Page 97 of Claimed By the Enemy

“Whiskey?” he offers.

“No thanks.”

“Ah, yes, I forgot. You’re going to be a father soon. Congratulations.”

The casual way he mentions Sophie’s pregnancy makes my skin crawl. “Thank you.”

“A baby. How wonderful.” Riccardo settles into his usual chair, the same one he sat in when I was sixteen and broken by grief. “Tell me, figlio, does Sophie know the whole truth about her parents?”

“What truth would that be?”

“About how they really died.”

“I know how they died, Uncle. The same way my parents died. Because of you.”

Riccardo’s glass pauses halfway to his lips. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. You killed them. All of them. Marco, Aurora, my mother, my father. You orchestrated everything.”

“Domenico, you’re clearly upset. Perhaps we should-”

“I’m not upset. I’m done. Done with the lies, done with the manipulation, done with you poisoning my family from the inside.”

Riccardo sets down his glass with careful precision. “Those are very serious accusations.”

“They’re facts. I know about the falsified documents. The fake witnesses. The way you convinced Uncle Enzo that my father killed his family.”

“Do you?”

“I know you’ve been playing us against each other for sixteen years while you consolidated power from both families.”

“And how exactly would you know any of this?”

“Because Uncle Enzo and I compared notes. Turns out, when you remove your lies from the equation, the truth becomes pretty clear.”

Riccardo stands up, moving to the window that overlooks Central Park. “The truth. Such an interesting concept.”

“What’s interesting about it?”

“The truth is that your father was weak. That he trusted the wrong people, made alliances with families that were beneath him.”

“You mean the Bellinis.”

“I mean, anyone who threatened the purity of what we’d built.” Riccardo turns back to me, and for the first time, I see something cold and calculating in his eyes. “Your father was planning to merge with Marco Bellini. Can you imagine? Diluting the Moretti name with street trash from Naples.”

“They were our friends.”

“They were parasites. And your father was too soft to see it.”

“So you killed him.”

“I saved our family from destruction.”

The casual admission hits like a physical blow. “You killed my parents.”

“I eliminated threats to our legacy. Just as I’ll eliminate this threat.”

“What threat?”