Page 53 of Vow to Me

Oh, joy.

“Hey, Papa. Good to see you,” I say sarcastically with a nod.

“Enough, Isabella. You’ll tell us everything you know about the Romano’s; you’ll help us take them all down.” His voice is gruff, and commanding and I don’t bother to hide my eye roll. Gone are the days where I’ll play pretend and hide behind the mask of perfect princess.

“Ah good, you’re not hiding anymore. Did you know it was my idea for Alessi to train you? Did you know that we worked together in faking his death?” he asks with a smirk. “We’ve had everything planned for years. We’d use you to take down the New York outfit, and you will marry him once the Romano boy is dead, and he will be the one to take over as my heir. I’ve always seen something in him, something promising. Over the past year we’ve been slowly moving into different… business ventures. You exceeded ourexpectations with your ability to use computers, you’ll make a great addition to our team that finds ourbuyers.”

Buyers.He’s talking about fucking sex trafficking. I’ve been keeping my eye on suspicious disappearances in and around Chicago, but I never once thought it was my fucking father. I even flagged it and sent it to Alec for him to investigate it.

Thismotherfuckerhas started selling girls. Jesus fucking Christ. I need to find a way to contact Alec so he can locate the girls. Fuck everything else, those girls need rescuing.

I keep quiet, still not telling him anything about my husband or his family, and he pulls out his phone to send a text.

A few minutes later, Alessi strolls in and gives me a wicked grin.

“You won’t talk the easy way,piccolina?That’s fine, we’ll see if you can survive the hard way,” he says and nods towards the table in the corner of the room. It looks like something that belongs to a mental institution, used to strap patients down.

Oh fuck, this is gonna hurt like a bitch.

ONE DAY AGO.

My body aches. I’m covered in bandages from where Alessi let loose, he cut up my skin, burned my skin, broke my fingers and dislocated my shoulder.

The only thing that’s keeping me going is knowing I survived without telling him a fucking thing. Most of the injuries aresuperficial because he “wanted to keep me pretty for when I’m his wife” the sick fuck.

I’m lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what’s going through Luca’s head right now. It fucking hurts that he really thinks I would do that to him. He’s shown me more love in the last two months than I’ve seen for most of my life, and for him to believe I could really do that to him? Well clearly, it can’t have been that fucking real or he would have known better, he would have seen through the lies, he would have had fucking faith in me.

That’s the part that hurts the most. Not Alessi’s betrayal, not my father’s antics, not being tortured while tied to a table. No, the most painful part of this whole thing was knowing Luca didn’t fight for us, that he didn’t trust me, that I would blindly follow him anywhere, in anything. But he couldn’t extend the same courtesy to me.

The door opens and I brace myself to see the two men who were supposed to love me like family but instead used me for their own gain. Only it’s not either of them, it’s a foot soldier who approaches me and undo’s the cuff on my wrist, I pull my arm back to go to hit him, but he slaps me across the face so quickly I didn’t see it coming. I slump back down but he grabs my forearm and drags me from the room. It’s only as we’re ascending the stairs that I realize I’ve been in my childhood home this entire time.

He shoves me into a room that’s filled with computers, and I glance around for a way to escape as he backs out of the door.

Before I can make a move to follow him, my father steps into the room.

“You’re going to repay me for all of the years I had to put up with you living under my roof, the spitting image of your mother and reminding me of everything I’ve lost. It should have been you that died, not her.”

The mention of my mother sends a pang of hurt through my heart.If only you could see the man that you once loved now, Mama.

He explains how he wants me to build a database of all of the girls he has for sale, giving me a folder filled with pictures of girls who’ve clearly been through hell. It makes me fucking sick that this is happening in this day in age, it’s even worse that it’s my own flesh and blood who’s doing it.

He sits in the corner of the room, observing me as I work. I know there’s no point in trying to fight him, I’m too weak and fucking fragile, not to mention he’d just fucking shoot me before I could even make a move.

I play my part and develop a database while swallowing down bile as I do so. My father doesn’t understand computers, which is the only thing I have going for me right now.

The computer I’m working on only allows me to go through a certain systems mainframe. But luckily for me, I set my laptop up on the same one when I bought it two years ago. The laptop that’s currently sitting in New York. And if I know my husband like I think I do, he’ll give it to the one person he knows with the ability to hack into it.

The one person who can put a stop to this shit and help those girls.

After I’ve sent a message to Alec, and my father deems me to have done enough work for the day, he orders a guard to deliver me back to the basement.

The guard isn’t as tall as the others or well built. If anything, he’s a scrawny little thing and I use the opportunity of being alone with him to my advantage. I wait until we're stood in the basement, where no one will be able to hear the commotion before I jump him, I grab his gun from its holster and shoot him between his eyes before he can even blink. The poor fuck didn’t even see it coming.

Once Alec unravels the codes that I’ve sent to him on my laptop and he sees my message, Luca will be here within hours. Too bad for him I won’t be here when he arrives.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Alec

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