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It was almost too painful to see her there, to know what I could have if only I ...
I stepped back and quietly drew the door shut and settled into an armchair by the fireplace to call Constantine.
“I wasn’t drunk,” was the first thing I said once he picked up. “You didn’t need to worry.” But sleeping with Maria in my arms had been what I’d needed, though I hadn’t realized it until she showed up with all that determination in her eyes, prepared to fight my battles alongside me. My fireball.
“You had me worried,” Constantine grumbled. “You’re not one to throw back the whiskey like that.”
I set the coffee mug aside, but my gaze lingered on the words CHEF’S KISS on it with a pair of red lips by the writing. It’d been one of my gifts from Maria for my birthday. “And you?” I cleared my throat. “What’d you do after I told you what I learned and sent you the cleaner’s files?”
Alessandro probably had sex all night to try and handle his tension like I’d nearly done.
But Constantine? My brother was a question mark at times, and I didn’t always understand how he could maintain his cool without exploding like I did.
“I worked,” he answered in a steady tone.
“Oh, great. Mergers and acquisitions are more important than our—”
“I worked on Bianca’s case,” he fired back at my shitty sarcasm. “I went through all our old files from the investigation. I spent all night on it.”
His words had my shoulders falling. My anger from last night was circling back without Maria in my presence to calm me down. “And?”
“And it doesn’t make sense. She had no enemies we were aware of, and she would’ve told you if something was wrong. You two were close.” He paused for a moment. “She didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. Not even a lover. Even if she kept them hidden from us, there would have been photos when we packed up her place. Or the guy would’ve come to the funeral, right?” He hissed a deep, frustrated breath over the line. “And as for work, she’d written a few stories and articles for a magazine, but she wasn’t an Erin Brockovich who might wind up with a target on her head. And no one would be stupid enough to come after one of us, knowing our family name.”
“Not everyone in the US knows not to mess with us,” I reminded him. “But we clearly missed something back then.”
“Unless ... well, her murder wasn’t premeditated, and it was still a crime of passion as we’d originally believed. But instead, it was committed by someone else, and he had deep enough pockets or enough power to acquire a cleaner to assist him in the middle of the night to cover up a crime.”
“What if she went somewhere after that club? Somewhere before she went home?”
“She punched in her building’s security code at around midnight, though. Shortly after we had footage of her leaving that nightclub,” he reminded me. “Unless the cleaner tampered with that, too.”
“If the guy was that good to fool us back then, it’s possible he altered even more than just when she turned off her alarm to enter her apartment.”
“I know you’re blaming yourself right now, but we were young. Inexperienced. We couldn’t have known any of this.”
“And you didn’t spend all night blaming yourself?” I retorted, and his silence was my answer. Yeah, he felt the full weight of the guilt, same as I did. Because Bianca’s killer was still out there.
“CEOs, dirty politicians, criminal groups, and—”
“The alphabet soup of government agencies all use cleaners.” I finished his line of thought. “That’s a big pool to scour through.”
“Which is why we need to interrogate the cleaner ourselves. And I don’t think your friend’s boss will let us near him.”
“Why do I get the feeling you know Jesse’s boss?” At his curse in Italian, my body tensed. “What is it?”
“I do know him, and let’s just say he’s not my greatest fan.” Constantine dropped the shit news on me. “His name is Carter Dominick. Former army Delta Force. CIA officer after that. Now coruns Falcon Falls.”
I didn’t need an introduction. I needed him to get to the point of the problem. “And?”
“Back when I was in college, before I dropped out to join the navy, Dad needed a favor from me. Didn’t give me much of a choice.” He paused to let the beginning of the storm sink in. “A company was attempting a hostile takeover of our family business. We were smaller back then, and this other corporation was ruthless. The owner was up there with Warren Buffett in terms of his bank account.” Another pause that had me uncomfortable. “Dad needed me to try and buy some time to prevent the takeover.”
“What could you possibly have done?”
“I was in school with the competitor’s daughter, and Dad asked me to try and date her. Get her to fall for me so we could delay the takeover and strategize a way to prevent it from happening.”
But how the hell was Carter part of the story? And how much of my brother’s life did I not know about? As the oldest son, how much shit had he done to keep our family’s business going?
“I was young and did what Dad told me. Did what I thought needed to be done,” he explained. “It worked. And they backed off, assuming their daughter and I might marry.”
