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“Got it,” he responds as he steps out of the room with his phone to his ear. Could Eric have betrayed me? My gut is telling me no. He’s been loyal to me for years. The moment I found out Ada was a twin, I briefly wondered if he had been in on it but remembered that there was no way for him to know. I’d had every inch of that room surveilled when he’d been in there working on my wife.
No, not my wife.
Her twin sister.
Ada had used her own twin sister to fake her death. She’d taken an innocent woman away from her family to use as a ploy so she could work on… on what? What is her endgame? If she wanted the Castellanos empire, why tear it down? No, it must be something deeper.
Or maybe it wasn’t deep at all.
This whole time, we’ve been assuming she’s after something big. Taking over the Castellanos’s territories or even trying to start a war between all the families here in Vegas. But what if she isn’t? What if the only reason she has done everything was to achieve one thing, and one thing only?
Chaos.
She’d chosen that name because that is exactly what she wanted to cause but not between me and the Castellanoses. Or at least, not just between us. Everything she has done has directly affected Vanya. Ada discovered the letters and decided to pretend to be Vanya when we met. It broke Vanya’s heart and for the next few years Ada smugly rubbed it in her face and Vanya was none the wiser. But that didn’t matter to Ada because she knew what it meant to be the one to have me instead of Vanya.
The gardens.
Fuck. No wonder Vanya had spent so much time out there once I gave her the freedom to leave her room. I’d planted that garden the exact way she had described it in her letters.
“Boss,” Anton shouts. “Eric’s been stabbed. He’s currently at Vegas Memorial in surgery.”
“How the hell did that happen?” I growl.
“Mac says the doc’s entire home office was torn apart and his laptop was taken.”
Shit. I stroll back into the kitchen. “Do we have video surveillance?”
“Yep.” Anton pulls it up on his phone and tosses it to me from across the island. “You’re not going to believe who it is.”
Un-fucking-believable.
Jonah, that slimy bastard. The camera clearly shows him rooting around Eric’s office. When Eric rushes in to confront him, Jonah stabs him several times before running off with his laptop.
“Shit.”
“Not to add to your plate, but I’ve got the coroner’s report on Cora,” Vitali pipes up. He shifts the laptop so we can all see. “Multiple stab wounds to the pelvic cavity. Head sawed off. She was found in a hotel room in Spring Valley.
“Sounds like the work of her brother,” Anton points out. “But why would he kill his own sister?”
Why indeed.
“It doesn’t make sense that a man did this though,” Vitali says. “The report says that the stab wounds were most likely done by a female. Not a male.”
“Was the sawed-off head done by a female, as well?”
Vitali shakes his head. “Nope, that was definitely done by a male.”
“Why would someone do that to another woman?” I ask Vitali, the resident psychologist of us all. He’d been trained in the art of neurolinguistic programming at Royalty Elite. The same science used by the FBI to track serial killers.
“I would say resentment,” he tells me with a look of disgust. “Of what, I don’t know. It could be a scorned lover resenting the prostitute her man is sleeping with. Maybe her madam if she pissed her off or stole money.”
“Or if she resented being born?” Anton asks hesitantly. I turn to look at him.
“You think Ada killed her own mom?”
Anton shrugs a shoulder. “Vanya told you that her father used to take Ada away from her and that when she came back, she wasn’t the same. What if Theo was whoring Ada and her mother out in that hotel room and then one day Ada just snapped?”
Fuck. She’d really resent her mother then.
