None of them smiled; they just sat beside me, all of us waiting to see if we’d calculated this correctly. An hour later I’d almost given up hope when my phone buzzed. A weird little bubble popped up onscreen, and Grayson leaned over, cracking his first smile.
“Encrypted message,” he said.
That got Angelo to smile as well, but I had no idea what this meant.
“Only you can open it,” Gray told me. “It’ll require some form of identification.”
Turned out it was my thumbprint, and I didn’t even want to know how my creepy father managed to have that fucking print on file after all these years.
When I got it open, a short message appeared.
Billie. Use the money I left for you and get a vehicle. When you’re away from the house and danger, call me, and I will come to save you.
There was another phone number at the end, and I had to assume this was what I was supposed to use to contact him next time.
“Now we plan,” Angelo said standing. “Wilson won’t go alone, no matter what you said to get him to meet you. But we can’t give that away when he’s scouting. I have an idea of how we can conceal our people, if we use a certain location.”
“Could he be watching us now?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Grayson growled. “We will need Vee and the others to covertly set this up for us.”
I nodded. “Do you think it’s a good idea for us to be out and about doing normal rock star shit, and I can look kind of quiet and broken, so that Wilson’s spies can report that back to him? Keep Wilson from thinking I’m plotting how to trap him.”
“Excellent idea,” Jace said, jumping to his feet. “With that in mind, I’ve got dinner reservations booked at theGilded Rosefor us tonight, and then we can hit the clubs after—normal band activity. Meanwhile, the rest of Siena will be prepped.”
“How will we let Vee know all of this in a safe and secure way?” I asked. “And are we still thinking the same location?”
Angelo hugged me hard. “Yep, it has the landscape we need to keep this hidden. Don’t worry about it, Bella. I promise that our plan will come to fruition soon. This will be dealt with by the end of the week.”
I was shot through with fear and relief in the same instant—fear because so much could go wrong with this plan. But it was the only way to draw Wilson out into the open. It seemed I was still his only weak link, and it didn’t bother me remotely to use that connection to take him down.
He killed my mom and daughter. He abandoned me, leaving behind a few million dollars and no fucking cares, like his dirty money could take away from everything he’d done to me. I’d known all along not to touch that shit; now I knew it was tainted with the blood of my family.
Whatever was coming Wilson’s way, he deserved.
“Get dressed, Rose,” Jace said to me. “Make it convincing.”
No need to explain what he meant as I hurried to my room and dug out something drab and boring, loose enough in the abdomen to look like I was covering a bump. I also pulled my hair back in a messy bun, with no care taken, and I wore no makeup.
My current state would be photographed and posted everywhere, but I could live with that as long as my father fell for the charade.
That was literally all that mattered, and I wouldn’t rest until his presence in our lives was done.
thirty-eight
JACE
Tears had been streaming down Billie’s face as she drove away, and my entire body screamed at me to go after her. To bring her back and reassure her that we didn’t need to do it likethat. She didn’t need to sacrifice her heart and her goodness to neutralize the threat of her father. Fucking hell… if anyone had asked me ten years ago if Bruce Bellerose was capable of murder, I’d have laughed in their face.
Nothing shocked me anymore, though.
Over the past week, we’d had some major changes with Angelo and Vee tightening their hold over Ricci Corp and the Siena Mafia, proving themselves to be a dynamic duo. Or trio, with Giana’s assistance. For now, Angelo was maintaining the illusion that he was the one calling the shots, just until the transition was set in stone and he could be sure that his people wouldn’t turn on Vee the first moment they could.
Billie had made several additional calls to Wilson—I couldn’t think of him as Bruce anymore—to build the story that she was scared of Angelo and, by association, all of us. My heart broke a little when I overheard her on the phone to him yesterday, sobbing about how I was no longer the boy she’d loved as a child, that I was now cold, cruel, selfish… and she wasn’t wrong.
She was lying, building a false narrative to suck Wilson into our trap, but the line between exaggeration and truth was at times very muddied, and it was creating an enormous amount of strain between us all. Add to that, Rhett wasn’t with us to provide that softer perspective, to hold her and let her melt into his unconditional love in a way that only Rhett seemed able to do.
By the day we’d decided to enact our plan, we were all strung tighter than bow strings and snapping at each other over the dumbest shit.
