“Did you know that her parents put you forward as a candidate to marry her before her first engagement?”
My head jerked. “What?”
“We hacked some emails. You were their first choice. They wanted to…”
“If I was their first choice for their daughter, then why…”
Jesus, that would have made this so much easier. I would be her husband by now, and none of this would have happened.
They stared at me silently.
“Gio,” I muttered. “Gio talked them out of it.” Shaking my head, Isprang to my feet. Why would he do that? Back then, we had been friends. Who better to marry his sister than me?
“Any idea why?”
Another look passed between them, and again, they looked at the computer screen. “There’s more. We don’t know how he found out, but …”
Flicking through the tabs, I felt my blood run cold. Gio hadn’t just known about me and Sophia. He had told his parents we weren’t a good match even before we had started seeing each other.
He had been working against me for years, even when I had thought we were closer than brothers.
Another tab and another secret was laid out in front of me. One that had been right there in my face the entire time. I’d just been too blind to see it.
Gio had been playing the long game. All this time, he had been playing the long game.
“Her parents…” My voice wobbled, and I had to clear my throat to regain my composure. “Jesus fucking Christ. They were going to pass him over.”
“Yeah for Sophia. If she could find a suitable match. Someone who would love and care for her and not just use her for the power she would have.”
My hand closed into a fist and came down hard on the spindly table. The top split, but it didn’t break, and pain shot through my arm.
But pain was good. It would make me focus, and I needed to focus now more than ever before.
“Someone like me.” My voice was deathly quiet. “That’s why he needed to put a stop to it. If Sophia and I had been married, or even together, he would have lost the seat as head of his family.”
“Yeah, she had to be married or…”
Again, I slammed my hands down. “Or be pregnant and expecting to be married.”
“I would have married her.” It felt like I screamed it, but it came out as a whisper.
It hit me in a rush, so hard and fast that I fell back on the chair, and it rocked back onto its legs. It threatened to topple over.
“He killed his family.”
No one spoke. They didn’t need to. It was the only thing that made sense. Gio knew I was in love with his sister. He knew that I would marry her, and if that happened, he would lose all the power.
So he had orchestrated their deaths to tear us apart. He had told the entire world that I had murdered a couple whom I adored as much as my own parents and sent the love of my life away, filling her head with lies as he went
Then she was pregnant, and that complicated matters even more. No wonder he hid her, because Sophia and I sharing a child together would be enough to give her control.
So why bring her back into this now?
That was the part that didn’t make sense to me. If he hadn’t brought Sophia back into my life, I would never have found her.
So why now?
Lily.
