Page 61 of Forced Arrangement

Groaning, I roll over onto my side, wrapping my arms around my belly. I barely even feel all my other injuries anymore. I must be going into shock.

“Just give him what he wants,” I murmur to myself, wishing I could talk to Angelo. “I don’t care what you give him so long as he stops hurting me.”

I think of everything that Guiseppe told me. I have a whole new understanding of everything, really. If I make it out of here alive, there are things that I will change, things that Angelo and I can do better.

But I have to survive first.

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 calledIl 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.”

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