“What?”
“Fucking look down there Aiden.” He points down below at driveway within the opened gates.
I look through my binoculars and see one lone black Sedan.
Next to it is an elderly man with shoulder length silver hair. As I watch him I feel I’ve seen him before. His back is turned so I can’t see his face. It’s his slightly hunched posture I recognize.
I stare though until the fucker turns around and I see instantly why Maksim called me over.
The man I’m looking at is Jeshero Nikitin, Gabriella’s father.
The sight of him standing in a facility that belongs to the Order is one more piece of the puzzle and possibly the biggest piece since he was a man who knew the ins and outs of my home as it was back then.
He would have known when both me and Gabriella would be at home. Near enough where we were at all times.
He was always with my father and his men, carrying out orders and always at either my father’s home or at Romanov Logistics.
He could have been someone watching my movements in plain sight and I wouldn’t know.
More importantly, he’s a man who would have known Jude and his father because they were all in business together.
It wasn’t someone close to me who betrayed me.
It was someone close to my father, and someone close to Gabriella.
I always believed the attack on my home felt like someone opened the gates and allowed the enemy to walk right in.
Well that’s exactly what would have happened if my father in law went to my home. No one would have questioned a visit from him. He would have gone into the house with no problem and no one would have thought anything of it.
He came to see Gabriella and Aleksei every day after she‘d given birth and even tried to tell her she shouldn’t be going back to work so soon after having the baby. He would have known her work schedule and known she went to close up the salon at night when her staff finished for the day.
But that night he got it wrong.
It was him.
Gabriella’s father. But why?
He didn’t want me to marry his daughter. But did he hate me that much that he wanted to kill me?
Maybe he did because he stood to lose something by the loss of opportunity.
Gabriella was supposed to marry Jude. Dominic said Jude made that plan to kill me and take her like he had permission, so maybe her father gave it to him.
I glance back at Maksim seeing how wrong I was and for the first time in nearly a decade I allow him to feel like my cousin. A man I should trust.
“It wasn’t me Aiden. It must have been him,” Maksim says.
When I look back down with my binoculars who I see next makes my analysis it irrefutable.
A little dark haired boy gets out of the car. I’m fully zoomed in so I can see his face.
His face that looks just like mine with his mother’s eyes.
That’s Aleksei.
The parent in me makes me bolt forward like a wild beast but Maksim holds me back with all his strength.
“You can’t Aiden. You’re dead if you run down there like that,” he argues.