Page 146 of Fighting With Light

Marco Costa covered his ass and collected all the evidence he’d need to get rid of Fred if he ever had to. This would easily send him to prison for life. And if I were a mobster like Costa, I’d have Fred killed while in prison, and no one would blink an eye. It’s admittedly a good plan.

I look up at Aelia, and she’s staring at me already. “This is exactly what we needed,” I tell her.

She nods and wrings her hands together. Something else is on her mind.

“What? Did you find something else?”

She bites her lip. “You can’t use it for the case,” she says.

I stare at her a moment before snapping at her and realize she’s right. Before I can open my mouth, Emerson speaks up.

“She’s right. Three, if you provide that information in your evidence for the Feds, it will open an investigation into them, and you just killed Costa. I don’t know how deep their pockets are, but I’m not sure they’re deep enough to cover that up.”

I glance at Aelia, and she nods. “My brother will do his best, we discussed it, and most will think it was an enemy, a meeting gone wrong. It happens all the time in the mob world. They will bury him, and that will be that.”

“There’s no way they would connect the two unless Romeo or Mia talk, and they won’t,” I say and glance at Aelia.

“They have had plenty of chances to do that, they would never, you know, how snitches are viewed,” she says.

“But this will stop him from becoming governor. We needed something to stop him, and this is it,” I say. I understand what they’re saying, but this will eviscerate my father in the public eye. It’s perfect.

“Are you willing to play Russian roulette, Three? Because it sure sounds like it. There is zero guarantee that it wouldn’t be traced back to us,” Emerson grunts.

“The goal was to bring our fathers down, Liam. We did that with Marco…” she trails off.

“Spit it out, princess,” I snap.

She glares back, and I immediately feel bad about it.

“If we present the case with everything else we have, then reorganize the evidence of that poor woman, I think we can give them the pictures, but that’s it. We can’t give them the texts. If your father knows we have them and wedon’tgive it to the Feds, then, well, if he’s anything like my father, he will keep his mouth shut because that’s as damning as you can get.”

I sigh and lean back into my chair. “Fine. We will give them everything else.”

“We just have to hope that it will be enough,” Emerson says.

I nod and close my eyes, wishing we had a bigger plane with a bed in the back so Aelia and I could at least take a nap together. I missed her. I missed the way her body fit into mine. I missed the taste of her lips. I just missed her.

Standing from my chair, I pull her onto my lap on the couch and she doesn’t fight me, curling up into my chest. The pain of her absence lifts and I feel like I can breathe again because she’s safe and in my arms.

“What happened to your phone?” I ask her. Based on her face, I’m not sure I want to know.

“He took it before I could tell you what was going on.”

“And why did he do that?” I ask, lifting her chin so I can see it in a better light.

“I talked back,” she mutters.

I chuckle and kiss the bruise. “I’m proud of you, you know that?”

“Why? I should have put a bullet in his head for hitting me,” she says as anger passes through her eyes.

I shake my head. “No, you shouldn’t have because that was my job. I failed to protect you.”

Agonizing over my choice to kill Marco Costa will not help me. But I can’t find it in myself to feel bad about it. It was my woman, her mother, or him.That’s an easy choice. I’ve seen that look on an angry man before, and it ended with him beating my mother within an inch of her life. It ended with me as a ten-year-old kid doctoring up my mother’s wounds while Emerson stood guard at the door and Kai sneaking to the fridge for ice to help with the swelling. Marco was going to lay into Mia, and Aelia would have never forgiven herself for it.

“He was going to use my mom to get to me. He wanted me to marry into the Ballerini family in Italy, and,” she pauses, “I told him no, so he threatened to sell me instead.”

My stomach rolls at the thought. But I would have found her, I would’ve stopped at nothing.