Page 178 of Hidden Empire

“You barely even knew her,” Karina spits. “If you actually knew her, you’d have never stuck your cock in her, you stupid fuck!”

Unsettling imagery I refuse to think about, but Dad isn’t fazed.

“You got away for as long as your luck would allow,” my father warns. “You won’t escape this, the time for coming clean is now. Talk, before you lose the ability to.”

Her haunting eyes flare, and her amusement dies. “And then what?” she asks bitterly. “What will you do when I can’t speak and give you what you want? You’ve already lost, Dante. An unfamiliar concept for you, I’m sure.”

Dad’s grip on his knife tightens, and he brings it to her neck, twirling it to poke the tip just hard enough under her chin to nick her. She hisses as a small trail of crimson red rolls down her throat, the blood oozing and oxidizing instantly.

I can feel Ivan and Cassio on guard, scanning our surroundings, but I can’t look away from this horror show. Karina’s disdain for me is to the bone. How can someone hate me so much? What did I ever do?

“That’s where you’re wrong, Karina,” Dad replies, voice dripping with malice. “I already have everything I need and everyone I love. I’d like to give my daughter closure for her mother, but at the end of the day, I’ll survive without her. I’ll sleep soundly at night with only the memory of your death keeping me warm. I don’t need you, and so you see, I can never lose.”

I don’t know if he means it, but his tone is more than believable. I can see the moment his declaration sinks in for her and the immediate realization when she’s been convinced. Dante can see it too.

Moving in closer, he lowers his voice into a menacing threat. “Did you think secrets would keep you safe? I didn’t love the mother of nine of my children, and you think I hold a candle for Kim?”

I don’t think that’s true. I know that he loved Alina, even if they weren’t in love. My dad isn’t the kind of man who could feel anything other than love for someone who gave him the children he absolutely cherishes.

But his lie, oh, it gets under Karina’s skin.

“I fucking know you do,” she seethes, holding on to hope and hatred.

“The woman is stunning,” he allows, pulling the knife from her chin to wave it flippantly in her face as a casual taunt as he continues to speak. “Funny, kind, and generally better than you in every imaginable way. I enjoyed my time with her, but I don’t love her. I certainly don’t put her above my desire to kill you where you stand. Let that sink in, inferior twin. Understand that when I steal the last breath from your lungs, you’ll be leaving this earth as pathetically as you existed in it. You. Don’t. Win.”

A new sort of evil flashes behind her eyes, and before my father can shift his knife, she hits us all without lifting a finger.

“Inferior twin?” she drawls, tasting the insult on her tongue. “How can I be the inferior one when I took everything from her?” Bile burns the back of my throat, but Karina isn’t done. “I stole her name, her baby girl, and her fucking life.”

“You’re lying.” I don’t mean for the words to come out, but they do.

Ivan stiffens, lightly squeezing my arm in a reprimand. He doesn’t want me to interact with her at all, but how could I have stopped myself? Did he hear what she just said? Karina is saying that my mother is dead, and she’s the person responsible for it.

A smirk widens her lips as her eyes laser in on me. “You’re right,” Karina agrees, nodding with a fake sympathy. “I did leave her with one thing. I’ll admit to it being an accident. I never would have given something so important to her intentionally.”

A cold sweep of dread blankets me, and I watch as Cesar moves in, approaching my father’s side. He feels it, too, the awful sense that something bad is going to happen.

“Twins really are so much trouble, aren’t they?” She lets out a long sigh, shaking her head while only looking at me. “Your brother was too close to the outside of Kim’s stomach. Slit his throat right as I was cutting her open to get the two of you out. Such a shame. He would have been worth ten of you to me. Do you know how much one of Dante’s enemies would pay for a Moretti son? God, I would be fucking swimming in gold.”

I’m going to throw up.

There’s no…

No, she’s making all of this up to hurt me.

She can’t be so callous that she would gut her own sister, could she? Sweat makes my hands clam up as her words replay on a poisonous loop in my head. Your brother was too close to the outside of Kim’s stomach.

If she isn’t lying, she’s sicker than I could have ever imagined. She blames him for his own death. Not the fact that she performed a forced and unlicensed cesarean section on Kim, but the fact that he wasn’t positioned properly for her?

Dante’s previously stern and cold demeanor has cracked, and I know he believes her. I wish he wouldn’t, because the thought is too much to bear. If it’s true… oh god.

“Aww,” she coos patronizingly at him. “Do I win now, Dante? Don’t worry, I’m not entirely heartless, I buried them together.”

Cold sweat breaks out, and nausea consumes my stomach.

It’s true.

I had another brother.

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