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Hours pass and I ask many questions and by the time Winter falls into an exhausted sleep, I have never experienced rage like this. I had a son and now it’s my duty to step up and be the father he deserves.
Leaving Winter to sleep fitfully, I head back to the kitchen and find everyone exactly where I left them. The emotion on their faces rolls off me like water on wax because I no longer have any.
Angelo steps up and says quickly, “How is she?”
“Sleeping.” I growl my response and head straight for the coffee machine. I need a clear head now and fix Jasmine with a hard look.
“Please, can you watch her?”
She jumps up. “Of course.”
Louisa nods. “We’ll take it in shifts. We want to help.”
I note the tears streaming down Charlotte’s anxious face and she says with a quiver in her voice, “I’m so sorry, it was all my fault.”
Ivan hisses angrily, “None of this is your fault. There is only one man responsible for that and he’s lucky he’s not here right now.”
Angelo shakes his head, looking as if he’s been to Hell and back. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. We couldn’t get inside, so we burned the place down. I…”
“Enough!” I round on my friends in a rage that has been brewing since hearing the news I have a son.
“We are all to blame. Nobody saw this coming. We weren’t to know.”
Flynn looks as destroyed as the rest of us and moves closer, saying with a gruff, “What can we do to help?”
Before I can answer, Malik’s voice washes over us like a balm of antiseptic taking away the sting as he says firmly, “Take a seat. I have some information that may help.”
We stare at him in surprise and waste no time in grabbing a seat at the table and he peers at his computer with a worried frown.
“As I said before, you may be interested in what I discovered, and now certain events have come to light, it begins to make sense.”
There is not a sound in the room as we wait expectantly for him to speak, and he raises his eyes to mine, and my heart quickens when I note the excitement in his.
“I hacked into Massimo’s servers and found some interesting files stored on his computer. He saved them to the cloud and used a weak password to protect them.” Malik shakes his head in disgust as he sighs. “They contained the usual shit, but there was one folder that interested me more than any other because it was titled with a name rather than a description.”
“What was the name?” I’m guessing it’s one we are all familiar with, judging from the gleam in his eye and he nods. “Ortega.”
The silence says it all as I share a look with my friends around the table and understand why Malik is so excited about this. Like his own family in Dubai, the Ortegas are mafia royalty. Some consider Giovanni Ortega to be the Mafia King and I’m not surprised that Massimo had him in his sights.
“What was in the folder?” Angelo says quickly and Malik’s eyes gleam.
“A series of payments set up to a woman.”
“What woman?” Angelo is getting impatient, but whatever Malik has discovered is something he’s excited about, and he says with a smirk, “Delores Brown.”
“Should we be familiar with that name?” Flynn appears as confused as we all are, and Malik shakes his head.
“At first, I was as confused as you are. I did some more digging and found a bank account set up in Zurich for a Miss. Delores Brown. Then I cross-referenced the account numbers and payments and had a match.”
“But how does this matter to us?” I huff with frustration.
“Because the payments were for services received. Once again, I did some digging on the elusive Delores Brown and discovered a birth certificate and a passport in her name.”
“So, you think Delores Brown is somehow connected to Giovanni Ortega?”
“No.” We stare at him in confusion as he says with rare excitement. “My sources reveal that Delores Brown was last seen leaving a party in downtown Los Angeles around a year ago. That was the last sighting of her and despite exhaustive searches, she was never found. Word is, she left the country and in the absence of a body the case remains open. It appears that whoever Delores Brown is now, is someone who doesn’t want to be discovered and is hiding behind her, using her identity.”
“So, how does this link to Massimo?”
