“Would you have kept her so close?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.” He snorted. “You had an apartment set up for her. That marriage was supposed to be paper only, a token gesture. And now…”
Now she was living in my house, sleeping in my bed…
“I could just as easily have sent her back or killed her and Renzo.”
“But you wouldn’t do that. Not to a girl vying for her freedom. Not to a brother who was only trying to save his little sister.”
“They couldn’t know that!” I snapped. “They think I’m as bad as Nero.”
He shook his head. “You might have a bloody reputation, but Andreas knew otherwise. Enough to predict that you wouldn’t send a scared girl back to her tyrannical family.”
The thought burrowed inside my mind like a parasite, eating away at everything I thought to be true. I replayed every conversation I’d ever had with Emila from the moment I had met her. “Sergio sent men to hunt her down. They tried to kill her.”
He said nothing, but his silence was louder than any accusation he could voice.
“She killed her father,” I said, trying to argue against the image forming in my mind.
“And Nero had his own brother killed.” He shrugged one heavy shoulder. “Who’s to say that Roberto’s death wasn’t in Sergio’s plan?”
I fell into silence, unwilling to believe she had betrayed me. It would mean everything she ever had said was a lie. Matteo, her sister. Her grief and guilt over her father.
And if she had lied to me, did I have it in me to kill her or was I too far gone? Did I love her? Fuck.
“Look, I like the girl, Gio. I even fucking like Renzo.” Jackson dragged a hand over his face. “I’m not saying it’s definitely the case, but I don’t want you to be blind to her.”
No, it was my blindness that would make her the perfect mole. An innocent young girl, a victim, a fighter. Was I so transparent that Andreas could have orchestrated this? For the first time in my life, I wished I hadn’t killed a rat so I could fucking ask him just how deep his deceit ran.
Jackson drove the rest of the way to the airfield, leaving the bloodied car and dead body for our cleaners to dump.
Over the course of the ninety-minute flight back to New York, my anger only rose, twisting into something volatile and vicious. I was now potentially facing war with The Outfit and the mob, and I may well have a snake in my bed. I didn’t want to believe it, but the very fact that I shied away from the idea meant it needed to be explored.
Men had died tonight, and more would die. There was no room for weakness.
9
EMILIA
I couldn’t sleep. Gio was away tonight, and without him, I was on edge, like my body couldn’t break out of flight mode. I’d already had one nightmare tonight. A nightmare that had Renzo running to my room and offering to stay with me, just like he had when we were kids. But now he’d fallen asleep, fully clothed on top of the comforter. His soft snores filled the darkness, and though it soothed me having another person here, it wasn’t the same as having Gio’s warmth wrapped around me.
I heard a murmur of voices somewhere in the house, a creak of a floorboard in the hall a few seconds later, and then the door exploded open. I bolted upright, clutching my chest as my heart let out a pounding beat.
Renzo shot to his feet, gun in hand, and instantly alert. “What the fuck?”
Light spilled into the dark room from the open doorway, the silhouette of a figure I knew all too well filling it. “Gio?”
Bright light suddenly flooded the darkness from the overhead chandelier, temporarily blinding me. When I blinked the spots from my eyes, I found Gio storming toward the bed. His suit was disheveled, blood smearing his cheek, his throat, and the tattooed skin of his forearms. No doubt the dark material of his suit pants and shirt were also soaked.
That wasn’t what alarmed me, though. It was the look on his face—cold, lethal, and fixed on my brother like a predator stalking its next kill.
“Gio, what—”
Without warning, he grabbed Renzo by the throat and slammed him against the wall.
“Stop!” I scrambled from the bed, stopping a few feet away from them, when I noticed the knife Gio now had pressed to Renzo’s throat. Was he pissed Renzo was in here with me? Had Renzo done something?
“Gio,” I whispered, terrified for my brother. The man covered in blood and wielding a knife was not the man I knew. My hands shook violently, my chest squeezing so tight I could barely breathe. “Please.” I moved to the side, trying to shift that lethal attention to me.