Lightning Struck (Brothers Maledetti Book 3), page 1
Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue: Jack
Other Books by Nichole Van
Author's Note
Reading Group Questions
About the Author
Copyright
Preview of Intertwine: House of Oak Book One
Preview of Gladly Beyond: Brothers Maledetti Book One
v0.1
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue: Jack
Other Books by Nichole Van
Author's Note
Reading Group Questions
About the Author
Copyright
Preview of Intertwine: House of Oak Book One
Preview of Gladly Beyond: Brothers Maledetti Book One
To Bec—
It all began with a university writing retreat,
two strangers, and a shared hotel room.
Twenty years later—college, boyfriends,
husbands, careers, loss, grief, children,
lots of therapeutic chocolate, and now back to writing—
I love that we’ve come full circle.
We should do it all over again.
(Or maybe just the hotel room/therapeutic chocolate part.)
To Dave—
For always being willing to run to the store
to fetch the therapeutic chocolate.
I kissed you
the moment the lightning
struck.
I wanted to know,
with bright certainty,
that for the rest
of your life
every time you heard
thunder,
you would taste
my lips.
—Tyler Knott Gregson, Typewriter Series #812
The course of true love never did run smooth . . .
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That . . . unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up . . .
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Prologue
Volterra, Italy
1723
The madness came for him at night.
Eager. Grasping. Hungry. Always wanting more and more, devouring him piece by piece.
There was a reason the D’Angelo men were called i Conti dei Maledetti—the Damned Earls. Hereditary insanity was their curse.
But unlike his forebears—his father and his father’s father and so on—this particular D’Angelo loved his madness. He luxuriated in it, losing himself in the addictive wanderings of his mind.
The Earl— or Conte, as he insisted on being called—didn’t care that the madness would consume him. That one day, he would simply never wake.
For him, the madness with its powerful visions was a craving. An obsession. A cherished lover never to be forsaken.
Because of this, the Conte considered it his duty to record what the madness whispered. No one should forget what it said.
“Did you get all that?” he asked his scribe seated at a desk before the window.
The Conte employed a clerk to write down the words the voices in his head murmured. It was critical that not one thing be lost.
The madness had told him so.
Candlelight flickered around the room, highlighting the Conte’s white powdered wig, glinting on the pink brocaded silk of his frock coat and bouncing off the gilded walls.
“Yes, my lord.” The man cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably. “You said, ‘I know all the secrets. The universe tells them all to me.’”
The Conte laughed. The scribe nervously flinched.
But the words were true. The Conte did know all the secrets. He knew the madness. He knew its power.
He giggled again.
He had heard the story from birth. Generations before, Giovanni D’Angelo had made a dark, sinful pact with the gypsies. Giovanni paid the demanded price and a sacrifice had been made. In return, the gypsies had given the D’Angelo family a gift of Second Sight—the ability to see, hear and feel the past and future.
But the power of the gift grew, year after year, until it was too much for a human mind to bear. Eventually, the mind cracked from the pressure, and the gift began anew with the next generation, the next heir.
The Conte’s mind, of course, had descended into insanity years ago, well before the madness generated by his gift had manifested itself. The power of the gift simply joined the lunacy already in his veins.
Would there ever be another like him? A D’Angelo who interacted with the Sight in different ways?
The Conte posed his questions to the madness.
It replied, flooding him with a vision.
He saw a line of D’Angelo men, stretching into the distance. His future heirs.
The Conte floated along the line, passing man after man, each one tainted with the madness. It clung to them like plague, a mass of shadowy sludge turning their skin sallow and their edges murky. The madness spread through the line, morphing and moving, a slimy, viscous darkness. The men sickened and died, the blackness consuming them entirely.
Until . . . the line abruptly faded into a smoky mist. Not one but three men stood before the dark cloud. Shoulder to shoulder. Expressions stoic. Two of the men were identical. Twins. The third man was a few inches shorter and leaner but still obviously related.
Brothers. Triplets.
The Conte couldn’t see beyond them. The mist obscured the way. Were the brothers the end of the D’Angelo line?
The madness churned and roiled around the men, trying to grab on. But the brothers held it back. Every time the madness tried to claim one of them, the other two raised their hands and scraped it off.
“What happens here?” the Conte asked.
“Nothing more,” the twin on the right said.
“We will be the last,” the twin on the left intoned.
“It ends with us,” the smallest brother stated, hand slashing emphatically.
But the oily madness returned, determined to smother the brothers, their bodies writhing as they struggled to pull free.
