Chapter 30
Felix
Ishould have been devastated to see Tessa like that. I should have wanted to rip her father’s throat out for hurting her, made him pay for what he did.
Instead, I felt relief. Tessa’s father would never pay back the debt he owed me, and she would be mine forever.
Even if by some miracle he scraped together the money, it wouldn’t matter. I’d find a way to bind her to me anyway—twist fate, bend circumstance, do whatever it took. She would be mine, and no one, not even her father, would ever take her away.
Especially if she might be carrying my child. Then there would be no doubt.
I traced my fingers along her bare abdomen, feeling the gentle curve beneath my touch, imagining what might be growing there.
Every movement, every breath, belonged to me, and the thought hummed through every nerve.
It was hungry, possessive, unrelenting, and it wouldn’t go away when I thought about her.
Then my gaze flicked to the corner of the room, to the fleeting memory of my cousin’s face, the way he had lingered around us too long, casually asking for information. And suddenly it all clicked—the ledgers, the missing money, the clues of the brownstone. He knew about all of it.
Rocco had mentioned something about Cosimo’s side of the family getting almost nothing from my grandma, which he had found odd. It was because my cousin—and probably his family—had been siphoning money from my grandparents.
And now he was taking it from me, all while feigning ignorance. I felt the heat of anger simmering just beneath the surface, threatening to boil over.
I tried to stay quiet, stay still, to not wake Tessa. But my hand brushed too sharply against the sheets, a soft rustle that broke the silence. Her eyes fluttered open, and her gaze found mine, searching, soft.
The remnants of sleep clouded her eyes, but they cleared as she focused on my face. “What’s wrong?” she murmured, voice barely above a whisper.
“I just figured out the rest of the ledger,” I said, my voice low, precise. “Who’s been siphoning the money.”
“What?!” she said, instantly jolted out of her half asleep state. “Who?”
“Cosimo,” I said, letting the name hang in the air, heavy with accusation. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
“Your cousin?” she asked, her voice tinged with disbelief. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I explained how my grandma hadn’t left anything to Cosimo, and now my money was going missing.
How the timing was too convenient, how he just happened to be asking questions at the right moment, casually probing for information, pretending ignorance while lining his pockets.
Every gap in the ledgers, every unexplained sum, screamed his involvement, and I could feel the pieces falling into place in my mind, each one pointing straight to him.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, her voice shaky, disbelief lacing every word.
“I wish it weren’t true,” I murmured, my eyes fixed on hers. “I’m not looking forward to what I have to do.”
She cringed, but didn’t ask what I was going to do to him. Then, she changed the subject. “Thanks for helping me with the last clue. I would have never figured it out without your help.”
“I think you would have,” I said. “I just sped up the process a bit—I’m around Cosimo more.”
“Now what?” she asked, her voice tentative.
“I need to make a call. Go back to bed.”
I leaned down and pressed my lips to hers, a brief kiss that tasted of both command and possession.
Her eyes widened, caught between surprise and trust, and I felt that familiar coil tighten low in my chest—the part of me that wanted to claim her, tether her to me completely.
Even this small contact reminded me how much of her attention, her world, belonged to me.
I walked downstairs and into an unused office, somewhere I could have a private conversation. Tessa’s cleaning had turned the room near spotless—now, the only faults were those of aging.
I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and dialed Rocco’s number, letting it ring once, twice. My mind ran over the details again—the ledgers, the missing money, Cosimo’s careless probing. Every piece of evidence pointed to him, and I wasn’t about to let him slip away unnoticed.
“This better be good,” My brother said, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice.
It was four a.m. He probably had been asleep. I didn’t soften my tone. “Cosimo,” I said, each syllable deliberate. “He’s been siphoning money from us. Every missing sum, every gap in the ledger—it all points to him.”
There was a pause on the line, the kind that made me grit my teeth. I didn’t care that I’d woken him.
“What are you on about?” Rocco said skeptically.
So, I told him everything from the past few months.
“Wait, the girl who’s your maid found the ledger?”
