Page 26 of Passion and Revenge

I watch her, my fingers twitching for my gun.

“Please. Oh, God.” Her legs give out under her, and she crashes to her knees with her head pressed to the glass.

“Don’t waste your breath,” I inform her. “We’re all alone here. And by here, I mean we’re on the fifteenth floor of a twenty-story building that belongs to one of my false firms registered under a false, untraceable name. There are three people in this whole building.”

Her shoulders begin to tremble, and I hear a sob rip out of her throat.

“Myself, you, and a man who would scoop out his own eyeballs with a blunt spoon if I asked him to,” I add.

She climbs to her feet and whirls at me. “You’re a monster! You tricked me. I can’t believe I—” The words end with a sob, tears trailing down her cheeks.

I freeze. She what? What was she about to say? And why the hell am I curious about it? I don’t care if Sienna thought I had been her knight in shining armor.

“My father told me all about you, Alessandro Mancini.” She spits the name like it’s a bad taste in her mouth. “You’re a drug dealer, a killer, and a man who sits on his self-made throne of blood money and thinks he’s the king of the city.”

“While your father is the protagonist out to catch the bad guys and toss them in jail where they belong?” I ask mockingly.

“He’s a good man,” she reiterates.

“He’s just another dirty bastard who’s too much of a coward to own up to what he is.”

“What has he ever done to you?”

Pasquale’s smiling face flitters through my mind. He was always smiling. The complete opposite of me. He was never cut out for this world. My brother would have been suited for a life behind a bar, mixing drinks and flirting with every woman he came across. Or working in the shitty mechanic shop he had walked away from.

I rise to my feet and dig my fingers into the pockets of my pants.

“Your father is responsible for the death of my brother.”

“Impossible! My father will never hurt anyone. He protects people, not hurt them,” she roars. “He’s proof that the justice system is not completely messed up.”

“He’s another bastard in a long line of people who should never have been in charge of someone’s fate,” I grit out. “A day before the final court ruling, the prosecutor—your dear father—met up with the judge overseeing the case in the middle of the night in an empty parking lot.”

I advance toward her. “Tell me, Sienna, what would make the prosecutor and the judge have such an illicit meeting if not foul play?”

“No,” she breathes. “I—Impossible. He would never.”

“Four days after the ruling, where my brother was sentenced to life imprisonment, your dear, perfect father was seen sitting in a hotel bar, and just a seat down, guess who was there.”

“Stop it. You’re lying!” she shrieks.

“It was none other than Maksim Popov, the man who had actually been the one to kill a family in cold blood, the man who had sliced the pregnant mother’s belly?—”

Sienna presses her palms against my chest and tries to push me away. “Stop lying. Papa will never. You’re trying to turn me against him.” Tears flow from her eyes. “You don’t have a brother. You’re lying.”

“Pasquale wasn’t my brother by blood, but he was my brother in every other way that mattered.”

Her hands fist the front of my shirt. “I’ll talk to my father. He can reopen the case. He can save your brother.”

“Save?” I scoff. Then I lean toward her. “Pasquale is past saving now, little bird. The same Russian bastard who had orchestrated Pasquale’s arrest with help from Ivan sent word to his men on the inside. Do you want to know what they did to him? Do you want to know what they did to my brother?”

“No! Stop!”

I lean closer until my breath washes over her lips, so close that her plump mouth is just a hairsbreadth from mine. I can see the kaleidoscope of colors in her eyes, and for a second, it’s enough to distract me.

“They beat him with metal rods. He was outnumbered seven to one. He was unrecognizable when they left him in that room.” And then I tell her the worst part of all of it. “The last thing I ever said to him was that I was going to fix it. Fix everything.”

She shakes her head, one trembling hand flying to her mouth.

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