I closed my eyes and held my breath. More than anything, I wanted sweet memories to flash across my brain in my final moment, but I had none. Not in growing up in the shadow of my brothers in the Binachi household, not in finding out that I was nothing more than a chess piece on a giant biological gameboard in the Costa household, and not in watching Anthony take the plan I had and turn it into something that I could no longer control.
Then, the Varasso family came to mind. My time with them had been short, and in the end, they all wanted my head on a platter, but in the days before that, I experienced something I’d never experienced in my life before. I experienced love. I experienced happiness.
Marco smiled at me, and I imagined what it would be like to have someone love me. Gabriel joked with me, and I imagined what it would be like to be with my siblings and be happy. Alessandro and Luca defended me, and I imagined what it would be like to be important enough to someone that they would want to save me. No. I didn’t have any happy memories of my own to recall as I prepared to leave the world, so I settled for the next best thing—the joy and love I had the honor of experiencing for those short days that I spent in the Varassos’ light.
“Move.”
I released the breath I was holding.
“No. I’m not gonna let you kill her.”
My eyes peeled open, and I saw that Ashton was standing between me and Anthony’s gun. Heat radiated off of his body, the likes of which I’d never experienced before.
“I’m not gonna tell you again, Ash,” Anthony growled. “Move.”
“No. She’s still of use to us.”
Arturo scoffed. “She’s not of use to us. You just want to—”
“Quiet!” Anthony barked at the more bawn of his two sons. He leered back at Ashton. “How?”
“Illiana Costa doesn’t know…anything.” There was a shake to Ashton’s voice as he spoke. “She doesn’t know that Denise knows the truth about why she had Denise and Callista and the others. She doesn’t know that we tried to use Denise to take down the Binachis and the Varassos. She doesn’t know any of that. Denise could go back home right now, and Illiana would be none the wiser.”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d been very careful to keep all of my interactions with the Carduccis a secret from my mother. She didn’t even know that Callista and I knew one another. As far as my mother knew, Callista didn’t know that she wasn’t a pure Carducci child. If I went back to the Costa household right now, I could blend back into that family as if nothing had changed, not that I wanted to. I was trying to distance myself from my mother’s world, not get more mixed up in it.
I dared to glance over at Callista, but I couldn’t read her expression. Somewhere between her hardened Carducci facade and her softened Costa reality was an inner-conflict in which the best outcome for her might be for me to die. She wasn’t chomping at the bit to stop her dad from killing me like Ashton was, but she wasn’t in total agreement either.
She was just another person willing to weigh the risk of losing me against themselves. The only person who was willing to put himself in the line of fire for me was Ashton.
He pointed his finger at Anthony. “You told me that you let me make the decisions because I’m smarter than the three of you put together.” At “three of you,” he flicked a finger in the direction of Callista, Anthony, and Arturo. “I’m the brains here, and I’m telling you that this is the best move.”
When Anthony didn’t immediately respond, Arturo grabbed Anthony’s shoulder. “Dad.”
Anthony shrugged him off. He pulled his gun down and held up one sausage finger in Ashton’s face instead. “She gets one more chance, and if she fucks up, I’m holding you responsible.” He glared around Ashton, directly at me. “I’ll drop you both in Lake Michigan.”
Chapter Two:Ashton
We were barely two steps into my dad’s office when I felt a hard slap rake across my face. It was so heavy that it knocked me off my feet and sent me clattering into the chairs surrounding the octagonal meeting table. I flipped over, expecting to see Arturo’s hand pulling back, but it was Callista looming over me with a disgusting look on her face.
“Why’d you hit me?” I tried to keep the bite out of my voice, knowing that if my dad heard me raising my voice at his little princess, I’d meet Lake Michigan much sooner.
“Do you just want the top ten reasons?” she growled back.
“Enough. Fuck. Siblings are supposed to get along with each other. You three fight like cats and dogs.” My dad reached down and grabbed me by the collar and yanked me to my feet. He tossed me into one of the chairs and then walked around and sat in the chair opposite me. Arturo sat in a chair a couple to my right, and Callista sat across from him, a couple of seats to my left. My dad folded his fingers together and dropped his hands on the table with a dull thud. “Now. Why don’t you tell me about this big brain plan of yours that is worth me not emptying my magazine into that little bitch?”
“She cost us millions of dollars,” Arturo tacked on. “Not hundreds. Not thousands. Millions. And now we have a fucking lapdog halfway across the country with information that could ruin us at any moment.”
“The Varassos don’t want back into this life,” I responded. “Willow Varasso meant what she said. As long as we don’t try and drag them back into anything, that secret will stay with them.” I looked over at Callista. “Can you help me out here? She’s your fucking sister.” It was only once I saw the pained look on Callista’s face that I regretted asking. I turned and looked at my dad instead. “Denise may have fucked the Binachi-Varasso takeover, but it didn’t hurt us as much as you think it did. She’s the last Binachi, and we have control of her, and the Varassos aren’t part of the equation anymore.”
My dad guffawed. “They will always be part of the equation.”
“They aren’t.” I stabbed my finger against the green felt top of the table. “The Varassos aren’t in the game anymore. They didn’t keep a nugget for themselves or a thread to pull on if they needed to. I followed all of Denise’s leads. They shut up shop.”
“We needed those trades,” my dad growled.
I shook my head. “No, we didn’t. What? We were gonna throw ourselves into laundering and smuggling when we’ve never done that shit before? The Ghiardos were already fuming that the Varassos had California when they were all the way up in fucking Philly. If we had run in and tried to cowboy that operation, we would have landed ourselves on the shit end of a turf war. Sure, we got an army, but Sid Ghiardo helms Texas. They’re four times our size, at least. That’s not the play.”
My dad took a deep breath in and then slowly let it out. He scoffed and then let all of the tension out of his shoulders. Relief washed over me as I recognized him calming down. “This is why I let you do the thinking.”
