Chapter 9 #2
“This is bullshit,” he repeated in the same taut, barely contained tone. “He loved your father. Fabio was his oldest friend.”
She shook her head. “My mother saw him. She’d finished work early.
She saw your father leave the alleyway at the back of our apartment block and get into his car.
The only reason your father didn’t see her is because he turned left instead of right.
She found my father dead in a pool of his own blood. ”
His lips barely moved. “If any of this is true, why didn’t she go to the authorities?”
“And give your father a reason to kill her, too? She was eight months pregnant with me.”
“Yes, she was pregnant with you, my father’s goddaughter.” The dangerous glare in his eyes deepened. “You expect me to believe your mother made my father your godparent when she thought he’d murdered your father?”
“She was protecting me as my father told her to do – your father had been acting weird around him since he’d told him he wanted out. He told her that if anything happened to him, she was to protect herself and me. The only way she could do that was by pretending ignorance.”
Tommaso was shaking his head, his features a contortion of barely concealed fury and cynicism.
“It’s the truth,” she said, striving to keep her tone matter-of-fact when her heart had swollen, its beat accelerated.
This was the first time she’d ever spoken of this, and while she’d fully expected that Tommaso would at some point raise the subject, she’d never imagined he would be ignorant of the facts.
“She had the presence of mind to call your father before she called the police, and when he came to her, she comforted him in his ‘grief’, and even told him to find who’d done it and get vengeance for her.
She did everything she could to protect me, because if he’d suspected what she knew or had seen, he would have killed us both.
She spent sixteen years letting your father play father to me and letting him play the benevolent, heartbroken friend, making sure to only speak about him in loving and grateful tones, all the while nursing grief and hatred in her heart that she was completely unable to let out in case he was spying on us and had bugged our home and devices.
Which he had, because I found them. She kept everything bottled up so tightly that it festered inside her and became cancerous, so as far as I’m concerned, your father didn’t just kill my father, he killed my mother too. ”
He was still shaking his head, his jawline now so tight she half-expected it to snap. “Your mother told you all this in the days before she died?”
“Yes.”
“After the cancer had spread to her brain?”
“She never lost her faculties.” Right to the very end, her mother had remained Gabriella’s loving protector.
He brought his face down to hers. His eyes rang with an antipathy that made her shiver. “She did, because what you have just described are the ravings of a mad woman.”
Trembling, Gabriella jutted her chin and held her ground. “She waited sixteen years to tell me the truth. She knew exactly what she was saying.”
“It was the ravings of a lunatic.” Tommaso’s watch beeped.
He glanced at it and straightened. “The staff are back.” Climbing off the stool, he brought his face back to hers and flared his nostrils.
“I’m going out, so you can amuse yourself.
Just know this – if you repeat any of this to anyone, you will spend the rest of your miserable life in a cage. ”
Tommaso drove his Ferrari aimlessly for an hour before heading back to the villa.
By rights, the Ferrari belonged to Rico.
Months ago, Tommaso and Mattia had made a bet with their younger brother.
Rico had undisputably won, but his refusal to cash in meant Tommaso’s favourite car and the Patek Phillipe on his wrist were still his.
Whenever he looked at the watch, it reminded him of how Rico had walked away from the family business for a woman.
He would never understand how he’d done that.
Or why. He didn’t dispute that Marisa was beautiful and that she had an aura about her that suggested she moved with angels rather than the devils the Espositos tended to mix with, but to walk away from everything as Rico had done to spend his life fixing up old cars?
To Tommaso’s mind, those were the actions of a madman; just as Gabriella’s story had been the retelling of words first told by a madwoman.
What he did not doubt was that she believed it, and the longer and faster he drove, the more doubts crept in.
But he couldn’t believe it. His father had been as far from an angel as it had been possible to be, but he’d never lied to his family.
He’d never whitewashed his past to them, never spared his sons the details of the brutal life he’d once lived.
It was a brutality that had lessened as his wealth had mushroomed, the past buried with rigid enforcement, the shadowed world policed by trusted enforcers, any violence so many steps removed it could never come back to him.
Fabio Romano’s death was the one death his father had never got over. His vengeance against the Ranieri family, which had turned the walls of Naples red for months, was the stuff of legend.
Sickened with himself for allowing Gabriella’s story to put doubt in his mind about his father, Tommaso returned to the villa in a worse mood than when he’d left.
He found her in the living room, curled on a sofa, fast asleep.
