Page 115 of Veiled Amor

He swore again.

“What?”

“Tell me the rest.”

Hating the space between them, as often as she’d rehearsed this conversation, it went nothing like this. She stood and made her way across the room, her hand stroked his forearm.

“Please don’t be angry, Giancarlo.”

“He lied to my fucking face.”

She blinked. “Who?”

“Santi. I asked him outright the night before the wedding,do you love this girl? He told mesure, yes. It’s the only goddamn reason I didn’t stop it from going ahead. The only reason I stopped myself from doing a lot of fucking things since.”

“Gi…”

“Finish the rest.”

“Your brother idolized you, you know that. He wasn’t like you or your brothers, he tried too hard to fit in, to make your father proud.”

“He madepapásick with worry working for a drug dealer.”

She’d heard worse about her father, but she still flinched and took her hand back, wrapping it around her waist.

“What did your father have on him? What did he promise Santi to make him marry you?”

“He was scared to tell you. I told him it would be fine, but he wouldn’t listen. Working for my father would give him status, he said.”

“Instead, he’s in the family crypt.” Capone replied, cold as ice.

“My father.” She started, cognizant of how many bad sentences from her life started that exact way, “he caught Santiago having sex with someone on the estate. Begging Nicholas for anything only brings trouble, this meant Santiago was in dad’s pocket because he threatened to tell those he cared about.”

“Because he was getting his dick wet? Who was he fucking, the cook?”

Any other time she might have laughed. Touching the track of veins on the back of his right hand, he grasped her fingers, running his thumb over her knuckles.

“Remember, Nicholas is all about leverage. People are things to him. Santiago didn’t stand a chance.”

“You don’t need to tell me,nena. He tried to fuck over the biggest drug cartel Kingpin and got our family killed for it.” The words, though they were quiet, were spoken with bite.

Lucia winced, feeling his pain. “I think he was trying to fix what dad held over him, it went wrong.” And then she told him about his baby brother’s biggest secret he had never wanted his family to know, fearing they’d disown him. “He was gay, Giancarlo.”

That gorgeous face of his didn’t alter.

“Santiago was afraid to tell you and put himself in a situation that was impossible to get out of. He was in a relationship with one of dad’s guards, it didn’t last long, the guy disappeared, it spiraled from there with Santiago trying to diffuse the situation and to keep my father happy. He was miserable, Gi.”

“He was miserable?Hewas fuckingmiserable?” His deep tenor rumbled angrier. “He got our family killed because he was too much of a coward to tell us he was gay.”

“I’m not making excuses for him, just telling it how it was.”

“Julieta was only goddamn sixteen, never had a boyfriend and never will. She wanted to live in New York, did you know that?” He asked. Lucia nodded sadly. Capone’s baby sister had two topics of conversation and they’d been clothes and New York. She’d planned to be a fashion designer.

Raking his fingers through his hair, Capone paced over to the windows, looking out at the night sky. “I wouldn’t have cared about his sexuality.”

“I tried to tell him that too. You saw for yourself how it is for a Puerto Rican boy, things are expected of him from the community, the family.”

Whichever way Lucia looked at it, it sucked. She’d pleaded with him so many times to tell his family so Nicholas could no longer blackmail him.