His Fatal Love (West Coast Mobsters Book 3) by Leighton Greene

Author:Leighton Greene [Greene, Leighton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

JULIAN

“So you know I have those arty cousins I grew up with back in Vegas,” Jack says conversationally, and for the first time, I see Sandro twitch with impatience. “One of them had a problem. Whole family of painters, sculptors, crafters—you name it, they did it. Valentina was as gifted as the rest of them, so it took a while before anyone noticed she had trouble telling one face from another. She was actually a very gifted portrait artist—maybe because every time she looked at a face, she was seeing it for the first time. Capturing it pure, for what it was. But there was an awkward incident where she was doing two different nude studies commissioned by one man, and, well, suffice to say, she sent the wrong portrait to the wrong person. And making a mistake like that when your client is Sonny Vegas...” Jack grins. “I can tell you, it’s no fun. Anyway. My cousin—she had this same thing Julian has. Face blindness, she called it.”

Sandro stares me down. “Face blindness?”

Jack shrugs. “It’s got a technical term. Something long and complicated.”

I look away. “Prosopagnosia.”

“Bit of a mouthful,” Jack says. “But yeah. That’s it. When I asked my cousin how she hid it for so long, she said it just made her more creative—forced her to look for ways to identify people not based on looks alone.”

“Scents,” I say, watching Sandro pace in front of the bay windows. “And voices. And gaits, and hats, and…scars.” Sandro stops dead and gives me a dirty look. “You two are very familiar to me now, and Sandro’s scar makes him...memorable—but I certainly couldn’t pick Jack out by his mugshot, which is actually rather useful when you think about it.”

“But not,” Jack says, “a very useful trait in an assassin, I’d say.”

“You recognize voices,” Sandro says. “But you did not recognize the Lion’s voice during your time with him?”

That’s a sore point to me, but I take it on the chin. “I’d never spoken to Leo before we started hooking up at The Cellar, or not to remember, anyway. So…no. I didn’t recognize his voice.”

Sandro gives an appreciative, ironic laugh. “Shiny DeAngelo.”

“Shiny DeAngelo?” Jack repeats blankly. Sandro is still chuckling. “Care to share the joke?”

“One of Julian’s first assignments,” Sandro says. He’s smiling, but his eyes are hard. “He was sent to take out Shiny DeAngelo, a Bernardi soldier making problems on our territorial borders. Aldo had hand-waved it; Shiny was more trouble than he was worth. But Julian killed the wrong man: Ricky Santoro. The fucking Capo.”

My chest tightens as Sandro recounts my mistake. I’d been so sure that I could do it, so confident in my abilities to identify my target. I had studied Shiny DeAngelo’s face for hours on end, memorizing every detail until I thought I knew it.

“It was an unfortunate error,” I say lightly. “Ciro wasn’t very happy about it.”

“He was not,” Sandro agrees, and his eyes soften a little. “He locked you up...downstairs, didn’t he?” he says.

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