Page 65 of The Forbidden Husband

Was he telling the truth?

Did she return to her father for me?

And if so… what did he want from her? She knew about his plans, and she could have ruined his entire grab for power. He couldn’t afford to let her go. He wouldn’t let her spill his secrets.

“Aria planned to kill us, but she turned her back on Alonzo and didn’t follow through, I repeated. “What did she offer him?”

“I… I don’t know. I swear!”

She had betrayed us. There was no question about that. But was it possible that she had been trying to make it right? Aria had told me on our last night together that she had things she needed to tell me the next morning, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had planned to tell me the truth.

She came into this marriage to betray me.

But when it became more than an arranged marriage, I had seen the love in her eyes. I knew she cared about me.

I didn’t know how far those feelings went—how much influence they had.

I looked over my shoulder at Uncle Giovanni. His eyes darted between the men hanging from the rafters. I had been content letting her go after what she had done to us—after the deaths she had caused.

But I had plenty more information to learn before I had to make a decision.

I restarted the saw with a menacing grin.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Enzo Rissi

I took only long enough to bathe the blood from my body before talking to Uncle Giovanni about options. It wasn’t as cut and dry as we had believed. There was talk of consequences for Aria but also a sense of mutual understanding. There was a reason she had done the things she had done, and she seemed to have a plan to make them right.

She was under duress when making her decisions.

However, they were still decisions that she had made, and people were dead because of them.

“When we go into the Bianchi home, the odds of running into Aria are high,” Uncle Giovanni reminded me. “What we know about her motivations is second-source hearsay. We don’t know that her intentions weren’t malicious.”

“I need to talk to her again.”

It was a back-and-forth, but neither of us had the answers. All we knew for certain was that I loved her. I cared deeply for her. Fuck. Who was I kidding? I had allowed myself to fall in love with the woman. I wanted to believe that she was innocent—that she had no choice.

Uncle Giovanni’s phone rang, and he glanced down at the caller ID with a raised brow.

He showed me the screen.

Alonzo Bianchi.

“Answer it on speaker,” I demanded.

“Alonzo,” he said with a hard tone I rarely heard from him.

“We seem to have a problem,” Alonzo claimed, sounding both smug and cruel all at once. “You sent my daughter away. You broke our alliance.”

“That’s the excuse you plan to use, then?” Uncle Giovanni stated.

He was a man of few words. He liked letting people dig their own graves, and it almost always worked. I waited, though I had to grind my teeth to keep from shouting at him. I wanted to ask about my wife—about what he was making her do.

She shouldn’t have mattered, but in my mind, she was the only thing that truly mattered. I lost a cousin and a guard today. I had killed men and washed their blood from my skin. But none of it mattered as much as the pit Aria had left in my chest.

“Excuse for what?”

---