Page 97 of Beautiful Devil

My amusement instantly dies as I start to realize the seriousness of this situation and the fact that the man who has just laid hands on me will no doubt be the same man to take my last breath.

I try, but I can’t help the tears that start to fall. I only let a couple roll from my eyes before masking my face and trying to quell my emotions. He starts to smile a big, toothy smile back at me when he sees my tears. That grin sends a shiver of fear down my spine. I grit my teeth as I listen to the lies he spews at me and the anger starts to become unbearable.

“You see,cara, yourdear motherwhored herself out to both me and my brother in hopes that one of us would get her pregnant and take care of her, so she would no longer have to be a measly old housemaid. She wanted to live a life of luxury and be the one to boss the servants around. What she didn’t account for is that even with her getting pregnant, it didn’t change the fact that she was trash. Unfit to be any mafia man's wife, never mind the wife of a Don.”

He gets up slowly from his seat with the assistance of his cane and starts to walk back and forth in front of me as he continues.

“Your mother must have realized this and tried hiding the pregnancy from both of us. She almost got away with it, until one day I heard her vomiting. When I walked in on her in the bathroom, she started to cry and begged me not to harm her or the baby. She knew you both weren’t good enough to be a part of our world. So I did what any good Don would do. I assured her I wouldn’t. But I never said anything about my men not harming you two.”

A sick, Joker-like smile crosses his face and causes goosebumps to break out all over my skin. There’s no way he’s right. My parents are James and Mary Roberts.

Right?

The creepy smile is quickly wiped from his face when he starts to have another one of his coughing fits. He pulls the white rag out of his suit jacket and coughs into it. And just like before, when he pulls it away, there’s blood on it. I’m starting to get a really bad feeling about where all of this is going. I know he’s going to kill me, regardless of what I say or do. He believes that I'm Angelina's daughter. So I make a decision to try to stay as calm as I can, so I don’t aggravate or provoke him in any way. What didDatelineand20/20always say? Keep them talking? Well, that's exactly what I plan to do.

Returning his hanky back to his suit pocket, he starts his slow pacing again and picks up with this crazy, far-fetched story. At least I’m praying that it is.

“Where was I? Oh, right, your whore mother. I promised her that I wouldn’t hurt her and made her believe that I was moving her into a different house to keep things hush-hush. Men in my world have mistresses and secret families all the time. It’s our way of life, and she knew this as well, so when I told her to pack a bag because I was moving her, she didn’t blink an eye. Unfortunately, one of my men slipped up and allowed her to overhear him saying how stupid she was to believe what I’d told her, instead of the truth, which was that both she and the baby were going to be killed. So, when they stopped for gas, she gave them the slip. She was smart and lived off the grid. Took us a couple of months before we found her. Until one day, one of my men spotted her in Cambridge, covered in blood. He followed her into an alley, where she collapsed on the side of the building. My men questioned her, but she said the baby was dead. She told them she had just given birth, and the baby wasn’t breathing, so she dumped it in the nearby lake. My men had their orders, and knew what to do if they found her.”

He pauses his pacing for a moment to turn his evil glare toward me when he tells me the next part. “Just so there’s no false hope here and wanting a reunion, she’s dead. Took a bullet right between the eyes. Didn’t even beg for her life, either. I’m sure I still have the footage of that day if you’d like to see for yourself?”

My eyes go wide, and I’m sure my face is the picture of shock and fear. He starts to laugh until he begins to cough again. He stops pacing and resumes his previous position in the chair across from me.

“Didn’t think so,cara. I thought my problems had finally been taken care of, but imagine my surprise when I walked into an accountant’s office at Briar and Smith and saw a framed picture of a man with a woman he claimed as his wife who looked exactly like my Angelina, twenty-six years later.”

He pauses to gauge my reaction to this news, but if he was thinking he would get one out of me, he’s mistaken. I know I need to keep him talking to prevent the inevitable, and I feel the best way to do that is by staying quiet. This man seems to like the sound of his own voice and he clearly has a lot to say.

“As I was saying earlier,cara, I was working with your husband, Gallo. He was a nobody, but he came highly recommended from colleagues of mine for the job I needed, which I’m sure you can guess by now was to take money from Moretti that belonged tomy family.Gallo was just the in-between, who turned out to be more help to me than I originally thought. There was something slightly off about him, and I was going to walk away until your picture caught my eye. I began asking questions about you and your marriage, and thatstronzowas all too eager to give them to me. He told me you were his wife, Gia, and I knew just by your name that you were my daughter, or so I thought.”

