Big smoochy smooches to everyone reading ‘Hardest Fall’ at the moment! It was so eerie jumping back into this series after such a long break, so I really had no idea how it was going to go, but once again, you guys have proven that I have the best effin readers in the world. Don’t forget to leave it a lil rating or review if you enjoyed it. The old algos are being brutal right now, so try to give all your indies (not just me) a little extra love. It really does mean a lot to us.
Reminder: I’m not on Instagram. If I need to announce a new release or something urgent, I’ll post it there, but otherwise I’m avoiding it like the plague because it’s not a healthy place for me. I need to focus on getting words on the page and nothing else. Please leave a comment here on the blog if you want to ask me anything, I’ll get an email notification and make sure I answer.
OKAY. Onto Dario! This is the absolute final book in this world, and it’s as thick as Dario’s thighs at a whopping 90k words. Oof. I really tried to give it a solid, satisfying wrap-up, so I didn’t mind how big it turned out to be.
Here is Chapter One for a brief looky! It is currently being serialized on here on my Ream stories, and there are already 19 chapters up, so it’s a hefty chunk to catch up on if you can’t wait to read more and want to check it out.
***
Chapter One
The bass hit Dario’s chest like a second heartbeat, deep and thudding, syncing with the strobe of colored lights cutting through the crowd. Istanbul knew how to do nightlife, and usually he loved it.
The rooftop bar overlooked the Bosphorus. It was the kind of place where the cocktails cost more than most people’s rent, and the people looked like they had walked out of a perfume ad.
He should have been having the time of his life. Instead, he was fucking bored.
Dario leaned against the bar, smoking a cigar and swirling the dregs of his whiskey. He had stopped tasting it two drinks ago and tried to figure out why his skin felt too tight.
He had been here for three hours. He charmed the bartender into pouring doubles. He made a table of Swedish tourists laugh so hard that one of them had snorted champagne out of her nose. He turned down two invitations to dance and another two men and a woman looking for a hook-up, which was so unlike him that even he noticed.
Something was off. Something had been off since…
Since the wedding, his brain prodded him, and he told his brain to shut the fuck up.
He signaled for another whiskey. The bartender, a sharp-eyed guy who had clearly seen every kind of person drown every kind of feeling in this place, set it down without comment.
Good man.
Again, he wondered what he was doing there. Oh, right, Rodrigo and Giana were making heart eyes at each other. Or whatever you called it when two people who had already been through kidnapping, torture, and a full-scale assault on the villa decided they needed ‘alone time.’
Dario had made himself scarce because that was what you did when your older brother finally won over the woman he had been obsessing over for six years. You got out of the way. You gave them space. You took yourself to Istanbul and said you would help the Edgeworths look for a deranged sorcerer. Then you found the loudest, most crowded club you could, because silence was dangerous.
Silence made you think, and that wasn’t a good thing.
Leo was back at his apartment with Dante and hadn’t been in a partying mood. His little brother had that particular glow about him lately—the settled, certain look of a man who found exactly where he belonged.
Leo had his computers, his husband, and even Altun had offered to teach him about his magical potential if he wanted to learn it. He had stepped into his power like he’d been born for it, which, Dario supposed, he had.
And you’ve got a red silk shirt and a talent for small talk. Don’t overthink it. It’s not what you are good at, his inner voice sneered. It sounded way too much like his mother. Even death wouldn’t stop Gabriella Colleoni from prodding him.
He took a long pull of the whiskey. It burned, but not enough.
The problem with being the charmer of the family was that it worked on everyone except himself. He could walk into any room and own it within ten minutes. He could talk his way out of a hostage situation, into a locked vault, and through a border checkpoint with expired papers and a smile. Gabriella had used him for it. Rodrigo relied on him for it. It was his thing.
But what was it, really? Rodrigo had the strategic mind, the ruthlessness, the ability to lead. Leo had the razor-sharp intellect, the assassin’s stealth, and the hacking skills that made intelligence agencies look like amateurs.
Dario had… volume. Personality. A willingness to be the one people underestimated, because underestimation was its own kind of weapon.
The spare, the vicious voice whispered. The overlooked middle brother. Gabriella’s afterthought, who could never be as useful as she wanted.
