My phone rang again. Another call from Giambrone was my first guess, except this had the French country code.
I stared at the vibrating phone, my fingers clenched.
“You going to get that?” Tore asked.
There’d already been two calls from France in the last two months, all from the French fucker who broke my sister’s heart years ago. Now a third. I was tempted not to answer.
“Hello,” I answered gruffly, expecting Adrien De Villier’s aggravating accent. I never understood my sister’s infatuation with the prick, regardless of the arranged marriage that had once been planned between them. “De Villier, this better not be you calling again.”
“Renzo,aspetta un attimo.” Hold on a second. My throat seized. That wasn’t Adrien De Villier talking at all.
I sat up straight and adjusted my hold on the phone. “Persetta? Is that you? Persetta?Rispondimi.” Answer me.
I caught Tore’s confused glance across the car and Jac’s wide-eyed stare in the rearview mirror from the driver’s seat as I called out her name again and again. No answer, except for a muted female conversation on the other end of the line. Was it really her? Or was I so tired I was hearing things? After nine months, was I close enough to giving up that I heard her voice when it wasn’t there? No, she’d spoken Italian. She’d said my name. It was her. It had to be.
“Persetta,” I yelled. “Pick up the phone!”
Still no answer, except for the god-awful chatter on the other end. My body pulsated with the need for an answer. To hell with the Greeks and war.
“Pull the car over!”
“We’re almost there, boss,” Vinny said.
“Ho detto, accosta la macchina, ora!” I said, pull the car over now!
The tires squealed as Jac cut through two lanes of traffic and slammed on the brakes. My hand and phone smacked against my ear as the car stopped abruptly. The moment the car was off, Jac turned in his seat, his blue eyes spearing me.
I tugged the suffocating grip of my tie loose.
“Persetta, I swear to all that’s holy, if you keep ignoringme, I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Send me halfway across the world in a sex trafficking ring? Babbo’s got you beat on whatever you could think up.”
My breath caught.Madonna, it was her.
“Don’t joke about that!” It was really her. She was alive. All this time…only one phone call away.
“It’s her,” I mouthed to all three of them, my eyes watery. Having grown up together, Tore and Vinny were just as protective of her as I was. And Jacomo, he’d spent his life guarding her alongside his best friend—Persetta’s biological father, Giorgio, who died the day she was taken. For almost nine months, we searched without end, all for her to be the one to reach out. She was alive. She was talking. She was lucid.
“I was losing faith I’d ever find you. I tried, Persetta. I really swear I did.”
“I got out. That’s what matters. I can’t…I can’t talk about it more than that.”
The strength she spoke with left me amazed and flabbergasted. I always knew I’d find her, but how and in what condition…I’d expected to have to pick up her pieces and help glue them back together. She didn’t sound like the bubbly sister I knew who hid her heartache and pain behind cheer and smiles for everyone else, but she wasn’t broken either.
“We don’t have to. It’s just so good to hear your voice. Where are you? I’ll come get you. Why are you calling from a French number? Did De Villier have anything to do with this? I swear if he hurt you—”
“Calm down. He helped save me.”
Calm down? Calm down! She’d been missing for nine months, and now she was practically waxing poetic about the man who’d broken her heart years ago. I could hear her infatuation. Thatcazzodidn’t deserve her. Never had, never would. No matterwhat part he played in rescuing her, not when his abandonment left her in my father’s clutches to begin with.
We spoke of everything and nothing after that. Of her injuries and permanent loss of vision. Of our mother’s suicide. Of our memories with her. Trips we’d taken together. Trips we’d still like to take. How business was doing. My new responsibilities. How I was coping. All for it to land back on her relationship with the De Villier bastard.
“I’m going to marry him,” she told me matter-of-factly.
“Over my dead body.” My left hand toyed with a pen pulled from my breast pocket, tapping it against my thigh.
“Don’t tell him that. He might arrange it,” she teased. “I’m serious though. Once we iron out the kinks, I’m going to say yes.”