The vision faded.
The Conte shook his head, turning to stare at his scribe.
Had he witnessed a Truth? Would the D’Angelo line—and by extension the insanity—end with them?
He loved his gift. He embraced the madness. Did he even want his line to end?
The Conte pondered the idea, giggling as he walked out of the room.
ONE
Florence, Italy
July 2016
Jack Knight-Snow, Lord Knight
The facts are straightforward.
I am a ghost.
Loss defines me.
(Though other terms also come to mind—lost, losing, loser—words that are kissing cousins to loss.)
As a ghost, I have lost everything.
Not only my physical body . . . my ability to touch and feel and smell and taste. Not just the family and friends who died generations ago. Not simply my money and my estates.
I have lost my very name.
I was born John Alexander Frederick Knight-Snow when George III was King of England. In 1812, I inherited my father’s title, becoming the sixth Baron Knight.
For the first twenty-nine years of my existence, I was Someone Important. I sat in the House of Lords. I debated parliamentary bills and wrote laws. I had the care of thousands of people on my shoulders.
I mattered.
Now, I am just . . . Jack.
Jack the Ghost.
Beyond these basic facts, I know one more truth—
A ghost is an echo.
A clinging memory of what once was.
Currently, I have no relevance. My existence has no meaning.
Shakespeare once said: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
I am a neve
I am worse than a nobody.
I am a nothing.
Ironically, this sense of nothingness creates restlessness. Sitting still, not doing anything . . . it is a slow spreading poison.
I am decidedly not a spirit at rest. I grasp for any sense of import, a goal that would give my life—half-formed and half-lived as it is—meaning.
To that end, this particular afternoon, I pushed myself into the wall between the stairwell and outside entrance to the palazzo where I ‘lived’ in central Florence.
The density of the hard stone slid through me. It wasn’t uncomfortable. There was no real sensation, I supposed. Just darkness and the knowledge that I was in a wall, which was instinctively unnerving and slightly panic-inducing. But hiding in the wall was a necessity. How else was I to covertly observe the man and woman on the other side?
“I told you, Gianni, I’m so done with this. You were texting your ex during lunch.” Chiara’s staccato Italian carried through the dark of the stone wall, muffled but clear.
Watching over Chiara D’Angelo had become my life’s purpose. I was her self-appointed guardian angel of sorts.
Chiara was my house mate, teacher of all things modern and Kate to my Petruchio. Though I hadn’t decided if she and I were engaged in a Shakespearean comedy or tragedy. Time would tell.
I inched closer to the outside edge of the stone wall, all the while diligently ignoring the stern Regency-gentleman voice in my head clamoring that lords did not hide in walls to spy on unmarried women.
“Woman! Stop being so paranoid. She was just asking a question about my mom.” That voice belonged to Gianni, Chiara’s latest ‘manwhore fiasco’—her descriptor, not mine.
I would describe Gianni as a rakehell of the first order with pockets to let, but that was my inner nineteenth century British nobleman speaking.
Chiara snorted. Keys jangled.
That same restlessness driving me, I moved up the wall, making sure I was well above their heads. I angled my forehead and pushed my right eye out of the stone so I could see. In my short tenure as a ghost, I had realized that people rarely glanced upward, allowing me to hide in plain sight.
I looked down on the scene.
The main door into the palazzo rested inside an arched corridor which ran the breadth of the building from the street to the courtyard behind.
Chiara stood with her back to the door, keys loose in her hands. I could only see the top of her sleek, dark hair and the tapping of one red, stylishly-clad foot.
A man leaned over her. A shockingly handsome man with copious amounts of precisely coiffed hair. Outward perfection was Gianni’s one and only selling point. Why a perceptive, intelligent woman like Chiara bought it, I would never understand.
“Please, Gianni, I’m hardly that stupid,” Chiara scoffed. “You were asking her what she was doing later on.”
“What? Not even. Again, you’re being paranoid, Chiara.” He trilled her name in Italian staccato, rolling the ‘r’ until it almost sounded like a ‘d’— Kee-AHR-uh.
“Uh, hello? No, I’m not. I checked when you went to the bathroom.”
Gianni’s head reared up, brows frowning. “You what?! You looked at my phone?”
“Of course I checked your phone.” Chiara threw up her hands. “You left it on the table. It was like you wanted me to look. Classic subliminal messaging.”
“That’s a total invasion of my privacy!”
“Not if you leave your phone lying around it’s not!”
