Page 57 of The Strength Of A Woman

This woman truly has no one.

Her mother failed her.

Her father?

Let’s not even talk about it.

The second man her mother married left behind a son who thinks life is about grabbing ass literally whenever you feel like it.

What an entitled dick.He still lives on the Gallos’ dime.

And the Gallos? Don’t even start me on them.

So, it seems to me that Giorgio Gallo was in business with Stefano Varela from way before the latter expressed his newfound interest in his granddaughter.

In fact––and that doesn’t mean they weren’t enemies at some point––they seem to have played the same side a lot.

If I get that right, and I’m sure I do, Giorgio Gallo wanted to bring me into his family and worked with Varela behind the scenes to set me up and make me do what they wanted.

It wasn’t happenstance, as they pretended to be.

Varela got his money from Giorgio Gallo.

Then Giorgio got his money from me.

Then, something happened.

Bianca’s death came as a surprise to no one.

No one really blinked an eye when they heard the news.

It was expected.

It was convenient.

Convenient for whom exactly?

That’s the thing.

Who wanted Bianca dead?

People looked in my direction––as I have said before––but that didn’t fly. I had nothing to do with the woman, so painting me as the jealous type didn’t work.

Xavier wasn’t married, so having a scorned woman in the mix wasn’t plausible either.

An accident?

As unimportant as Bianca Gallo was in this world of crime, she benefited from protection.

Bodyguards followed her around day and night, yet somehow, that day, they hadn’t checked her car.They didn’t make sure that she was safe in her vehicle.

No one who’d been around the block a few times had bought into the idea that it was an accident.

I honestly suspected that Giorgio himself had plotted his own daughter’s demise.

It made no sense to me, but criminals often don’t.

It made me a widower, and I could still run their empire.