Page 84 of Scarred Heir

“We want to come home.” He finished his beer. “In order to do that, we have to take care of Medina. I don’t want to bring her back to the city with him lurking around.”

“He might have his sights on Sable now.”

“How the fuck did that happen?” Marchello placed his empty bottle on the table next to him. “He’s too fucking dangerous to know who she is.”

“He intercepted her at the club, but that was an accident. She shouldn’t have been there. It was my fault. I should have had a better handle on the situation. It won’t happen again.”

“You have to keep her safe,” he said. “I don’t know how serious it is between the two of you, but from where I’m standing, you look pretty close.”

“We are.”

“Then she can be used as leverage by our enemies.” He rested his chin on his hand. “We know what that’s like.”

“Mom.” I stared out at the gentle waves floating to the shore. “Something like that will never happen to this family again. We won’t let it.”

“We need to get this family back on track.” Chello stretched his legs across the chair. “The three of us have to get back to New York. Things are falling through the cracks.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“It’s not your fault. You can’t be expected to do the job that three of us handle,” he said. “We have the demands of the cartels to meet. We have to keep the shipments running through the ports while we keep our territory safe.”

“Medina isn’t going to make it easy on us.”

“We have to eliminate the problem.”

“I’m open to suggestions.” I leaned my head back andlet the strong rays of the sun penetrate my face. “He’s not going to let this sex trafficking situation go without a fight.”

“He’s not working alone,” Chello said. “Someone is funding him.”

“I thought Gian was the mastermind behind that.”

“That’s what Diego wanted us to believe, but I’ve been doing some digging.” Chello tugged off his shirt and joined me by the pool. “Miami was set up. He wanted me to believe he was a nobody, but there’s more to his story.”

“Do you think he’s been in charge all along?”

“I think so.” He slid off the edge of the pool and immersed himself up to his shoulders in the water. “He’s going through a lot of trouble to get to us.”

“This is a lot bigger than we thought,” I said. “This is what Angelo meant when he said Gian unleashed something far worse on us.”

Angelo, Gian’s second-in-command, had warned Chello and I that something bigger was coming. We thought he meant the trafficking ring, which was why our father went underground to dismantle it. By eliminating Gian and removing Danny from the situation, we thought we had control of things.

We miscalculated.

“That war we fought with Gian is far from over. It was only the beginning.” Marchello rested his arms on the edge of the pool.

Lissia and Sable stepped out onto the patio with drinks in their hands, giggling as if they had been friends forever.

“We have to stop him,” Chello said. “By any means necessary.”

The sunlight caught Sable’s hair in its stream, making it look redder than usual against the backdrop of the white siding on the house. When she smiled at me, anominous notion took residence in the darkest corner of my mind.

“Before he gets to one of them.” Bile burned my throat when I recalled Diego with his hands on Sable at the club. It was a warning that I wouldn’t ignore.

There wasn’t anything I wasn’t willing to do to protect her.

TWENTY-TWO

Sable