24. Emmett #2
“The old man said it the day you left that we should prepare for your return.”
I frown slightly.
This is exactly what’s fucking me up, the fact that Grandfather’s moves lately have been so weird.
“He’s waiting for you,” Rip says, then proceeds to open the doors before I can say or ask anything else.
Steeling myself, I walk into the office filled with shelves upon shelves of dark wood that hold books, different from my mother’s grand library.
Ahead, there’s a lone man sitting in a high back chair by the fireplace. His favorite place, and behind him is one of Grandfather’s closest friends, Dr. Brad.
“Sit, let him look at your wounds,” Grandfather says.
Dr. Brad bows to me, then he silently gets to work, removing my shirt to assess my wounds.
“How is it?” Grandfather demands.
“He was shot twice. The bullets were removed, but the bleeding hasn’t completely stopped.”
“Then fucking stop it!”
“Yes, sir,” Dr Brad says and immediately gets to work.
I sit there stoically for twenty minutes as my wounds are cleaned, stitched, and then wrapped in thick gauze.
I stare at Grandfather the entire time, studying his papery old face, my mind racing with the incredulity of this man.
He hasn’t stopped reading his book since I entered, but after Dr. Brad leaves, he closes the book and stares at me.
“Ask if you have questions,” he demands. “Stop staring at me like I’m an alien.”
“Aren’t you one?” I question, intentionally keeping my voice clear of any emotions.
“Does it feel like it?”
“You tell me.” I hold his stare coldly. “You go behind my back, dig up my life, manipulate the Hughes idiots on one burner, and get Vaughn moving on another, all that just to move me. But when I didn’t do what you expected, you made the girl a target, which triggered those bastards to set me up, attempting to have me brutally murdered, and you knew everything beforehand, didn’t you? ”
“Yes,” he answers simply, cleanly, not missing a beat.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
We glare at each other.
“You’re one of the most cunning old foxes to ever exist,” I mock. “Are you proud of yourself? Watching your play succeed when I almost lost my life?”
It took me these past few days to realize what this old man had been doing all along.
He fostered the hatred between me and his sons, intentionally raised Vaughn to be a whetstone for me, and when things got to a fever pitch, he brought out the girl he once abandoned by the side of the road years ago.
“And yet here you are,” he simply says. “Did you die, though?”
“Disappointed much?” I mock.
“Yes,” he says directly. “Did it have to take that long? A big man like you, laid up in a hospital for so many days like a weakling.”
I knew it!
“You knew everything,” I state, my fists clenched.
“Alessio, please, who do you think raised you? All those ruthless methods, how could I not see that you were intentionally making your uncles move against you?” the old man sneers.
“You played your cousin like a flute, making him think he had won by sending you away, but in fact, you just wanted time to get fixed for her!”
My God.
I thought all my moves were hidden and undetectable, but apparently not.
“If you knew all along, then why did you play along?” I demand. “By allowing Vaughn’s request to delay the decision, you hit several birds with one stone.”
“I was only doing what you wanted.”
I can’t help but react to this. “You… knew?”
“Of course I knew! Your mother often used those kinds of strategies, encouraging the enemy to act. They might think it’s their own initiative, not knowing they are being set up, influenced from within by a carefully calculating hand.
” Grandfather watches me with narrowed eyes.
“But you lack the mercy my Daphne had. You’re entirely too ruthless, encouraging your cousin and uncles to kill you just so you could create the present situation where you justifiably wipe all of them out! ”
And this right here is the crux of the story.
From the beginning, I wanted to create this situation of war, rebellion, and mutiny.
I wanted to move my uncles… but first, I needed to use the circumstances of having Angel announce to the family that she’s marrying Vaughn to make them feel confident enough to try and kill me.
But then the game changed.
At first, I didn’t care about this, but then, like a bolt from the blue, I found out that someone from the Hughes family had made contact with my Angel.
They even went as far as to entice her to come out to New York in the guise of meeting the long-lost parents she had been looking for.
This move was obviously to get me to act.
“This is what you wanted right from the start, isn’t it?” I ask him slowly as the pieces start falling into place.