I didn’t flinch. “Yes,” I said, my voice low, precise. “Tessa noticed a lot of inconsistencies while cleaning.”
There was a pause on the line, and then Rocco’s voice cut through, sharp with disbelief. “Why do you care about her so much?” he asked, suspicion threading through every word. “She’s just your maid. You’re putting a lot of faith into things she found.”
“She’s nothing,” I lied, the words feeling like acid on my tongue. “Just some debtors brat. The documents she found don’t lie, though.”
I let the pause hang, letting him imagine her as insignificant, even as my mind traced every detail about her—how careful she was, how observant, how utterly mine in ways no one else could see. My chest tightened with a low, possessive heat, but my voice stayed steady, controlled.
“Ok,” he responded. “Lets take care of it.”
Rocco and I pulled up to the strip club. We were here to pick up Cosimo, under the guise of needing help with interrogating some guy we found sniffing around our drug storage.
But that was a lie, obviously. Every detail about this “mission” was fabricated—just another way to get Cosimo out where we could confront him. He had been careless, greedy, and now it was time to make him pay for thinking he could take from me unnoticed.
I parked the car in a darkened alley, and Cosimo hopped in. The way he slid in the back was far too casual, like he hadn’t been siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars from us.
Rocco glanced at me in the rearview, the kind of look that doesn’t ask anything and still says everything.
His jaw was tight. I felt the car settle around us, the engine a low animal.
For a second I let the ordinary noise of the city fill the space—tires on wet asphalt, a distant siren—because if I didn’t I could hear the tiny, furious calculations in my own head.
“Club been busy, Cosimo?” I asked, voice smooth.
Cosimo leaned back like we were just catching up, one arm slung over the seat, a grin carved too wide across his face. “Always, man. You know how it is. Cash flowing, girls dancing, drinks never stop. Place runs itself.”
“Don’t I,” I said, feigning a chuckle.
I eased the car out of the alley, headlights cutting across slick asphalt as the city blurred by. Nobody spoke. Rocco watched the streets roll past with that same stone-faced calm, while Cosimo lounged in the back like he hadn’t a care in the world.
The further we drove, the thinner the city grew.
Neon and storefronts gave way to silent warehouses and cracked pavement, the kind of district that forgot how to breathe after dark.
My hands stayed steady on the wheel, but inside my head the math kept running—how much he’d skimmed, how far trust had slipped, how this night would end.
By the time the warehouse came into view, Cosimo’s grin looked painted on, and I could already feel the air sharpening for what came next.
I killed the headlights half a block early, letting the car roll the last stretch in shadow. The warehouse crouched at the end of the street, all rusted metal and boarded windows, the kind of place nobody had cared about in years. I pulled up to the dented loading bay doors, then cut the engine.
“You got any plans for this guy we’re interrogating?” Cosimo asked, none the wiser, his tone almost playful as he finally slid out of the car.
If only he knew. “Oh, just a few,” I responded, slamming my car door.
The three of us entered the warehouse. The air was heavy with dust and old oil, the concrete floor echoing under our steps. Ettore, Emilio, and Vincenzo stood waiting near the center, their shadows long in the harsh light of a single hanging bulb.
Cosimo hesitated just a fraction, caught off guard by the audience, then forced his grin back into place. “Didn’t know it was a party,” he said, voice thin.
“Only for you,” I replied, letting the words settle over him as the door clanged shut behind us.
“What do you mean—” he started, but before he could finish Rocco had grabbed him and dragged him to a chair in the center of the room.
Cosimo yelped, stumbling over his own feet as Rocco’s grip tightened around his arm. The chair scraped against the concrete, ringing out like a warning. He twisted, tried to break free, but Rocco’s strength didn’t give him an inch.
Vincenzo came up behind him and quickly wrapped duct tape around Cosimo’s wrists, pulling them tight until the struggle only made them dig in deeper. Cosimo hissed through gritted teeth, twisting and jerking, but the tape held fast, binding him firmly to the chair.
“What do you think you’re doing, cousin?” he hissed at me.