“You’re crazy, woman. Like . . . seriously messed.”
In Gianni’s defense, Chiara was a wee bit nutty. Generally her personality quirks fell into the cute and harmless category, but every now and again, they overspilled the banks and flowed into the Fields of Psychosis.
“Don’t you even start with me, Gianni. Looking at your phone was simply payback,” she snapped. “I know you were the one who took that hundred euros from my purse.”
Gianni jerked as if slapped. An ugly look washed across his attractive face.
“You must have dropped it somewhere,” he said. “I keep telling you it wasn’t me.”
It absolutely was him. I had witnessed it.
I took my guardian angel role seriously.
“First, you’re spying on my texts, and now you’re accusing me of taking your money. Why you gotta have such trust issues?” Gianni huffed out a breath, threading his fingers into his hair, tilting his head upward.
We locked eyes, Gianni and I—his two to my one.
Gianni flinched backward with a loud yelp.
Blast.
I instantly pulled myself back through the wall and into the stairwell. Trust Gianni to break with convention and look up.
“An eye! There was an eye in the wall!” Gianni screeched like a little girl, his voice carrying through the shut door.
A shuffling sound.
“Seriously? There’s nothing there.”
“I swear! It was right there!”
“Whatever, Gianni. Walls don’t have eyes. Stop being so dramatic.” Chiara’s tone was all irritation.
“It was there! I’m telling you!”
Keys jingled in the lock.
“I’m not up for dealing with this. Have fun with your ex. Ciao, Gianni.”
The door swung open. I pressed myself into the space behind it, not wanting the wood to pass through me.
“Wait!” Gianni yelled. “Chiara—”
Chiara slammed the door shut. Gianni continued to call her name, pounding on the door.
She whirled and stared up at me, that toe tapping again. As her shoes were a glossy cherry red and her heels a solid four inches high, the toe tapping was hard to miss.
It matched the restless, jittery energy banding my chest.
Chiara shook her head, the motion more resigned than angry. Resigned was not a common emotion for her. She tended to prefer frustration, irritation and annoyance where I was concerned.
Alarm bells sounded in my mind.
She jabbed a finger at me, pointed it at herself and then nodded toward the ceiling.
You. Me. Upstairs. Now.
Chiara was a skilled conversationalist. And clearly not amused (again) by my self-appointed, guardian angel-ship.
I had a feeling I was in for a lengthy, not altogether unjustified scold.
She turned and went up the stairs, shoes clicking on the stone. I trudged along behind her—silently, of course—staring at her spiky heels all the way. Even though I had no mass as a ghost, I still had to propel myself forward or upwards through space.
I also wasn’t worried about anyone in the apartment building seeing me. The entire palazzo belonged to the D’Angelo family—Chiara, her triplet older brothers, her mother and grandmother—and they all knew me and my story. This palazzo was a place of refuge.
Chiara’s heels flashed as we passed the first floor apartment door where her brother, Dante, and his wife, Claire, lived. Past the second floor apartment where Chiara’s grandmother, Nonna, and another brother, Branwell, lived. Further upward to the third floor apartment where Chiara lived with her mother, Judith. Her third brother, Tennyson, resided away from them all on the family estate—Villa Maledetti—located in the Tuscan countryside north of Volterra.
Chiara flung open her apartment door. Notably, however, she did not slam it in my face. Slamming things was a typical Chiara reaction to vexation and exasperation—two more emotions I seemed to regularly elicit from her.
But today, Chiara opened the door and then stood politely to one side, motioning me across the threshold with a dramatic sweep of her arm.
Yes. I was definitely in hot water.
Have I mentioned that Chiara is Italian?
Granted her mother is American and Chiara had spent much of her childhood in the United States, but she had sidestepped that part of her heritage and run one hundred percent to the Italian side of the family.
Petite and short with dark eyes and hair, Chiara was a blur of constant motion. She spoke as much with her hands as her mouth. She loved her family and friends with every last molecule in her body and never missed a chance to involve herself in others’ affairs—characteristics which surely drove her employment as a research specialist and part-time private investigator.
Unfortunately, these same characteristics came with the side effect of making her somewhat obnoxious and controlling in romantic relationships.
I shot Chiara my brightest smile and walked past her into the apartment. The room opened immediately into a single expansive space that encompassed a kitchen, dining room and sitting area. A large, marble-topped island separated the kitchen from a dining table. Beyond the table, a sitting area of couches and tufted chairs flanked an enormous flat screen on the wall.
