“What happened?” she whispered.
He dragged himself to his still-drunken feet and crunched over the broken glass and splinters of wood.
“Gabriella,” he answered shortly, before heading up to the bedroom she would never sleep in again.
It was midmorning on Tuesday before Tommaso felt capable of leaving the villa. His monster hangover had finally left him. The rest of the pain wracking his body had only grown.
But there was work to be done. There was a board meeting he needed to attend at headquarters and then he’d be taking his jet to Milan and staying there for the rest of the week.
At least Milan didn’t have all the Gabriella memories tied to it. Not like Naples did. There wasn’t an elevator or stairwell or office in their headquarters that didn’t evoke a memory. Even the stairs he was ascending now came laced with the memory of climbing them and finding Gabriella bounding down them to the ground floor. The moment she’d clocked him, her pace had changed, lost its fluidity. She’d moved closer to the wall, giving him as wide a berth as she could manage, her neck and cheeks darkening.
“You’re looking exceptionally sexy today, Gabba,” he’d nonchalantly said as they passed each other, filling his lungs with a huge dose of her gorgeous, sultry perfume.
She’d lifted her chin. “Go fuck yourself.”
“I’d rather fuck you.”
“I wouldn’t even fuck you in your dreams.”
He’d taken three more steps when he turned to look down at her at the exact moment she turned her head to look up at him. One infinitesimally small moment in time, but he remembered it as clearly as if it had happened seconds ago. Their eyes had locked, and Gabriella’s chest had risen as if she were breathing in her longing. And then she’d blinked and disappeared out of his sight.
There had been so many of those infinitesimal moments over the years. Moments that had fed his obsession with her. His longing.
Her desk was exactly how she’d left it. The same desktop computer, good for playing chess and solitaire and nothing more. The same photo of her mother. The same sheaths of paper and piles of files that made it look as if she were doing useful work.
He sat himself on her chair and opened the drawers. The top right-hand one had a sealed A4 envelope in it. Opening it, he recognised her neat handwriting in the same beat as he remembered her bent over an A4 notebook while he’d been trying his damnedest to tune out her divine presence.
It was Gabriella’s thoughts on how to prevent another traitor from working on the inside to betray them. His rat obeying his instructions to teach him how to catch a rat. All there in black ink.
She’d put a huge amount of thought and detail into it, so much so that already he knew every suggestion would be implemented by all the Espositos.
Gabriella had handwritten a manual to protect their legitimate business from ever being contaminated by the shadows again.
His heart beating faster than it had in days, Tommaso took a photo of each page and sent them to Mattia and Siena, then messaged Edoardo telling him to collect him.
Striding out of the office, he called out to his PA, “Cancel Milan.”
“Until?”
“Until I say otherwise. I’m going home. No calls.”
Back home, Tommaso headed straight for the cellar. Weeks ago, he’d had all Gabriella’s incriminating files and documents stored in it. It was the one room of his home he knew she would never voluntarily step foot in. She thought it was some kind of sex cave. The truth was much tamer than that. It was Tommaso’s safe zone, a place others would call a panic room. When the doors were locked, there was no way to gain entry without the code. Not even dynamite could blast through it. Inside, it had a sleeping area, a fully stocked kitchen and dining area, a temperature-controlled wine-cellar, a bathroom, and tall fireproof and waterproof storage containers. An abundance of them.
The world Tommaso inhabited was dangerous. Many of the people in it were dangerous. Some were bona fide psychopaths. If the day came when one of those psychopaths decided to take him out in his own home, his domestic staff could take sanctuary in it. He didn’t believe that day would come, but Al Capone had never believed he needed a decent accountant.
Tommaso’s father had learned a great deal by studying Al Capone’s downfall and had instilled those learnings in his children. Make the untaxed illegal money clean. And then clean it again. Leave no trail. Account for every cent. Never be sloppy.
But no system was foolproof. Gabriella had proved that, and now it was time for him to look through it all properly and see exactly what evidence she’d found against them.
Unlocking the container he’d put the files in, he carried the pink boxes to the dining table and sat down to read.
When he came up for air some eight hours later, his head was reeling as he tried to make sense of what he’d found.
Gabriella parked her Vespa in her usual space, unhooked her bag of groceries and removed her helmet. The courtyard was empty. She doubted Ciro and his mates had gone to school. More likely they were holed up in one of their living rooms playing online war games.
She wished she could go back to that age. Wished she could close her eyes and then open them to her mother being alive. Wind back a little further to a time before Tommaso Esposito had started invading her dreams. Wind back even further, to the day of her first holy communion and stop herself from looking at Tommaso when Siena told her she should marry Rico.
What good would even that do, she thought miserably. Her crush on Tommaso must have started before then if she was already imagining herself marrying him. How far would she have to go back to stop it all from happening? Back to the womb?
