Page 12 of Mafia Heir's Alpha
I had managed to spend not just one, but multiple nights with Rosco. In doing so, I blurred the line between reality and pretend, as well as the truth that I knew and the actual truth. Or what the truth might be. It was getting hard to keep it all straight.
My father wasn’t an innocent man. Like Cord, Andro, and even Rosco, he’d done terrible things in the name of business. But had he really done what the rumors said he had? Did he kidnap children?
To say my mind was a fucked-up mess was an understatement. I barely knew what to believe orthink anymore. Except that Rosco was sweet and protective. When he was with me, he gave me all his attention. The men who worked for him respected him.
Ever since the night of Andro's party when Rosco told me about closing down a sex-trafficking ring, I knew there was more to my father's death than what I had been told. Uncle Mario refused to answer my questions. That left me to my own devices.
Hacking the FBI was not a new endeavor for me. One thing I enjoyed about my time in college was the fact that I had a lot of time to kill. I didn't have to work since my tuition was paid, I didn't have a ton of friends, and I wasn't much of a social butterfly. Playing around on the computer and seeing what trouble I could get into and out of was how I passed the time.
So when I needed answers that no one was willing to give me, I went toward the government. Ironic, considering how many secrets they kept from the public and how much they lied about reality.
I was able to pull up the case files made against my father and the Russo family. The FBI even had a file on me. It was rather boring, though. I was not considereda threat to the public. I mean, they weren’t wrong, but ouch.
My dad wasn't just some small-time criminal. Rosco wasn't wrong about the crimes that Andro and Cord committed, but they clearly had a moral line they wouldn't cross. Sex trafficking was one of them. Apparently, my father held no such moral standing.
The FBI had one hell of a case against him, and before Andro had struck, they were ready to make their move in order to arrest my father and some of his cronies, Uncle Mario included. Had my father not been killed, he would have been arrested and put on trial for his crimes. I doubted he would have survived prison.
I didn't know how I felt about all of that. My stomach churned with guilt, though I didn’t know why.
I knew my father was cruel. Just because he had been nice to me on the few occasions I actually saw him didn’t minimize what he had done to others. His victims were out there, surviving, thriving hopefully, now that their perpetrator was dead. And here I was, continuing to live in his house, reaping the benefits of the wealth he’d built on spilled blood of omegas, children, and women.
I hated it. It made me want to burn the whole place down.
"Orlando!" Uncle Mario's voice boomed through the library.
I snapped my laptop shut and looked up.
"You're taking too long. Your father deserves better than what you've delivered."
My throat grew tight and my jaw clenched. My father's victims deserved better than what he had done to them. I kept my mouth shut. "What do you want me to do? Rosco hasn't introduced me to anyone. I need more time." I needed to clear my head to come up with a real plan or no plan at all. Was it too late to run away? Except running away meant leaving Rosco. That thought twisted my stomach.
Mario narrowed his eyes. "Come up with something, boy. You need to force an introduction soon. Andro Ferrini needs to pay for what he's done.”
Pay? Like my father had paid with his life for the things he had done? Neither Andro nor Cord hurt kids or other innocent people.
Andro didn’t need to pay. The world owedhim.
"I'll see what I can do," I said. "I have a date tonight."
Mario nodded, then left the room.
The longer I spent away from my uncle's influence, the clearer things became. If Cord and Andro weren’t the villains in this story, did that make them the heroes? Morally gray heroes, sure. But how many omegas had they saved from being under my father's thumb?
Hours later, those same questions plagued me.
I used some of my skills in the computer realm to fund one of the accounts used to provide money and assistance to the victims of sex trafficking. I transferred money from my father's accounts, making sure it was untraceable. Perhaps in a few weeks, Mario might ask where that money went, but I would worry about that then. I had time to figure out how to hide that.
Would it make a difference? I didn't know. Did it make me feel better? Not a whole lot. It most certainly didn't erase all the things my father had done that I didn't know about.
It was a start. There had to be more that I could do to make up for some of my father’s wrongdoing.
I met Rosco at the apartment he thought I lived in. He brushed a thumb over my cheek as he greeted me. "What plagues you today?"
"Nothing."
He raised a brow. "Didn't we have a discussion about lying?"
The man could read me too well. It was becoming harder and harder to hide anything from him. Soon, I’d have to spill all of it. And where would that leave us? "Family things." I grinned, leaning into his hand. "Nothing for you to worry about."
