hunting in the summer. Is that where she meant? Did Darius have a chalet there?

I do a search of his properties, of his companies too and their holdings. It comes back with nothing, just as I expected.

I do a search of the Capulets and that too draws a blank.

A cabin would make sense. A cabin would be a logical place for Darius to slink off too. To regroup. He’s not the kind of person to flee too far and besides, we checked where the helicopter went from the flight logs. Officially it made five stops. We know most of those were bogus but three were in remote areas, away from prying eyes, and two were close enough to the mountains to be logistically possible.

I sink back into my chair, taking another gulp of my whiskey.

The answer is here, I just can’t quite work it out.

An hour goes by, an hour of searching through every cabin, every owner, every tiny possible clue as I get more and more frustrated.

Just as I’m about to throw the damned computer out the window I see a breadcrumb.

I smirk as I realise how damned obvious it was.

Darius didn’t own the chalet. Neither did Carla. And neither did Robert Blumenfeld, their father. It was her mother. Francis Herlington-Bach. The second generation immigrant whose father had come to Verona seeking his fortune and was lucky enough to strike it rich with his timing.

Franz Bach started off with small fry businesses, nothing too glitzy but he made enough money to marry into the moderately respectable Herlington family. And it was their money that enabled him to make them all big time.

He bought his wife the chalet as a holiday home years before Carla was born. Bought it through one of his companies so the ownership is more of a puzzle than it should have been.

I wonder how many times Robert Blumenfeld would visit Francis there. How many years their affair went on for. She had other children too. Two boys. Only they looked spitting images of her husband so I guess they got smarter after Carla was born.