Hold You Against Me (Stripped 4)

“You could have already had me. If you had shown up at my door as yourself, the boy I loved, I would have been with you in a heartbeat. I’m not why you do this. I’m just the pawn you’re using to help you do it.”

I hadn’t meant to lay it all out there, but now that the words are out, I don’t regret them.

“You’re right.”

“Then why, Gio?”

“They have her. My mother.”

Shock slides through my body. “What are you talking about? Who has her?”

He stands and holds out his hand. “I’ll tell you what you want to know, but not like this. Not across a table.”

Only because he offers me the truth do I take his hand. He leads me to the bed. His movements are cordial, almost stiff, until he sits down. Then he draws me onto his lap, crushing me with his strong hold. I can hardly breathe, but I don’t fight him—and not because it’s practical. Because I sense that he needs this, needs me, and I can’t deny him.

“They took me because they thought I might have information about where you and Honor had gone.”

I don’t mean to flinch, but I do. “Gio—”

“No,” he says roughly. “I don’t blame you. That was how it started. And then, Javier Markam is a sadistic motherfucker. I knew he was going to kill me, but he wanted to drag it out.”

I swallow hard because I’d felt firsthand the cruelty of that man. He pinned me down at my sister’s engagement party. Giovanni was the one to save me that night, in more ways than one.

“I was gone for long enough that everyone assumed I’d been killed. The family would have swept me under the rug, but my mother insisted that they have a proper funeral.” He laughs, raw and humorless. “There’s still a headstone for me in the cemetery.”

“Oh, Gio.”

“That’s why you saw an obituary. No cause of death was listed because they hadn’t found my body. They held me in the basement, doing things that were…let’s just say I was looking forward to dying.”

I wrap my arms around him, pressing my face into his neck. I don’t know whether I’m offering comfort or receiving it, but his arms tighten around me.

“Then your father was killed. There was a power struggle, but in the interim, your father’s consigliere had control of the mansion. He found me in the basement. I was so weak at that point I think he expected me to die. Maybe putting a bullet in me would have been the greater mercy, but he brought me upstairs, tossed me in a bedroom, and waited to see what would happen.”

“You didn’t die,” I whisper.

I feel him shake his head. “I didn’t die, and what’s more, I had heard Markam on a hundred different phone calls over those few months. He didn’t guard what he was saying around me because he assumed it wouldn’t matter. I sold the information to the family in exchange for reinstatement.”

I pull back, not understanding. “But I thought Markam worked with the family. That’s why they let him use the basement.”

Giovanni nods. “They had a partnership, but the family never trusted Markam completely. And he never trusted them back. There were secrets on both sides.”

“Because what matters most is blood,” I say, my stomach clenching with the familiar refrain.

“That’s right. The family in New York stepped in when everything went to hell. Officially Bartolo Vicente became the head of the Vegas operation, but Romero ran operations.”

“And you?”

“I was the punk kid with leftover bruises and too much information to kill. I also had a pretty big chip on my shoulder after coming out of the basement. Bartolo took a liking to me, let me sit in on some big meetings. Between my information on Markam and the meetings with Bartolo, it got to where I knew more than Romero.”

Now I understand why Romero’s an enemy.

“When Bartolo got killed during negotiations with the Albanians, the Rudaj, I was the only one who knew the intricacies at play. They let me stand in temporarily.”

“And how do I figure in?”

“You’re going to make this permanent. With my status and your family tree, they won’t dare throw me out of the mansion. As long as I’m here, I’m in the best position to find my mother.”

“Who took her?” I remember the cruelty. “Markam.”