“What do I think I’m doing?” I let out an incredulous laugh. “Tell me, what do you think you’re doing by stealing money from us?”
Cosimo’s eyes narrowed, panic and anger sparking in equal measure. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve just been running the club.”
I couldn’t contain my laughter. Emilio let out an audible snort, the sound bouncing off the warehouse walls, while Rocco just rolled his eyes, the corners of his mouth twitching in irritation at our theatrics. Cosimo’s face burned red, his bravado crumbling with each passing second.
“You think this is funny?” he spat through clenched teeth, “Wait until I tell your father—”
“You won’t be telling him anything,” I said, holding up the ledger Tessa had found, and Cosimo’s face paled. “You had men break into the house looking for this, didn’t you?”
He swallowed so hard I could see it move at the base of his throat. “I—no, cousin, I swear—nobody—”
“You’ve always been full of shit, Cosimo,” Rocco said, looking at him with a look of disdain.
I stepped closer too, letting the ledger rest in my hands like a loaded weight. “You thought you could take from us, hide it, and get away with it,” I said, voice low, deliberate. “Just like you did our grandpa.”
“And when Grandma put a stop to it and left you with nothing,” Rocco said, finishing my sentence the way only my twin could. “You didn’t take it well. So you went looking for a new pocket to pick—ours.”
I motioned for Emilio to bring the bucket of water over. It shifted with a soft, ominous slosh that made Cosimo’s eyes flick to it and never leave. I didn’t have to say anything more; the suggestion sat in the room like a second light, simple and undeniable.
I grabbed a rag and held it between my fingers, letting the dampness show in the way it sagged. I didn’t touch him with it at first, just the sight of it was enough. Cosimo’s pupils jumped; his hands trembled against the tape as if the rag were already a promise.
Emilio came closer with the bucket, slow and deliberate.
Vincenzo stayed where he could see every flinch.
I dipped the rag, squeezed it once so a slow drip formed on the edge, and let a single bead fall, running in a thin dark line toward Cosimo’s knee.
He made a noise that wasn’t a sob yet, more like the sound a man makes when he realizes the floor’s gone out from under him.
“Tell me where the money went,” I said, soft, patient. “And I might consider letting you live. You are my cousin, after all.”
Cosimo folded before I even had to waterboard him. He had always been weak like that.
I let him ramble, and I realized we wouldn’t be able to recover most of it.
Cash disappears fast when it’s laundered through men who know how to melt paper trails: shell accounts in cities three time zones away, envelopes exchanged at docks under the cover of fog, payoffs tucked into the lining of a coat and spent the next night.
By the time we could trace a line, it would fork into ten other hands and then vanish.
He swallowed, the sound wet and small in the cavernous room. “Felix… let me go. Please. I’ll make it right—just let me walk out of here. I can fix it. I can—” His voice broke on the last word, a ragged confession wrapped in desperation.
“If we kill him our family will be pissed at us,” Rocco stated, as matter of fact.
“But if it’s an accident… well, that’s just unfortunate,” I finished, letting the last word sit between us like a verdict.
“Vincenzo, Emilio—lets run him by our warehouse and grab some meth,” I said looking my cousin in the eye. “Then we’ll ditch him in a hotel with a drugged out prostitute who can find him in the morning.”
Our family would never suspect us. Cosimo was known for partying hard and fucking any girl he could get his hands on. An “accidental overdose” would be the perfect cover-up.
As I leaned back, watching Cosimo’s face drain of color, I felt a rush of satisfaction. He looked like a cornered animal, desperate and aware of the trap closing in around him. I could almost taste the fear that radiated off him, mingling with the stale smell of the warehouse.
I savored the moment, watching the panic wash over Cosimo's face as he begged us not to do it. The power surged through me like a drug, intoxicating and warm, wrapping around me. His desperation was palpable, and I relished it.
I turned away, letting the shadows swallow my outline. My job was done, the city beyond indifferent, and the ledger still rested heavy in my hands. Cosimo’s fate was set; our message was clear. And for tonight, that was enough.