29. Lorenzo
CHAPTER 29
Lorenzo
I couldn’t get Isabella to calm down. She was sobbing and shaking and begging for me to help her mother and sister. Renaldo offered to drive us back to the estate, and I sat in the back seat with Isabella wrapped in my arms.
“It’s going to be okay,” I murmured, rubbing at her belly. I had seen her do it countless times in an effort to self-soothe, so I mimicked it now, hoping to be able to do the same for her.
She shook her head. “He’s going to kill them.”
I couldn’t promise her that he wouldn’t. In all honesty, her mother was probably already dead. He’d had her worked over with a pair of brass knuckles. I’d seen men twice her size die from internal bleeding after a less savage beating than she got. The sister would certainly suffer the same fate, but I wasn’t going to tell Isabella that.
I hushed her softly, still rubbing her belly. “We’ll be home soon,” I promised her and hoped that Amalia would be able to get her to settle.
She continued to shake and sob for the remainder of the ride, and when Renaldo finally pulled into the driveway, Amalia and Elio were waiting for us. Isabella took one look at Amalia and broke down even more, and my cousin’s wife took her into her arms and held her, rocking her gently. “You shouldn’t have seen that,” she murmured and petted Isabella’s back.
Amalia led the way back into the house, wrapped around Isabella like a warm blanket. “Santino is alive?” Elio asked me.
I nodded. “I think Artem is too. The shooter at Castello’s was Russian, but Nikolai swore that he had never seen him before.”
Elio sneered. “You trust him?”
We walked into the house. Amalia dug out a tea mug from the cabinet and set the kettle on to boil. “Not completely, no” I explained as we watched her. “But Nikolai swore he didn’t recognize the dead man who conveniently wore his brand. With everyone assuming Artem is dead, it’s the perfect time to create a war. If we’re all distracted with each other, he could sweep in and set himself up like a king.”
Elio agreed with me. “Is that fucker a cat or something?” he asked. “Man’s got nine lives.”
Isabella sipped at her tea with shaking hands. All I wanted was to pull her into my arms and keep her there, warm and protected, but I had other things that I needed to decide on tonight. “We’ll make sure that this is the last one he gets,” I said.
Isabella put her mug down on the counter and took a deep breath. Her cheeks were still wet, but at the very least, she wasn’t openly weeping anymore. “My mother is dead, isn’t she?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse.
I shrugged. “The chances of her taking such a beating and surviving is rare,” I told her. “I mean, I couldn’t say for sure, but?—”
“She would have catastrophic internal bleeding,” Isabella said. “Possibly even brain damage from the blows to her face and head.”
Of course, she would see it from the medical angle. Even if it hurt her to do so, she couldn’t help but assess what she could see with her nursing training. “Yeah, dolcezza , exactly.”
Isabella shivered. Her fingers tightened around her tea. “So, you need to focus the rescue on Gemma,” she said. “She needs to get out tonight. Before they do the same thing to her.”
“ Dolcezza .”
She shook her head, and I could nearly hear the creaking of the porcelain in her hands, she was holding onto it so tightly. Amalia reached over and gently extracted from her. “You have to,” she insisted. “Please, we can't leave her with him. What if he decides that Gemma is worth more to him alive than she is dead?” She was starting to look gray. The more she spoke, the more ashen she became. “Gemma is pretty. Prettier than me. What if he realizes that he could use her to pay off future debts? What if he has already?”
Before I actually met Santino Rossi properly, I might have disagreed with her. The drunk that talked me into taking Isabella to cover his million plus debt was not the same man who had become a loyal lamprey on a shark like Artem Volkov. He absolutely would keep his younger daughter for his own gains.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go after her.”
Isabella shuddered. “Thank you.”
“But we’re doing this my way,” I said. “I can’t trust that Artem is any more dead than we thought that Santino was. I need to send the very best.”
“Send? You’re not going?” Her nose scrunched.
“I’m not leaving you in anyone else’s hands,” I told her. “The last time I went after your sister, it was a trap.”
“But we know he has her this time. This wasn’t his voice over a call; I heard her scream.”
“But you didn’t see her,” I pointed out. “How do you know that he didn’t kill her first and record those screams while he did it?”
I could tell that Isabella hadn’t thought of that. She clapped her hand over her mouth and jumped off her barstool, running for the powder room. Amalia sighed. “Did you have to say that to her?” she asked.
“Yes, because it could be true. It’s something that I would have done, if I wanted to lure someone to me.”
Amalia’s frown deepened, and then it slipped away, leaving her looking tired. “I shouldn’t be surprised by anything you do,” she said, mostly to herself. Then, she leveled me with a look. “You aren’t a good man, Lorenzo.”
“That also shouldn’t surprise you,” I said. “You’ve lived in this house long enough, and your own father isn’t a saint.”
“You have a chance to be a good man now, though,” she said. “Rescue Isabella’s sister and bring her back here.”
“And if she’s dead already? If I’m right?” Telling Isabella that we found her sister already torn to shreds would break her, and I told Amalia that much.
“At least she would know that you tried,” Amalia told me. When I didn’t respond, she made a sound of frustration and looked at Elio, who shrugged. “You know how the men feel about her,” she said.
I did. Elio had made that pretty clear. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“If you send men who don’t like her after her precious, baby sister, and they come back empty-handed, she’ll always wonder why. Even if they reported back that she was already dead, had been dead long before that call, Isabella will have it in the back of her mind that they lied and killed her themselves for spite.”
Imprecazione .