He must see the confusion on my face, because he continues before I can even utter a word. “Giawas Angelina’s mother’s name. How extremely reckless of her to name you after her mother that I knew personally. So I started to do some digging. I couldn’t just kidnap you if you weren’t truly mine. I’m not a total monster. Gallo didn’t realize that he played an even bigger part in all this. Thatstronzowas so self-centered, you ask him one question about himself and you can’t get him to shut up.”

Isn’t that the truth? I just wish I realized how much of a narcissist he was before I married him.

“He was all too happy to tell me about where the two of you grew up, how you met, where you went to college, all about your life, and how you were an only child. He also willingly gave me your parents’ names, which made my search much easier. At first, I hit a dead end. Nothing came up. They covered their tracks pretty well. Until one day Gallo mentioned your middle name was Rosa. That’s when all the pieces fell into place. I remembered that Angelina had a cousin named Rosa. She was her last living relative, fifteen years older than her, and they didn’t speak much, but I just knew it had to be her. When I searched for aRosa Tarantino, nothing came up besides a wedding announcement showing she had wed a man namedMichael James Caputo. They didn’t cover their tracks as well as they thought they had. They were careless when they forgot to take down their wedding announcement and get rid of any traces of that. But they were reckless when they fell off the face of the Earth the same day thatJamesandMaryRoberts appeared, using parts of their old names in their new ones and in your middle name.” He curls his lip as he finishes talking.

I can’t hold back anymore. I need to speak up, because this is my life on the line, and I won’t go down without a fight.

“You have the wrong person. I told you, my parents are James and Mary Roberts. Not Michael and Rosa, and certainly not cousins to Angelina.”

He leans forward and looks at me closely, assessing me before he speaks again. “Let me ask you thiscara. Did your parents ever speak in Italian when they thought you weren't around? Did they try to sway your decision to move to Boston and attend Boston University?”

My hands start to get clammy and my heartbeat speeds up. No. No! This can’t be true. They can’t be my adoptive parents. My birth mom wasn’t a maid to a mafia Don and on the run. But how else would he know all those things?

What he said about my parents speaking in Italian and B.U. is the only part that’s true. Unless...no. My parents are straightlaced and follow the rules. There’s no way they’ve been living as other people this whole time.

What doesn’t make sense is how I would have gotten to themifI was thrown in a lake?

“But there’s no way I could be that baby. She said she threw her baby into the lake. A newborn would never survive that,” I bark at him.

“Ah, yes, howdidyour parents get you if you were thrown in a lake? That’s the very same question I had as well. I had my men dive insaid lakethat Angelina claimed she tossed you in, but they didn’t find anything. At this point, it’s been twenty-six years, so I didn’t think we would find a body, and you were just born, so you wouldn’t have been wearing any clothes. I thought we were at an impasse until I found Michael and Rosa’s wedding announcement in the newspaper. It listed the address where they lived, and the alley they found Angelina in was only a couple blocks away. So my guess is she either had you in an alley on her way to her cousin’s or even at her cousin’s house and fled after delivering you or dropping you off. Probably only made it as far as the alley where my men found her. She was covered in blood, so her story seemed believable. I had my guys check all the dumpsters and alleys in the surrounding areas as well as the fire stations for any baby dropped off to them and came back with nothing. She had it covered, or so she thought.”

My head is spinning with this new information, and I feel like I’m going to pass out or have a panic attack, both of which I can’t do right now. I need to make it out of here alive before either of those things can happen. In an attempt to calm myself, I remember something he said.

“You said that I’m not your daughter? So, if I’m not, then why am I even here?”

“Ah yes, the reason for all of this?” He holds his arms out wide as he gestures to the room we’re in. “I suppose I should tell you. I was diagnosed with cancer – bone marrow, to be exact – and I need a transplant. There is no donor that matches my blood type, and I was told by my oncologist that offspring or relatives have a high chance of being a match. I don’t have any family left, so imagine my surprise when I found your picture in Gallo’s office. It was serendipity, or so I thought. You look exactly like Angelina. I never thought to question whether or not you could be mine. But I should have known better with your whore mother. So when the results came back not only showing that we were not a match, but that we only share twenty-five percent of the same DNA. I told my doctor that was impossible. How could you be my daughter and only share twenty-five percent of my DNA? And that’s when he told me that you weren’tmy daughter, but myniece,which means that my brother, Bruno, was your father and had been sleeping with your mother at the same time I was,” he barks that last sentence at me and his face turns red.

He takes a couple of deep breaths before he continues, calmly this time.

---