Page 69 of Kings & Carnage

I stuffed the thoughts down. We didn’t have a choice. We had to try and get the other houses behind us if we wanted to catch the men — and they were almost certainly men — who had killed Emma and the other Bellepoint girls.

"Hear ye, hear ye," Neo shouted.

Everyone got quiet, their gazes swiveling to where he stood at one side of the fire.

"It's time to talk game four, and in case this meeting spot hasn't tipped you off, this one is important," he said.

I met Willa's eyes across the clearing. This was it. After this, everyone would know what we had discovered.

They would either become our allies or our enemies.

And looking at Willa, her face finally healed from Roberto's assassination attempt, my instinct to protect her more powerful than my own survival, I wasn't sure we could handle any more enemies.

Chapter33

Willa

Neo paced in front of the fire, his expression dark. I had no idea what he was going to say, how he was going to bring the other families to our side.

Maybe he didn't know either. Maybe that's why he seemed at a loss for words, a first as far as I was concerned.

He turned to face the crowd, silent and tense, like they knew something was about to change.

“Famiglia oltre il sangue.” He didn't shout it like he usually did. They were just words, spoken with a silent weight.

Everybody looked at each other uncertainly, clearly not sure whether this was one of those times when they were supposed to shout it back.

"We say it, but do we mean it?" Neo asked them.

Asked us.

"What is going on?" Quinn murmured next to Claire.

I hadn't told a single soul what we’d figured out since Claire dropped the bomb about RAA in the cafeteria.

Not Claire. Not Mara.

No one.

The Kings and I had decided it was too risky to let the rumor mill take control of the narrative. We needed to get in front of it, deliver the message to everyone at once and get a read on their reaction.

"What if we had to choose?" Neo asked them. He scanned the crowd, meeting the eyes of our peers. “What if we had to choose between family — the ones who sent us here — and honor? What if we had to choose between the families that sent us here and this one, this family?”

Claire met my eyes and lifted her eyebrows in silent question.

I shook my head and looked down at the ground. I felt bad about keeping her in the dark, especially since she was the one who’d helped me put the final piece of the puzzle into place.

"You all know that Emma Russo disappeared two years ago," Neo continued. "She wasn't technically a student at Aventine, but she was one of us, and she was last seen on our campus. What you may not know is that she wasn't the first girl to go missing here. Other girls have gone missing from Bellepoint over the years, made to look like they left voluntarily.”

"What the fuck does this have to do with our game?" one of the Rooks yelled from the crowd.

Neo's eyes flashed. "It has everything to do with our game. Because in a minute I'm going to ask you all to do something you've never been asked to do before. Something that will make you a traitor to your families.”

A murmur rolled through the crowd and I heard someone say, "What the fuck?”

"It's come to my attention that someone in the Alinari Mafia family is responsible for the disappearance of Emma Russo, and probably the other girls too," Neo said.

A collective gasp rose from the crowd like a gust of wind.

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