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Chapter Twenty-One

Angelo

“Here’s what Rudy dug up,” I tell Franco as I pull up the information that he had sent via encrypted email to me.

“Can we use it?” Franco asks.

I nod. “God, the man is so good at this. I’m not sorry he’s said he’s coming back,” I admit as I pore over the pages and pages of intel that Rudy had been able to send in just an hour.

“There’s a ship,” I say eagerly as I skim the documents. “It’s docked here. It’s called Il Fantasma . Rudy says it belongs to a shell corporation that is actually Guiseppe’s. He thinks that’s where he might have taken Sophia.”

Franco pulls a face. “Such an obvious name. What a disgusting bastard.”

I nod. “There’s something wrong with him,” I agree. I had no idea why Sophia’s father had kept him as his right-hand man. It had never made sense to me. Maybe he had been blind to his evil.

I get a text, and I frown. I don’t recognize the number.

I open the text and see that it contains a pinned set of coordinates and a simple message.

Meet me. Give me what I want, or the bitch and the baby die.

“Baby?” I say to myself, my heart practically stopping in my chest. A baby. Oh my God. How did Guiseppe find out when she hadn’t even told me yet? I thought of Justine saying that Sophia had had the flu last week. It wasn’t the flu. It must have been morning sickness.

“Baby?” Franco echoes, but he doesn’t sound surprised.

I glance over at him sharply. “You knew too?” I demand, feeling angry. “Did everyone but me know?”

Franco has the good grace to look sheepish. “Justine…” he says, then trails off.

I roll my eyes. “We really need to teach that girl to keep secrets better if she’s going to be warming your bed all the time.”

Franco chuckles softly, then sobers. “Okay, so what’s the plan? We can’t give him what he wants, but he clearly is crazy enough to kill Sophia.”

“I feel like I’m missing something,” I say, poring over the notes that Rudy sent me. Something isn’t adding up for me. Why would Guiseppe be so willing to hurt Sophia just to get at me? I had thought he wanted to take over the Agostini family. If he hurt Sophia, many of the men would turn against him, making it hard for him to claim the don position uncontested. Unless that wasn’t really what he wanted at all.

I remembered seeing something in Rudy’s notes about a birth certificate or something. I scroll through the document until I find it again. An image of the birth certificate is attached. I make it bigger and then suck in a breath.

“What?” Franco asks me, leaning over to try and see what I’m looking at.

I turn wide eyes on him. Suddenly, it all makes sense. “Look at this,” I say, thrusting my phone at Franco. “It’s Guiseppe’s birth certificate. Look at who is listed as his father.”

Franco squints at the image, and then his mouth falls open. “Oh my God,” he whispers.

I nod, taking my phone back. “It’s all making sense now,” I say, my mind already formulating a plan.

“It looks like the coordinates of the place he wants to meet are near the ship. I imagine he will want to put a bag over my head or something to make sure I can’t tell where we are going.”

Franco nods. “It’s what we would do.”

“My thinking is that you and the men can head to the ship while I’m meeting with Guiseppe. That way, you can have the element of surprise when it’s just his men and no one else. Once you control the ship, you can ambush him when we arrive.”

“I don’t like you going to meet him alone,” Franco says with a frown.

I smile at him. “I won’t really be alone. You’ll be able to see me.” I hold up my wrist, showing him the tracking bracelet. “You’ll be able to see me the whole time.”

Franco smiles for the first time. “Perfect.”

“Did you bring the drone with us?” I ask him.

He nods, gesturing toward the back of the SUV.

“Let's do a little reconnaissance before I reply to him. Maybe we can see how many people are on Il Fantasma before I go to the meeting point.”

“I could call some other men in if we need them,” Franco agrees before getting out of the driver’s seat and going around to the back of the car.

I continue looking through the information that Rudy sent me while Franco sets up the drone. In a way, I understand Guiseppe’s rage so clearly now.