He killed that thought with liquor and sheer force of will.
A woman slid onto the barstool beside him. Dark hair, red lips, expensive perfume. She said something in Turkish that was an invitation. He turned the full wattage of the Dario Colleoni smile on her—the one that had been making women lose their train of thought since he was sixteen—and said something charming and empty that made her laugh.
And he felt absolutely nothing.
This is new. This is a problem.
He used to love this. The game of it. The electricity of a new conversation, a new possibility, the crackling potential of a night that could go anywhere. Now it felt like performing a routine he memorized so long ago, he couldn’t remember learning it.
The woman touched his arm. He let her. He even leaned into it, because that was what the role demanded, but his mind was somewhere else entirely. Specifically, it was at a long table in Tuscany, at a wedding reception, where a dark-haired woman with a warrior’s build and a tongue so sharp that it could cut glass had sat across from him, drinking a beer.
Frederica Alesci saved you a seat at Leo’s wedding.
She hadn’t said anything about it. He hadn’t made it a thing. He had walked into the church, scanning the room the way he always did, and there she was, sitting with one hand resting casually on the empty chair beside her.
When their eyes met, she gave him a look. The one that was somehow both a challenge and an invitation, daring him to make something of it while simultaneously pretending it meant nothing.
He had sat down, despite planning on sitting next to Rodrigo and Giana. Afterward, they had spent the entire reception trading barbs and insults, and it had been the best conversation he’d had in months.
You are not thinking about the woman who killed your client while you were taking a piss in Rome. You are not thinking about how she looked when you drank wine with her on the terrace before she left Italy. You are not—
“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying, are you?” The woman was smiling, but her eyes had cooled. She could tell she had lost him.
Dario mustered an apologetic grin. “Sorry, güzelim. It’s been a long night, and I’m terrible company.”
“You’re beautiful company,” she corrected, sliding off the stool with the fluid grace of someone who didn’t waste time on men who were already occupied. “But you’re somewhere else. Whoever she is, she’s lucky.”
She would shoot you for saying that or laugh in your face. Maybe both.
Dario watched the woman disappear into the crowd, and the emptiness resettled around him like a coat. He should go. He should find a hotel, sleep it off, and fly somewhere new in the morning. Somewhere with fewer ghosts and cheaper whiskey.
His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.
Dario fished it out, expecting Leo to be checking in or Rodrigo to be sending him on a job. Unknown number. Greek country code.
He frowned and answered. “Pronto.”
“Mr. Colleoni?” The man’s voice, formal, slightly harassed, speaking heavily accented English. “This is Sergeant Papadakis of the Heraklion Municipal Police, Crete. We have a woman in custody, arrested for disorderly conduct. She is… quite intoxicated, and she asked us to call this number.”
Dario straightened on the barstool. “What woman?”
There was a pause, the sound of papers shuffling. “She says her name is Frederica ‘Fuck you,’ apparently. She won’t tell us her last name. We were hoping you might know?”
The emptiness vanished. Just like that it was gone, replaced by something bright and sharp and alive that hit him like a shot of adrenaline straight to the chest.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
“She asked you to call me?” Dario repeated, and he could feel the grin spreading across his face, wide and wolfish and entirely genuine for the first time all night.
The sergeant’s voice took on a note of weary resignation. “She was very specific about the number, sir. She also said, and I quote, ‘Tell the big idiot bear malakas dickhead he owes me a favor.'”
Dario laughed so loudly, it turned very head at the bar. The bartender raised an eyebrow. Dario raised his glass in a toast to him and knocked back the rest of the whiskey.
Frederica Alesci was drunk and in a jail cell in Crete, and of all the people in her life—her terrifying assassin mother, her legendary thief of a father, Altun Baruk, Kon, any one of a dozen mercenaries who would have come running—she had called him. He wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to rub it in her face when she sobered up.
This, Dario thought, pulling out his wallet and tossing enough euros on the bar to cover his tab and a generous tip, is going to be fun.
***
Need more now?? Click here to check it out on Ream.
That’s all from me, I’m off to do bad things to Fenris (hehe).
Alessa xx
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