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Something about creating a legacy for his little girl.
I understood that. I’d felt the same way for years. My baby brother had always been my legacy. Our name. Yes, even our long history of getting away with whatever the hell we wanted to was something to be proud of. For me, the appeal in going legit had less to do with doing something right than with the challenge.
My brain liked the puzzle of moving things around. Working the angles. Smoothing the rough edges. It didn’t matter whether it was the corrupt side of our business or on the level. Not even a little bit.
Morals didn’t really trouble me, though I had an innate sense of fairness that raised its ugly head at sometimes inopportune moments. I was the head of the family. It was my decision which direction we moved the business toward.
But I loved my little brother and his newly formed family. I would do what was best for them. And this was it.
The wine business was a huge step. The lounges and bars around the city were another. Some of them were seedy as fuck if you looked at the books, but not all of them. Not anymore. And we were working on bringing the rest of them into the light.
Our gambling dens, on the other hand . . . those would never be legal.
Antonio wanted to close them down. I did not. They made too much damned money to shut them down for good. But I hadn’t shot him down completely. Not yet.
The truth was, I didn’t want to. I liked working with him. My baby brother hadn’t wanted to run the business. That was fine. It made things easier since our father had left it all to me. I liked being in charge. I was good at it. I’d been born bossy.
I just didn’t want to run it alone.
Pulling rank would tip the scale. It would piss him off. It would send him running.
I loved and respected my baby bro too much for that.
So I listened, and I discussed.
But right now, we had bigger problems.
The Five Families meeting was coming up. And this time, I had beef to bring. I had an inkling of who was behind the latest string of distribution problems we’d had. The Feluciano family was encroaching on our territory. Again.
And I was going to have to do something about it.
It was the main reason I was encouraging Antonio to stay in Italy. They loved it there. They had a house in the hills here, as well as an expanded suite in the mansion.
But it was safer there until this thing blew over. If it blew over.
And I doubted it would.
Not without bloodshed.
Things were about to get messy.
Chapter Two
Francesca
“Time’s up.”
I clenched my teeth, hiding the anger that would only make this worse. He had her. My angel. I had to make him think I was on his side.
“I need more time. I told you that.”
“I want them dead,” he hissed at me, sounding more than a little unhinged. He scared me on a good day. On a bad day . . . he was downright terrifying. “I will have their heads for what they did to me.”
I nodded as if I understood. I didn’t. He blamed one of the other families for his downfall. For the mess he had made of things. For his father taking away the privilege of running his family. The truth was, it was his own damned fault.
Philip stood there outside the house in the garden where my daughter used to play. He was handsome enough, I supposed, trying to see what had once seemed like enough to me. But his veneer hid a cruelty that knew almost no bounds.
I should know. I was once married to him.
I’d gotten out, but not until I gave him a child, a daughter I was determined to protect from him. But he had a hold on her, and I had allowed supervised visits. Angelique loved her father, despite his mercurial moods and the mean streak that ran a mile wide.
I knew him. He took her love for granted. He was a taker, a true narcissist, but also a dangerous psychopath to boot. He didn’t see other people as real. We were all simply cardboard cutouts for him to arrange or knock down as he saw fit.
And then one day, he took her.
I used all my resources to find them, to hunt him down. But in the end, he hadn’t hidden at all. He didn’t want our daughter. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to use me to hurt him.
He wanted revenge on the Margarelli brothers. On the eldest, Vincent, who had once been a friend all those years ago.
Even with all my resources, I couldn’t risk storming in and taking my daughter back. Knowing Phil, he had the place boobytrapped. And I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt our daughter to prove a point. He was that much of a maniac.
