Page 138 of My Dark Ever After
“He lied,” I surmised.
“He lied,” Tonio agreed. “In fact, he made fun of me one night when we were in Pisa to confer with the Pietras. The first day’s meeting had ended, and Aldo had too much grappa. When I spoke of Leo joining us on the tour of the territory we took each year, helaughed.” There was a pause riddled with the palpable electric energy of his rage. “He told me Raffa would be his heir if he had to drag him back from that British isle kicking and screaming. He had a willing, capable man who wanted the throne, and he still refused to see beyond his own nepotism.”
“You were the one who killed him,” Dad said slowly as he put the pieces together. “You always blamed the family for what happened to him, but Ginevra told me Gaetano swore he never touched the capo, even though he was the one accused of murdering Aldo Romano. It was you, wasn’t it?”
Tonio flicked an invisible piece of lint off his thigh. “It was an accident, really. Grappa always brings out my baser urges, and I could not stand to look a minute more on that smug Romano laughing at me. Luckily, it was fairly easy to lay the blame at the door of the Pietras, given the history of distrust between the two families over the centuries. The two most powerful Northern Mafia families at war? It was too salacious not to be believed.”
There was a flicker of shadow in the light pooling in from the open door to the hall. I tried not to pin my gaze obviously over Tonio’s shoulder, but I kept track in my periphery as the shadow detached from the wall and loomed just beyond the frame.
Someone had come.
My heart leaped into my throat, hope so bright behind my eyes it threatened to blind me.
Raffa.
But the man who slipped into the room with a silver handgun in his grip, trained on the back of Tonio’s head, was not the man I hoped to see.
Leo di Conte looked terrible.
Heavy bags drooped beneath his eyes, and his normally golden hair was covered in a fine layer of soot that stained his white dress shirt and trousers as well. His gaze flicked up to mine, a warning to stay quiet implicit in his gaze as he tried to angle himself behind his father.
Something in my expression must have given him away, because before he could shoot, Tonio was lurching out of his chair, grabbing for me where I stood beside the desk and wrapping his arms around me in a tight bear hug. I’d been so focused on Leo, I didn’t have time to counter Tonio’s attack, and before I could think to move, I was caught in his grip, the cold kiss of a gun at my temple.
“Ah,” Tonio sighed sadly, breath moist against my cheek. “I see the explosion did not take you with it.”
Leo bared his teeth. “You fucking bastard. Gemma didn’t deserve that.”
Beside us, Dad lunged for me, but Tonio clicked his tongue and shuffled us away from him, grinding the gun into my head.
“Not so quick, Pietra. You only have one daughter left now. You wouldn’t want to lose her too.”
“Gemma was alive?” I whispered, looking at Leo. “All this time?”
Those devastated blue eyes flickered to mine, then back to his father. “Yes,” he ground out. “It was how Tonio was keeping me in line. Gemma was the one who sent the man at the bell tower in Impruneta with her necklace. She was trying to get you to help her without putting you in danger. If either of us had tried to tell you what was going on, Tonio had the house he was keeping her in rigged to explode.”
People will die if I tell you,Philippe had sobbed before Raffa killed him.
Gemma.
Tonio had staged her death and kept her locked up for over a year to use her as a tool against his own son, to take down Raffa in his quest to becomecapo dei capihimself.
And now, because of him, both my beautiful sister and the love of my life were dead.
“He died with her?” I asked with the rest of the breath left in my body.
Leo nodded tersely. “When I arrived, they must have been in the basement with her. The car was outside, and the tripwire for the bombs was at the top of the stairs.”
I closed my eyes against the brutal wave of pain that wrapped me in its viselike hold, crushing me from the inside out, bones and sinew ground to dust, veins bursting open.
“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Leo said quietly, and when I opened my eyes to look at him, tears were rolling through the dirt on his cheeks. “But Tonio had me by the balls.”
Tonio’s chuckle filled my ear. “You and Raffa were never very good at chess.”
“So what now,vecchio?” Leo demanded. “Raffa’s dead, but here we are, and I do not intend to let you out of this house alive.”
“You’re a wanted man, Leo. All I have to do is call thesoldatito us, and they’ll come running to end your life,” Tonio replied calmly.
“Even with you holding Raffa’s fiancée at gunpoint?” he countered.
