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There’s an edge in my voice when I want there to be these days that I’m not sure I used to be able to pull off. Being locked in a basement playing Russian Roulette with a psychopath will do that, I guess. I’ll be honest, I’m excited to whip out the new hard-edged voice in court and see who I can make shit their pants.
Until then, though, that pant-shitter looks like it’s about to be my grandfather.
He pales. “Yes, that’s it.”
“If I find out?—”
“I swear to you, that’s it.”
“Good.”
I glance around the room—at Gabriel, his face still bruised but healing, his arm in a sling. Taylor stands next to him, and then Tempest. Caroline is glowering behind her idiot husband, and of course Eloise is next to me.
This is the last bit of business we need to wrap up in New York before Eloise and I hop on a jet to Paris, where I’ll officially be meeting Andre LeBlanc.
I’ll also be telling him my intention to marry his daughter. Like, soon.
I proposed. Of course I did. She’s divorced now—well, annulled post-mortem, as it was never consummated. But yes, I’ll be marrying Eloise. I was an idiot to let this woman go the first time, and I never will again.
So yes, this is my big “meet the father” moment now that Andre’s out of his coma—the one that Massimo put and kept him in, with the help of two dishonorable fuckers in Andre’s organization who sold him out.
Luckily, “dishonor” doesn’t get you very far with the French Mafia. The French are pretty hardcore about the whole “Liberté, Egalité, Fratnerité” thing, and now that he’s awake, Andre’s people have…dispatched the traitors in their midst.
At least, that’s what I hear. I’m merely an attorney, after all.
Massimo and the traitors, of course, took Andre out to secure the marriage deal that Luca had first floated and Massimo now wanted too. Not because he had any real interest in Eloise romantically, obviously. But because he wanted Andre’s smuggling route, which was apparently far more lucrative than anyone was letting on.
On a more insidious level, his obsession with “taking things from me” was also part of why he married her, I think.
How’s that working out for you, fuckwit.
There’s a tiny part of me that wonders if I should mourn the loss of a brother. We’ve looked into it, just to be sure about everything, and Massimo was telling the truth for once.
I am Luca Carveli’s oldest son. My mother did die giving birth to Massimo. And Luca’s side-piece of the month, Gia, did help my uncle Angelo, who—pay attention, this will be important—was a lawyer, did take me away from Luca. Gia, it seems, took pity on me and the life Luca was forcing me into. She’d also, apparently, been a friend of my mother, and so she reached out to my uncle Angelo for help. It would seem their intention was to take a baby Massimo, as well, but were stopped in the attempt by Luca’s men.
When the accident which probably wasn’t an accident on the West Side Highway took their lives and somehow spared mine, a man who’d worked for years alongside Angelo found me in the hospital.
That man was Vaughn Black. The only real father I’ve ever known.
The only real father I choose to have.
I am not, nor will I ever be, Bruno Carveli.
My name is Alistair Black, and my life is my own.
“You’re sure this is it?” I growl at Charles as we stand in the library of his lavish mansion on the Upper East Side, in a half-moon around the fireplace.
“I promise you, Alistair,” he hisses quietly, nodding at the folder in my hand. “That is the very last scrap of evidence on earth connecting you, Alistair Black, to?—”
“You don’t need to say the name out loud.”
I draw in a breath and look at the folder—a tether to another world where I’m another man.
But I don’t want that world.
When my uncle and Gia were killed, I was also presumed dead. In fact, they called it in the ambulance, and only changed it when the EMT caught the faintest hint of a heartbeat just as they arrived at the hospital.
Apparently, I have been a fighter my whole life.
