“You’ve been out?” she whispered once the light had been extinguished and he’d settled down on his side, his back to her.
“Yes.”
She bit into her bottom lip. “What happened today?”
“Nothing I wish to discuss with you.”
“Who am I going to tell?” She laughed sadly. “I’m probably the safest person in the world for you to confide in.”
“Gabba, you despise my world, and you despise me.”
Her heart pounding, she chose her words carefully. “You’re my husband. You’re all I’ve got.”
She had no one else. If not for Tommaso, she would be dead.
It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic that she’d never felt as alive as she had since giving her life to him.
The silence that followed lasted so long she didn’t think he was going to say anything else.
“Gino Vicario is plotting a takeover.”
“Of the shadowed world?”
“Yes. One of our men defected to him today. He escaped before we could confront him and get more information from him.”
“Can that man cause damage?”
“Not as much as the others we suspect are working against our interests.”
“Are there many?”
“There are enough. Alfredo was being tracked. That he knew to ditch his car and the shoes and jacket he was wearing suggests he was tipped off about the tracking, so now we are on the hunt for the mole.” He expelled a long, tired sigh. “My father’s death has left what some believe to be a vacuum. We have to fill that vacuum before any of the snakes or sharks circling us can. We are fighting a war on several fronts, internal and external.”
“It must be hard to fight a war when you don’t know who you can trust,” she observed softly.
An edge came into his voice. “Not as hard as it is when someone you would have sworn on a bible was loyal betrays you.”
He meant her.
Closing her eyes, she said in a low voice, “Your father betrayed my father in the worst way possible. I know you don’t want to believe it, but it’s true. All my father wanted was to walk away with my mother and raise me without the danger of the shadowed world. He would never have sold your father out.”
“How can you expect me to believe that, Gabba?” he asked starkly. “I believe that you believe it, but you’re expecting me to put the words of a woman whose cancer had spread to her brain over the words of my own father.”
“I don’t expect anything. He was your father. You loved him, and he loved you. Nothing can change that. But I never met mine because his life was taken before I was born. I don’t know if I’m imagining this memory, but when we were driving back from Gino’s, you asked what hold I had over your father. I think the hold was his fear that my mother might have told me the truth before she died – that’s why he kept me so close but wouldn’t let me touch the shadows of your world. Check my apartment out. You’ll find it’s bugged. Who else would have bugged it but your father? My Vespa has a tracker, too. The only place he couldn’t bug was the hospital.”
“My father wasn’t afraid of anything. If he suspected you knew, he would have dealt with you, not kept you close.”
Gabriella shivered at this euphemism for killing her. “He had no proof that my mother knew. She played her part perfectly for sixteen years, and your father did too. In his mind, he’d got away with it, but what he did was so monstrous that I can only assume he experienced a form of paranoia about anyone learning the truth.”
This time, the silence lasted until the morning.
“How did you find all those documents?” Tommaso asked three days later when they were alone in his office.
Gabriella, who’d just started a game of either solitaire or chess on her internet-less computer, looked up from the screen. Today, she’d tied her glorious hair into a high ponytail, a style that accentuated her high, rounded cheekbones and allowed him to see the entirety of her beautiful face in one glance.
Neither of them had mentioned the documents since the day of Lorenzo’s funeral when Tommaso had found them, but she didn’t need him to tell her what he was referring to. “You’ve been through them?”
“Not yet.” Skimming them and seeing the sheer amount of incriminating information she’d stolen from them, physical evidence that her work to destroy them had been going on for years, had brought the red mist out in him so swiftly and completely that he’d not trusted himself to dive any deeper into them.
