Page 117 of Vicious Little Princess

It was always a whole lot more brutal than that.

I pulled up the intel on my phone and handed it to him.

He hesitated for a moment, clearly overcome, but then he took it and started poring over it, scanning and taking in everything rapidly.

I saw the moment he realized what it all meant, who it pointed to without a shadow of a doubt.

His eyes darkened in a way that was very uncharacteristic of Emilio Bardi.

A growl escaped him.

And then his gaze snapped to mine, grief and rage swirling.

“Leo,” he ground out. “Leo murdered my parents.”

I heard a choked sound from Julian.

But before I could get a word out, before any of us could, Milo tossed my phone back to me, then strode out of the room.

Fuck.

25

~Caterina~

I stared at the tracking chip I’d cleaned after extracting it from Julian a couple of hours ago. It had been a very easy procedure to remove it and it hadn’t left him with any damage. It would heal within a few days completely, and it hadn’t even required stitches.

But that had been the least of it.

The fact that he’d been chipped at all was what had done the most damage.

The indignity of it, being treated like a thing rather than a person through having that done to him, it had served to intensify what Julian had already been suffering through as a result of Angelo’s other heinous actions.

But while it was despicable, it had also unwittingly revealed a very exploitable weakness in Angelo.

It had highlighted that his goalhadn’tonly been to make Julian hislittle bitch, punish him and dominate him. It had become more than that. Whether that had occurred during Julian’s captivity, or whether the seeds had been planted beforehand, wasn’t clear. But what was clear was the fact that Angelo was so obsessed with him that he hadn’t been able to stand losing track of him, so he’d gone to extreme lengths. He was emotionally invested.

And that was definitely a weakness we could exploit.

One we could use to draw him out more than even the chip itself and get Julian the justice and closure that he truly needed, that desperate need which had been driven home to all of us tonight in a very painful way.

I secured the chip in a lockbox I’d had brought over from my apartment, then sank onto the foot of the bed.

I’d almost told Nico and Milo about my pregnancy earlier.

At first, I’d had it in my mind to wait for the perfect time to come around, but after having that talk with Julian, he’d made it clear that it needed to be a lot sooner. So I’d planned to do it after the attacks tomorrow, thinking that would have been a compromise on the wholeperfect timething.

There was no such thing, though.

Especially not for us, not until this was all over.

The mission tonight going haywire had just served to highlight how things could go off the rails despite the best laid plans and strategies guiding the way.

Plus, there was no definitive date etched on the proverbial calendar for when this war would be over, because there were unknowns involved. Reactions to our actions tonight and tomorrow night couldn’t be determined precisely and they’d all have a knock-on effect upon one another.

We hoped we could end this swiftly, but the truth was we couldn’t be certain of that.

And keeping this secret too much longer… it would become poison.

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