Page 62 of Mafia Billionaire's Surprise Baby

“Sal. I’m so sorry.”

I shake my head. “It was a long time ago.”

But I can still see my uncles and my grandfather, the handcuffs holding them back, the shocked look on their faces.

I can still see my aunts and my grandmother after, wailing and holding onto each other.

No one died. That day.

My grandfather died in jail. Heart attack.

One of my uncles got out. Marco lets him live on one of the farms in upstate New York, some old piece of land that the family’s held onto forever.

No one asks him to do anything more challenging than that.

Gia sighs. “I know. I live in mortal terror that Elio will go to jail. Or… worse.”

The ghost of our past flashes between us.

“I’m going to find out, you know. Who killed our parents.”

“Of that, I have no doubt.”

My phone pings then, and I pull it up. It’s a CNN article that Elio sent me. I open it, and nearly snort my pasta through my nose.

“What?”

“Look,” I say, passing the phone to her.

Gia reads for a moment, then her eyes widen. “Holy shit. They really do think we’re dead.”

“According to Interpol, and now CNN, yes.”

She hands the phone back to me and I look down at the article again.

Two bodies, a man and a woman, are believed to be Gianna Rossi and Salvatore De Luca. Both were caught on CCTV entering the restaurant in Amsterdam and were present for the blast.

There were no survivors, and the culprits have been named as domestic terrorists. Any information should be directed to… I look up.

Gia’s staring at me in shock. “Holy shit. Did Elio put the bodies there?”

I shake my head. “No. I don’t think so. That would be unusually… thorough of him.”

The real word that I meant to say lingers in the air.

Not thorough.

Brutal.

Elio doesn’t always have the stomach for the hard stuff. Not since he found out about Luna, anyway.

In some ways it makes sense. It’s hard to show up as a family man one minute, and then turn around and order two bodies to be placed in a burning building the next.

“Whose bodies are they?”

I shake my head. “I have no idea, cara mia,” I murmur.

We both still.

---