Family Ties (Morelli Family 4)

I lean forward, suddenly struggling to breathe properly.

And if Sal goes after Mia, he’s going to make it personal. My brother understands war is war, but Mia is his soft spot. If she gets so much as a scraped elbow while Sal’s guys have her, he’s going to come at them with every gun blazing and burn his family to the ground. He might do that even if she doesn’t get hurt, just because they had the gall to take her in the first place.

I’m gonna be sick.

“You can’t kidnap Mia. You can’t do that. Too much can go wrong with a kidnapping—she could get hurt. If she gets hurt, you’re going to unleash a side of him nobody wants to see. Trust me. If you want to kidnap someone, kidnap his stupid treacherous maid.”

“I can’t kidnap Meg,” he says, rolling his eyes. “She’s tucked away in his house. She rarely even leaves—he really keeps his bitches on lockdown, doesn’t he?”

He does, but that’s beside the point. “She leaves sometimes.”

“With Adrian,” he states, eyes widening. “I can’t kidnap her from Adrian. Mia is nice and easy. She lives in an unguarded house. I can get her when she’s alone and nobody gets hurt.”

I shake my head, burying my face in my hands. “Mateo has surveillance on her house.”

He frowns, apparently not accounting for that. “Well, she works at the bakery, too. Mark can take her from there without violence. Mark would never hurt her.”

“You’re not hearing me,” I say, straightening and meeting his gaze seriously. “You cannot take Mia. When the men in my family hold a grudge, they hold on tight. Even if we ran, Mateo would hunt you down. He’d kill us both.”

“He wouldn’t kill you.”

I shake my head. “Yes, he would. You shouldn’t even know to go after Mia. I didn’t even mean to leak that information to your side, and I still have. She’s Vince’s girlfriend; there’s no reason anyone on the outside should know to go after her. If you do, he’ll know you got that information from inside his family. Won’t take long for him to realize it was me. He won’t think I’m just talking to my boyfriend about my life—which happens to include his love life—he’s going to think I’ve taken moments of vulnerability he’s reluctantly shared with me and I’ve sold them out with the intent of exploiting him. I will be completely fucked and he’ll feel betrayed. He already doesn’t trust anybody, let’s not make it worse.”

“Mia talks to Mark about Mateo at the bakery. You’re not the only leak.”

“No, but that’s my fault, too. Mark shouldn’t even be at the bakery. He shouldn’t even know Mia. All of this comes back to me. I’m the leak.”

“You’re not…” He trails off, shaking his head. I understand this is aggravating. I am also aggravated.

“You need a different plan,” I state, sinking back into the couch. “There are safer ways to distract my brother than that one. He has more than one weakness.”

“Well, hell, I’m open to suggestions,” he states, dropping back against the couch with me.

I don’t want to exploit Mateo’s weaknesses at all, but if it has to be done, I’d rather it be a lesser betrayal. A weakness others have seen, something that his enemies may have been able to pick up on without me if they paid close enough attention. Sal has a professional reputation as being thorough and ruthless, so Mateo would probably consider him smart enough to pick up on an obvious chink in his armor.

“Beth,” I finally say.

Sal frowns. “Beth’s dead.”

I nod. “Beth is dead. Why is Beth dead?”

“Because she was a rat?”

“Because she cheated,” I correct. “He let her close and she stabbed him right in the heart. He’s going to kill the maid when he finds out your dad sent her anyway, so if we have to throw someone under the bus, we throw her.”

He contemplates, but he hasn’t quite pieced it all together.

I pull my Sal phone out of my pocket and open up the messages, scrolling through. Some of them are too specific, but these are clearly messages between two lovers. Messages that started a few months prior to Meg being sent to kill Mateo. If I delete a few here and there, they’ll just be generic messages between two secret lovers.

I glance over at Sal, cocking my head. He’s definitely hot and charismatic enough to convince a woman to do something crazy for him.

Hell, here I sit, doing something absolutely fucking crazy.

“I think I have a plan,” I tell him.

—

I live in a state of constant anxiety after that talk at Sal’s house.

My plan is better than his, but there are still a ton of risks. Still plenty of things that have to go right, and plenty more that could go wrong. At the end of the day, Mateo will probably still hate me.