Hating the pang that shot through his heart just to look at her, he sent the staff home and fixed two strong coffees. Back in the living room, he shook her shoulder.
She opened her eyes and lifted her head, blinking away her tiredness as she covered a wide yawn. “What time is it?”
“Talking time.”
Gabriella took a mental deep breath and sat up. It didn’t escape her attention that Tommaso had seated himself on the armchair he’d taken that first night when he’d made her strip for him. His back was straight, his huge feet planted on the floor.
Was that really only three nights ago? It felt like that many months had passed.
Shivering at the coldness still emanating from him, she rubbed her arms before reaching for the cup he’d placed on the glass coffee table next to her with a couple more painkillers. She hugged it in her hands and took a sip. The coffee was strong, sweet and creamy, exactly as she liked it.
“Did you check my story out?” she asked quietly. Gabriella had watched Tommaso screech out of the electric gates in his Ferrari with a weight in her chest she’d struggled to breathe through.
His black gaze was obsidian, his handsome features immovable. “I didn’t need to.”
“You don’t want to believe it?”
His eyes narrowed. “My father had no need to lie. Not to me or my brothers.”
“He did if he wanted to keep his own legend alive in your eyes.” That was the conclusion Gabriella had come to before she’d drifted off to sleep, after she’d spent an age turning it over and over in her mind.
“He had no need to lie,” Tommaso repeated, leaning forward. “Your mother was in the grip of a delusion, but I am curious – you promised her that you would destroy all of us, yes?”
Taking another sip of her coffee, she nodded.
“Why did you go along with it?” Animation flickered through the obsidian.
“I can understand why you made the promise to her – she was dying – but why try and fulfil it?” The animation gave way to anger.
“Even if you believed my father killed your father, why go after the rest of us? What the fuck did we ever do to you? We were children. Siena is a month younger than you and was still in the womb just like you were. She was your sister in all but name, but you were conspiring to have her spend the rest of her life rotting in a prison.”
“A sister who wants me dead, the same as the rest of you!” she retaliated.
Unbearably close to tears, she put the cup on the table before her shaking hands spilt the coffee everywhere.
“My mother told me to take you all down because you’re all the same as him, and she was right.
I watched you all embrace the shadowy world without a moment’s hesitation – Siena demanded she be allowed in.
” Shaking her head, Gabriella threw her arms in the air.
“Look at you all, putting on the act of rich philanthropists when you’re nothing but jacked up thugs running an empire built on the blood shed by people like my father and the Ranieris.
You want to know why your father lied about killing mine?
It was to justify his war to take down his biggest rivals.
They had control of the biggest district; control he took by killing them all.
That’s what he built his empire on, and whether you believe he killed my father to start the war or believe Marco Ranieri put the bullet in his head, the result was the same, and you all know it.
Not one of you hasn’t got blood on your hands. ”
“The only blood that’s been shed is from those who chose to be a part of this world. Not one person enters without knowing the consequences of living in it.”
“Bullshit!” she cried, jumping to her feet.
“I was born into this world without any say in it, and what’s Niccolo’s lover if she’s not innocent?
You set your men scouring England and the rest of Europe to find her!
What were you going to do when you found her?
Make her a cup of English tea? The only reason she’s still breathing is because Niccolo traded my name for her life, and the only reason I’m still breathing is because you chose to play a warped game with my life instead of killing me.
If Mattia or Siena had been tasked with the job, I wouldn’t be standing here now. ”
“If you hadn’t been plotting to have us all imprisoned, you wouldn’t be standing here at all!
” he roared before moving with such fluidity that she barely noticed the transition from him being seated to him being right before her with his hand holding her chin.
His gorgeous face contorted, and suddenly he was cupping her cheeks, his face so close to hers she could feel the heat of his breath on her mouth.
“This is the life we were all born into, Gabba, and we all made our choices. You chose to punish me and my siblings for the sins you believe were committed by our father. That was your choice, and for as long as I breathe, I will never understand why I let you live.”
“You let me live as punishment for me refusing to sleep with you,” she spat, making a fist of his shirt. “You were so intent on punishing me that you didn’t stop to ask why I’d been working to destroy you. I thought you knew, but you didn’t, and until I told you why, you didn’t care.”
The tip of his nose brushed against hers, his fingers sliding round her head and threading through her hair. “I cared, Gabba. More than I ever should have.” With a muttered curse, Tommaso turned his face away from hers and roughly dragged his lips down her neck.