He’s my half-brother . Even though I can’t imagine feeling any affection for someone as evil as Guiseppe, it makes me terribly sad to know that he is my brother. We could have grown up together as a family. If only my father hadn’t been such a coward. If only Sophia’s father hadn’t agreed to help him hide his mistake from my mother.

I frown. My memories of my mother are complicated. She was a loving, sweet mother, but she was not allowed to have much say over my childhood.

I was raised to be a weapon, to be the fulfillment of the destiny that my father wanted to secure for his legacy. Now that I knew that Guiseppe was actually my brother, I think maybe he drove me so hard, treated me so harshly, to try and ensure that Guiseppe couldn’t best me and take over the family.

I sigh. I can imagine many other ways I could be spending my life. I would actually have been quite happy to have Guiseppe ruling the roost. Being a second son to a powerful man would have been a much more pleasant life than being the first, and only heir to such a powerful name.

Franco is a second son and his life has been significantly less difficult than my own in many ways. His father allowed him to choose his own path and didn’t stand in his way when he chose to be my right-hand man. I would likely have had the same kind of life.

But I would not have been betrothed to Sophia, I remind myself. It occurs to me that Guiseppe likely would have been betrothed to her instead and the thought makes me feel ill. Even if my brother hadn’t turned into a monster as he aged, he still had a reputation for doing terrible things to women. Sophia’s father had to pay off many of the families of women he had abused, just to keep them quiet.

My stomach turns over as I realize that even if he isn’t interested in sleeping with Sophia, he likely doesn’t care how much he hurts her. She’s just a bargaining chip to him, a pawn. He doesn’t care if she lives or dies, so long as she serves her purpose.

“Ready to fly,” Franco says, breaking into my dark thoughts.

I shake my head and focus on the task at hand. I can’t let the past and my new understanding of it, cloud my judgment at the moment. Sophia and our child need me to be completely focused or they might die.

“Let’s see what we’ve got going on over there.” I turn my eyes toward the harbor and watch as the drone lifts into the air to spy for us. I smile grimly in appreciation for technology. In my father’s day, my men would have had to sneak onto the ship and hope for the best. Now, we could at least have some more information about who was on the ship and where it was located before we attempted to send them in.

“Can you kill him?” Franco asks me as he looks at the screen that shows him what the drone sees.

“What?” I ask, confused.

“Guiseppe,” Franco says as he adjusts the direction of the drone. “Can you kill him, even knowing he’s your brother?”

I frown. “I don’t have a choice,” I say firmly.

“That’s not what I said,” he replies. He glances over at me for a moment, then goes back to flying the drone and taking video. “Found Il Fantasma ,” he says with satisfaction.

I ponder his words. Before I knew who Guiseppe truly was, I would have said yes without hesitation. Now, however, knowing that he was my older brother made it a lot harder to imagine doing what needed to be done.

How long had he known that we were siblings? Could we have learned to get along if that information was out in the open? Would I have treated him any differently if I had known who he truly was?

I realize that I probably would have, and the thought was concerning, given the current situation. I harden my heart, however, as I realize that he will be unlikely to feel any hesitation about killing me if the chance offers itself. In fact, that’s probably his main goal in setting up this meeting. He is probably planning to kill me as soon as he has signed documents that indicate that he will be taking over the holdings that belonged to Sophia’s father.

I smile in a grim way as I realize that he has probably been keeping Sophia alive just so she can sign over her portion of her father’s businesses and assets.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Franco says in a flat tone of voice, distracted by his work with the drone. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

My mouth presses into a hard line. He’s not wrong. I might not be capable of pulling the trigger when it comes down to it. Maybe it’s just as well that I’m going to serve as a pawn in this game of Guiseppe’s. My men are more than capable of taking Guiseppe out as long as we get them established on the ship before Guiseppe brings me back to face the music.

“Do what you have to. All of you,” I tell Franco. “This has to end today.”