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“Antonella,” he speaks firmly, making me halt in my spot.
My entire body shakes as if I’ve been attached to a livewire. My teeth chattering loud enough for it to be audible.
Killian grabs my shoulders, holding me in place.
“I’m nothing like your father. You want to know the truth? Fine, I’ll give it to you. I never committed those murders. The bodies that you think I dropped into the river? They were your father’s doing. He wanted to pin them on me to make me look unstable. Crazy. That’s usually bad for business in our line of work. It was all an act in order to discredit me when I took over my family’s business after he killed my father.”
I suck in a breath, feeling my lungs burn. “No…”
“Yes!” He shakes me slightly. “All of this was him. I onlylethim pin it on me because it made everyone else fear crossing me. But I never did any of it. I promise you.”
I search his eyes for a hint of deception. I want him to be telling the truth, but then again, I don’t. It would mean my father was in fact the very monster Killian has been preaching to me about this entire time.
“I may be a lot of things—a bastard, an asshole, cold-hearted, whatever—but I am not the same as Marco Ambrosino. I promise you that, Nella.”
I blink until my vision is clear enough to see him again.
There’s a kind of desperate need that radiates from him, wanting me to believe him. Why would he have a reason to lie to me about this. He’s been upfront with me with everything else he’s done—heinous or not.
And now that I’ve seen firsthand what my father is capable of… How could I have been so blind? All this time, I’d put my blind faith and trust in a man who couldn’t be bothered to learn my side of the story.
It makes me hate him.
Killian slowly pulls me into his arms, pressing me into a comforting hug while my body slowly eases itself out of its panic attack.
I listen to the steady sound of his heartbeat again, and let it sync with mine.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
As soon as I get Nella to finally settle down enough to sleep, I head back downstairs to where Ava is waiting for me.
She paces around the living room, a pensive expression on her face that tells me that she felt just as bad about the situation as I did. Neither of us knew that Marco would be capable of sending a message like that to his own daughter, let alone in public. How he knew we were there in the first place, I still can’t wrap my head around.
I hate seeing Nella so upset, especially over a man who couldn’t give a damn about her and only pulled this stunt in order to shake her down.
When Ava spots me lurking in the shadows, she stops and drops her arms.
“What are you going to do?”
I slowly walk over to her, shaking my head.
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t thought of anything?”
“Trust me, I have. Just nothing that doesn't involve me going over there and kicking down the door with an AR-15 and blasting through the entire compound.”
Ava snorts at me and flops down onto the sectional.
“Why do you think he’d do that to her? I thought he didn’t care whether she lived or died over here.”
I can’t but agree with that, Marco is the kind of person that always has a motive behind every action. Even if, at the time, it seemed rather insane and unhinged. To get into the mind of someone like him, I’d need to actually set aside my morality for a second.
No matter what he wanted to accomplish by slicing off his wife’s finger and sending it to his daughter, he’d done some damage.
“I’m sure it’s to send a message to freak Nella out. What I’m surprised about is that he would go that far just to torture someone who he’s claimed to have disowned.”
Ava nods, folding her hands in her lap.
