CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #3
She twisted her lips once and then nodded.
“We looked more alike than we wanted to admit. After all, we both had Santino’s blood running through our veins.
We were born just a few months apart. We were the right age…
and somehow, everything seemed to work in our favor.
Serafina had been living away from her family long enough that she had grown and changed, and they wouldn’t recognize her truly.
She looked different than how she did the last time her family saw her.
She had grown into a woman. And if I were to take her place…
with us resembling each other so closely… ”
“No one would bat an eye,” I finished for her. “You fit right in.”
“Bingo.” She smiled cruelly.
“Fuck, you’re insane. A fucking genius, but insane.”
She lifted her chin in an arrogant way that both impressed me and pissed me off.
“Do you realize how dangerous your…plan was? How deadly could this have been for you? One small mistake, one tiny flaw… and it would have been fatal.”
“The things I’ve done to get here, to get to you…” her voice trailed off. “It was all worth it.”
“Fuck me, you’re actually more unhinged that I thought you were.”
Than even I was.
Holy shit, she actually frightened me with her recklessness and fearless audacity.
But she was wrong about one thing.
Terribly wrong.
I leaned forward, bringing our faces closer.
“I have to applaud your brain. You truly impressed me, Serafina.” I shook my head.
Fuck, this was going to be hard to get used to.
“Elyssa. But it pains me, it truly fucking pains me to tell you that all of this… all the planning, the orchestrating you did…it was all for nothing. Because I didn’t kill Angelo Garza. ”
She hissed in response, baring her teeth at me. “Lies.”
I nodded. I knew she wouldn’t believe me. That was fine.
But I needed her to hear my truth, even if she didn’t believe me. “I don’t know what you heard. I don’t know what you chose to believe, but I know what I did, what I had control over, and I didn’t kill Angelo that night.”
I had given him twenty-fours to move, a new country, new identities for him and his children. I remembered leaving his house, receiving the call from my father to ask me to come back because he needed me to handle a business urgently.
He hadn’t known I had found Angelo yet after all the years it took me to track him down. No one knew. No one except the two soldiers with me.
But I killed them myself that night before I flew out, back to New York, to where my father was waiting for me.
Serafina’s version of that night didn’t add up.
There was something else, something bigger than what she knew, what I knew.
And I needed to find out who the fuck gave that order.
My chest tightened.
Because… the answer was obvious. But I needed solid proof. I needed to really know.
“You don’t believe me now. My words mean nothing to you because you’ve lived six years with this truth of yours.” Her body shook with her rage. “That’s okay. You will believe me, eventually.”
She opened her mouth—to argue, to scream, to call me a liar again—and I moved.
My arm snaked forward before she could register what was happening, before the fight-or-flight response had time to fire in her nervous system. My hand found her neck and I wrapped my fingers around the delicate column of her throat.
She tensed. Every muscle in her body went rigid beneath the blanket, her eyes widening with a flashing fear and blind rage.
Her lips parted, forming the beginning of a sound, my name, maybe, to curse me but the pressure was already there, my thumb and forefinger finding the exact point on either side of her carotid, pressing inward with measured, controlled force.
I hated this.
The guilt was immediate and visceral, a sickening twist in my gut that made my lungs clench almost painfully.
She had been through enough. Just some days ago she had a killer’s hand around her throat, suffocating her, dragging the very breath she needed to stay alive out of her body and now I was the one with my fingers around her throat.
After I had promised to keep her safe. To never hurt her.
The irony of it, the absolute cruelty of it, wasn’t lost on me.
But it was necessary.
She tried to make a sound, a protest, a gasp, or something in between but the blood flow was already being restricted, the oxygen to her brain diminishing with each passing second.
Her eyes locked onto mine, and I watched the confusion in them sharpen into a dawning, terrible understanding. She knew what I was doing. She knew, and she couldn’t stop it.
“Shh,” I murmured, trying to placate her, the word barely audible. My other hand came up, cradling the back of her head, supporting the weight of it before her head could roll back. “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”
Her eyelids fluttered and then her eyes slid closed. The tension drained from her body. Her breathing slowed, deepened, the rhythm of unconsciousness settling over her with a gentleness that felt terribly obscene given what I’d just done.
I held her there for a moment, my fingers still pressed against the pulse point in her neck, feeling the steady, diminished thud of her heartbeat beneath my thumb.
Alive. Unharmed.
I released her throat and let my hand fall away.
It was time to take my wife home.
And it was time for me to find the truth.