The newspaper Ripley showed me months ago in Italy that had Senator Hughes’s candidacy news as a headline… I thought Rip was just tipping me off, but instead, Grandfather had moved already.
“You had already calculated everything before the night you told Vaughn and me that you were testing us, didn’t you?”
Grandfather watches me, then he chuckles.
“It took you this long to figure it out? I’m surprised,” he mocks.
“Why did you do it?”
“I told you already. My intention has always been the same since you were born, and it will remain till the end of my life.”
“What’s your fucking intention? To fuck me over?”
“To protect you!”
I fall silent, not sure if I heard that correctly.
“My intention has and will always be to protect you, ensure your life is better than mine, than your mother’s, and is more secure, come what may!” Grandfather’s voice is a low, deadly tone that makes me grow still in the chair.
The look in his eyes is burning with an inner flame that tells me he isn’t lying.
“You’ve been doing all this to protect me?” I’m stunned.
“If I don’t protect you, then what?” he snaps.
“Then why her?” I demand. “You should’ve left her alone! You abandoned her that night.”
“If I hadn’t, she would’ve died and you know it!”
My lungs seize from expanding at this confirmation. “Yes, it’s cruel that I abandoned Ivy, but I truly had no idea that she had been hurt. All I knew was that I had to act quickly to save the girl. Who knew how fate was going to play things out?”
At this, the old cripple actually laughs happily.
“The scared but brave little girl who screamed for your mother to be saved even after she had just lost her grandfather grew up to be a resilient, beautiful girl with strong survival instincts.”
I get up, unable to remain seated.
The old man sent me the link to listen in on the conversation he had with her, but he kept a lot of details, as if to threaten her.
“Why were you trying to intimidate her then?” I ask, watching him.
“To make sure she wouldn’t have any funny ideas of marrying your cousin, of course!”
“What?”
“After you threw off the marriage with Beaumont’s daughter, I had to find the reason why!
I thought that you loved that Beaumont girl!
You even went through the motions of sealing a marriage agreement with her with the help of your father, but imagine my shock when I realized it was all an act!
” he seethes but in the next second, he smiles. “But then I found her .”
“How?” I snap.
“Alessio, I’ve been doing this all my life. You resent me for pulling you in, training you to beyond the scope of fear and pain at a young age, but I killed my first man at the age of three! I have gathered intel far longer than you.”
The knowing smile on his face makes me realize I severely underestimated this old cripple.
“It took me years to connect the dots and see a pattern that whenever you ordered your men to kill, whenever you ordered a violent wipe out toward your uncles’ allies and friends, it was always after an attempt was made on Ivy Marie’s life, isn’t it?”
It’s like a bomb just dropped out of nowhere and exploded.
Grandfather stares at me, studying me while I sit there, speechless.
“Even that Beaumont girl you were supposed to marry, you were never as brutally violent and merciless for her as you are for Ivy Marie, so what does that mean to knowing eyes watching?”
I don’t know what to make of this man, yet he’s easily describing my one pressure point with such calm. It’s sickening.
“All the other times, you didn’t give a damn about my sons’ actions.
In fact, you ignored them,” he states. “But whenever they tried to kill that girl, the attempted burglary when she was in boarding school, the fire when she was at that public library, the doctor that poisoned her inhaler when she was seventeen, all those times you shook Heaven and earth just to destroy my stupid sons and their so-called power… what do we make of that?”
It's the fact that Grandfather is reciting most of the attempts on Angel’s life without hesitation that makes me realize he has known about all these matters long ago.
“You never left them any breathing space. When you moved, you were diligent, swift, and fatal. You completely weakened them for years to the point where they’ve realized they have absolutely no chance at all to take over my position, and I let you.”
I scoff then. “Didn’t you do that to keep your position safe?”
“Well, yes, but if I died earlier, what would’ve happened to you?
” he questions coldly. “You were still young and hadn’t established your own foothold yet.
Meanwhile, your uncles had already made friends all over the world.
Even if you controlled the Outfit, if those idiots were to partner with their friends to come for you, how long would it take to kill you? ”
He's right. My uncles were well connected and established, but I wasn’t. I was alone.