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Vincent stiffens.
As he should. While I was locked up, it took my brothers and me years to unravel the mess he and his accomplices made of the business. Then it took a grand-scale massacre to work out how. Thanks to the efforts of my cousin, Leroi, the men responsible for taking everything from our family are dead.
All but one.
Vincent only lives because I need a piece of information to enact the next stages of my revenge.
Scrubland whips past us in a blur, which soon darkens to sparse trees and then dense woodland. I make one stop for gasoline, which I pump into jerry cans that I load into the back seat. When I slide back into the front, he shudders.
“Tell me again which assets we lost to Frederic Capello,” I say, the mere mention of the man who destroyed us making me grimace.
“Why are you asking this question again? You already know?—”
“Humor me.”
He gulps. “Casino Montesano plus the hotel, the shipping company, the loan company, the stock portfolio, the real estate, and whatever was in the safety deposit boxes.”
I nod.
“Where are all these assets now that Capello is dead?” I ask.
“It’s…” He rubs the back of his neck. “He’s only been dead a few days. His estate is still in probate.”
“Meaning?”
“The law firm is going through the legal process for distributing belongings to his heirs.”
“Who should all be dead.”
Vincent clears his throat.
“But then, our belongings should never have ended up in the hands of that double-dealing snake.”
“Capello was blackmailing your father,” Vincent blurts. “I didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.”
“You already said that.”
Blackmail was the only explanation for why Dad signed over his assets to a second-rate underboss like Frederic Capello. I never understood what kind of information was worth more than the wealth our family had built up over generations and had thought Dad was weak until Leroi killed the entire Capello family.
Once they were all dead, we obtained a cache of hard drives.
Turned out, Dad wasn’t the only person with dirty secrets.
Judges, jurors, journalists—you name them, Capello held enough filth on anyone capable of sending a man to the electric chair with the most circumstantial evidence. That was just one of the many reasons he had to die.
“Send the law firm the paperwork and order them to transfer back those assets to the family,” I say. It’s not a request.
“Capello still has a surviving heir. A child he’s spent decades searching for,” Vincent says, his words heavy with the accusation that I ordered the assassinations that secured my freedom.
“I know. An illegitimate daughter named Emberly Kay.”
His quiet gasp tells me he didn’t expect us to conduct our own research. When the last of my appeals failed, my brothers, Benito and Cesare, hired an out-of-town firm of private investigators to dig up everything they could on the woman whose murder landed me in jail.
They found nothing to connect her to anyone we knew except Frederic Capello. Strangely, the DA never mentioned that the dead woman was a childhood friend of one of his mistresses. Our detective continued digging and found Capello’s long-lost daughter, Emberly.
As far as we know, Emberly has lived a life of poverty. She and her deceased mother changed addresses more frequently than most women change their hairstyles, suggesting they were on the run. Her birth certificate says father unknown, and the report also concluded she has no idea her father is a violent mobster who left her millions.
“Are you going to kill her?” Vincent asks.
