Page 31 of Mafia And Taken

“I need to see to your cut first.” It wasn’t that deep, but it needed looking at. It was just a surface cut, and the reality was that I could have hurt her much worse. But for some reason, I had held back.

“I’ll see to it myself. I don’t want anything from you.”

I couldn’t let her leave like this. “I’ll drive you home then. You don’t have your car.”

“No, I don’t want to go anywhere with you. I’ll get the soldiers at the gate to ring a cab to pick me up.”

She wrenched herself from my hold and stormed out of the garage. I watched as she hurried up the driveway towards the gates.

I got my phone out and rang the soldiers on perimeter duty and told them to call her a cab and to have Dr. Cotrone meet her at her apartment to treat her wound.

I also told them to make sure that she got back to her apartment safely and then to keep watch over her and report back to me regularly. She wouldn’t get away from me that easily, and in the meantime, I had an extreme need to know exactly what she was doing during every minute of every day.

After putting my phone down, I tried to calm myself.

I was still holding the knife.

I dropped it and let it clatter to the ground.

I couldn’t believe that I had hurt her, that I had marked her beautiful skin.

And I also couldn’t believe that I’d felt so conflicted. My first duty was to the Fratellanza, so why had I held back? Would I have been able to go through hurting her if she’d continued resisting?

All these doubts were swirling through my mind. I shook my head, trying to clear away the fog of confusion.

I had gotten the information we needed from her, but I was still raging.

I wasn’t angry with her. I was angry with myself.

She was right—I had been trying to manipulate her. And treating someone like her in that way made something that felt very much like guilt seep into my conscience.

Fuck. I felt like I needed to kill someone or at the very least, beat the hell out of them.

As I went back into the mansion, Marco came out of the office. “Ovidio has woken up. I’m headed down to the clinic now to question him. Danio has also hacked some information from the computers of the Bratva, proving that Ovidio was acting with the Russians.”

I took a look through what Danio had found. He was an IT genius. If he wasn’t already going to become a Made Man with us, he probably would have become a professional hacker.

The information he had hacked, together with what Cate told me, gave us enough evidence to know for certain what had gone on. Ovidio would not be able to argue with this.

“I’m coming to the clinic too,” I told Marco.

“Okay, let’s go.”

We took Marco’s car, and on the way to the clinic, I kept thinking about Cate’s words. About her accusation that I had used her.

In this life, I did a lot of things that didn’t make me a good man, but today I regretted what I had done to Cate and that was a strange emotion for me.

When we reached the clinic, we headed straight to Ovidio’s room and laid out what we knew to him. After setting out the facts, Marco glared at him in fury and with his fists clenched. “Does loyalty mean nothing to you? Why the hell did you do it?”

“Why do any of us do anything in this life? It’s the money. Everything you do is for money. Everything I do is for money. What’s the difference?”

“The difference? The difference, you fucker, is that we don’t put our family in harm’s way. You sacrificed your own wife and son,” I spat.

“We found the money you got from the Bratva. They’ve made you quite a wealthy man. What a shame you won’t be around to spend it,” Marco said. It hadn’t been hard for Danio to find the money. He located an offshore account, and the money traced back to the Russians.

“But you are a clever man. I’m sure there is more than one account, isn’t there? You wouldn’t have all your eggs in one basket.” Marco grabbed a pad of paper and shoved it toward him with a pen. “Write down the details of where the rest of the money is.”

He hesitated. But I didn’t hesitate. I drew my knife from my holster and drove it into him. He shrieked in agony. I had aimed my knife into one of his injuries.

---