Page 94 of Sin & Sapphire

36

ANA

Tired and indesperate need of a break, I combed through my memory for a list of men and women who might have been working the night my home burned down. What the fuck was Angelo thinking? He hadn’t called my father’s consigliere or the goddamned bookkeepers.

“Angelo,” I said, “sir, why didn’t you?—?”

“Because I had to find you,” he snarled, his frustration apparent. “I didn’t even fly to Sicily for Gio’s funeral. And then you fucking disappeared and?—”

He stopped and visibly collected himself. I stared at him, my eyes wide and heart light. No. It shouldn’t make me feel like the most precious object in the goddamned world to know that Angelo abandoned everything to come find me.

But it did.

Ruthlessly, I shoved those feelings into the dark well where they belonged. Kidnapper. Stalker. Torturer.Daddy.

My mind skittered away from the word.What the fuck, Ana?

We sat at the dining table in Valentin’s apartment, papers scattered across the wooden surface while I scribbled lists of names and relationships.

“These are the people I’m certain would have been on the compound when Tchérnov hit it,” I said, shoving a piece of paper at Angelo. “I don’t know which soldiers would have been working—they rotated on a shift schedule.”

Angelo waited with one eyebrow raised.

“Sir,” I added. My lips twisted into a wry smile. Fundamentally, our relationship hadn’t changed. I was still their toy, their slave, but at least now I was useful. At least now I was doing something to help my family.

Angelo is family, a voice whispered in the back of my head.

Fuck you, and fuck him too, I whispered back.This is forme.

“My father’s enforcer should have given you all of this information,” I said. Enzo Accardi was an asshole, but he was a loyal one.

“He disappeared, remember?” Angelo snarked.

My eyebrows snapped up. Jesus Christ, Angelo really had lost control of the territory and the family.

“You had three weeks to get my fathers’ territory under control while I was gone.”

“Three weeks when I thought I hadmonths.”

Angelo had access to my father’s legal businesses and their records, including the payroll software that paid out the strippers at his clubs. But the informal businesses? The soldiers we paid in cash every week to keep our family safe—the cousins and sons and brothers of my father’s capos?

Fuck.

“What about my father’s accountant?”

“Disappeared the day your father was killed.”

Fuck.

“What the fuck have you been doing for the last two weeks?”

Valentin’s pocket whip cracked across my left nipple, and I screamed with surprise at the agony.

“We’ve been training you, toy,” he said, dropping into the chair beside me. “And untangling this mess. Speak respectfully or don’t speak at all.”

The audacity of these two fuckers took my breath away. They thought they could parachute in from Europe, with their billion-euro business and their Sicilian mafia and hold onto my family’s territory without having to fucking work for it.

“You know, I have a master’s in finance,” I reminded them. “I could help.”

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