I’m so hungry that I simply take the food and water from him before he closes the door. Once I’ve eaten, I lie down in the bed and let sleep overtake me, praying that when I wake up, this will all have been nothing more than a horrible nightmare.
I wakeup to Henry staring at me, and for a split second, I forget about yesterday. Henry’s sitting on the edge of the bed, and he shocks me when he reaches out and strokes his knuckles down my cheek. When yesterday’s events come back to me—getting my brother sent to jail, his threats, hitting me—I flinch in fear but quickly school my features.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask him.
Yesterday, he said his plan was to destroy my family’s company, but there has to be a reason why.
“What did we do to you?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he stares at me for several seconds before he says, “In another lifetime, if you weren’t a Russo and I weren’t …me, we might’ve worked.”
He frowns as if he’s genuinely upset, and I can see now how he manipulated me. The man is a psychopath.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask again.
“I guess it doesn’t matter if you know,” he says with a soft, sad smile. “You’re never making it out of here alive.”
His nonchalant words cause my stomach to drop.
I’m not making it out of here alive …
Because he’s going to kill me.
I allowed this man to come into my life, seduce me, marry me, and now, he’s going to destroy my family’s business and kill me.
“My father and mother were killed by your father,” he says, startling the hell out of me.
One, because he told me his family lived here, so I assumed they were alive. And two …
“What are you talking about?”
I know my father did a lot of shady things, but was he capable of murder?
“He shot them. My br—” He shakes his head. “I loved my parents and were close with them, and the day they were killed, I vowed to seek revenge.”
His eyes turn into thin slits, and his jaw twitches. Instinctually, I move a bit back, not liking the dark look crossing over his features.
“So, that’s all I was? Revenge?”
He nods once. “Like I said, it’s not personal. The opportunity presented itself, and I had to take it. And once I’ve avenged my parents’ deaths, your brother will be rotting in jail, mourning the loss of his family, the same way we mourned our parents, and he’ll have nothing left, the same way your family left us with nothing.”
We…
He saidwe.
“Who’s we?”
He raises a brow.
“You said, ‘We mourned our parents.’”
The chances of making it out of this alive are slim, but if I do, I want as much info on Henry as possible. If there’s one thing my father taught me over the years, it’s that knowledge is power, and I need all the power I can get to fight against Henry.
“Don’t worry about it,” he snaps. “All you need to know is that your family caused this, and now, you’re going to pay.”
Because my dad shipped me off to boarding school, I don’t know anything about the business or who Henry’s parents might’ve been.
I think hard, trying to put the pieces together. I remember a few years ago, his two business partners died—Andrey and Joseph. Andrey was Dominick and Matteo’s dad, and Joseph was Anthony’s dad. As far as I know, his wife—Shit, what’s her name? It’s been so long. Maria! That’s her name—was still alive. I met Maria, as well as Anthony, a few times over the years, but because of the rift between my dad and Joseph, it wasn’t often.
