“Okay?” I said.
“I do like Avion, you know that I do. Honestly, she fits in really well around here, and if my assumption is right, then I’ll be as upset as the next person over, but I just can’t shake the feeling that Avion is a little more involved with her brother than she’s letting on. We’ve let her keep her phone and contact with the outside world, and I’m sorry, but everything she does is just a little too conveniently timed to everything else that is happening.”
I thought back and tried to think of the things that had happened to me since I met Avion, but I couldn’t think of any circumstance other than today when Avion had done something timed to anything else that had happened.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You just happened to meet her at that party where we were going to shake down Curtis to pay his debt right?” he asked.
“Yeah, but it was me who brought up taking her for collateral, not Curtis.”
“But he agreed pretty easily, and then after that we started having all of those problems with the Narzand brothers. You claim that they don’t really care all that much about her, but they sure played the concerned and worried brothers role well to start causing us issues. That paratrooper that came and snatched her from her room. How did they know which room was hers?”
That thought had never really occurred to me. When I determined that someone in our midst was a traitor, I just naturally assumed that whoever let the Narzand brothers in, could have also just as easily told them which room Avion was staying in. “I’m not sure.”
“You go and take her back and then a couple of days later, someone fires a shot through your office window, but just happens to hit her, which then opened up the opportunity for us to cross paths with the Narzand brothers again at the hospital. And that raid that happened there, happened only after her friend Lorie arrived.”
I squeezed my hand around my chin, not liking the pattern that Milli was stringing together. “Yeah, I know, but Lorie didn’t have anything to do with it. She was way too panicked to have had anything to do with it.”
“You blow up your estate and move us into this new place, and days after we move in here, your father is attacked. First by mysterious masked men, and then by the police. The Narzand brothers aren’t the kind of guys whodon’twant people to know they’re dangerous. If they were attacking Merrick to get to you, they’d want you to know it.” He was getting more agitated the more he spoke. “And then Curtis turns up dead and Avion sneaks away without telling anyone? I mean… Come on, Gio. Something isn’t right here.”
He wasn’t wrong there. Something definitely wasn’t right, it just irritated the hell out of me that I didn’t know what wasn’t or how to stop it. “No, you’re right. Something’s off. I just… I can’t imagine it’s Avion.”
“Giovanni, I need you to trust me as someone who has always had your back, something is not right with that woman. She’s a little toousedto all of this. I mean, think back. When we first took her, she didn’t seem scared at all. She’d do fucking yoga in the closet we locked her in.”
Back when we first kidnapped Avion, and before I moved her to a nicer room after she asked me for it as part of her subconscious sub training, I’d given her nothing more than a mostly unfurnished space no larger than a closet to live in. Though it did have a bathroom attached, she didn’t have much furniture and was being given very little to eat. Thinking about the way her best friend Lorie coerced in the corner at the hospital, that was much more what I was expecting from someone I’d snatched from their home and locked in a barren room.
It weirded me out back then that she wasn’t all that frightened, but I just chalked it up to her being a brave woman. Politicians and mobsters weren’t so different, especially when it came to her brothers, I figured it was just that concept manifesting itself.
“I’m not asking you to just take my word blindly,” Milli said, “I’m just asking you to consider the possibility. What if all of this has been designed from the beginning. What if the plan was always for you to bump into Avion, and for Curtis not to pay back his debt? What if they worked as a family to get her in here so that she could seduce her way into your heart and your family, and help destroy you from the inside out? They’re grooming you.”
The thought of it actually broke my heart. I thought of the conversation I’d had earlier with Tamryn, where she accused me of having fallen in love with Avion. The more I thought about that, the more I started to think that, just maybe, that was the case. She just seemed to be this part of me that I’d always been missing and when I saw the more ruthless side of her while we were dealing with Curtis, I thought it more. She was a perfect match for me.
I didn’t want to believe it was all fake.
Still, there was undeniable evidence that there was a traitor around me and I honestly didn’t believe it was Milli. If it wasn’t my parents, and it wasn’t Punk and Kelly who I simply didn’t think had the power to betray me that way, then that really only left Avion as an option.
Could that honestly be true?
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll admit that there’s a small possibility that she’s been hiding something.”
“Maybe it’s not even that she doesn’t have feelings for you,” Milli said. “Maybe she came in with this plan to seduce you and ended up falling for you accidentally. Thatcouldbe why she left to speak with her brothers, to tell them she wanted out or something, but if that’s what she did, then we’ve got even bigger problems.”
“If they killed Curtis, then they’ll want to kill Avion for betraying them too,” he said. “Either she’s going to take us down or they are. We have to do something.”
“I’ll talk to Avion,” I said. “Keep this conversation between us for now. Don’t tell my parents, especially Merrick.”
“Yeah. Avion’s charmed your mom too. She’ll be likely to try and convince you otherwise,” he said.
He was speaking as if it was already a foregone conclusion, which told me how staunchly he believed it, but I wasn’t so sure. “If you felt this way, that all that stuff before now was strange, why didn’t you say anything? Why continue to let her be here knowing that she could be the traitor?”
The question actually seemed to throw Milli off a bit, flashing a rarely unprepared expression across his face before it returned to its cool confidence. “Because I know how crazy you are about her. I wanted there to be concrete, undeniable evidence.”
“You don’t have that now.”
“I know, but the circumstances are different now. We could be running out of time to wait for anything more certain, and I need you aware of this possible threat so that you’re not letting your guard down around her,” he explained. “I knew that, if I could keep an eye on her, and Merrick already didn’t like her, that it would prevent her from being able to do too much around the house that would negatively affect you or our empire. I was hoping I’d have a little more time to put all the pieces together, but with Curtis dead, there’s none left. This needs to be dealt with now.”
“I understand,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m going to take care of things.”
