“Carmello said he had plans for you. Very, very big plans. That you were going to cement his dynasty. He told me that your mother had disappointed him. She’d run, tried to escape, and he’d hunted her down. He’d punished the man who’d taken her from the life that Carmello had planned.”
A tear leaked down her cheek.
“He killed your father, Delaney. He confessed to me. Just said it like it was nothing, and I remember thinking…this can’t be real. But it was.”
No. “My mother—she would have said something to me! She wouldn’t have just let me go and live with a man who had killed my father!”
“She was sick, Delaney. Physically sick back then. You didn’t know it, but she’d already been battling cancer for a while. She was weak, and I think that he was offering her treatment.”
“Paying for it, you mean,” Delaney corrected. Because wasn’t that what her grandfather had done in Milan? Paid for treatment? Extended her mother’s life by precious years?
“Your mother was a pawn in the game he played,” Nash revealed. “A pawn who fell in love with a man your grandfather hadn’t picked, and she fled her home to be with him. Later, I’d learn she fled because she knew your grandfather was Typhon. That she didn’t want to be part of his criminal world. She wanted better for herself. For you. But despite her efforts, she didn’t get to permanently escape.”
Her mother had cried for days when they first arrived in Milan. Now Delaney understood why.
But Nash wasn’t done. “He told me…Carmello said I didn’t fit in the plans he had for you. I told him to fuck off. You were my only plan.”
Another teardrop rolled down her cheek.
“Then he put a manilla file in front of me. Told me that, inside, I would find information on my biological parents. I had wondered about them my whole life. Always wanted to know why they gave me up. Why they walked away. He was offering me every answer. Right then and there. All I had to do in exchange for that information was walk away from you.”
A weak nod. “So you did.”
Another gentle slide of his thumb over her lower lip. “No, baby, I told him to fuck off again. They were my past. You were my future.”
A sob slipped from her.
“Carmello said that was an unfortunate decision on my part. He made a phone call. Right in front of me. Told someone to shoot and…” A ragged breath. His hand began to fall away.
She grabbed his wrist. “Nash?”
“Your mother was crying. Your grandfather left with her. Before the door closed, he told me to look inside the manila file, then to be sure and check the news.”
Her heart beat wildly in her chest.
“He had her killed, Delaney. He ordered the hit right in front of me. My mother’s photo—her name, her address—they were right in the file. I checked online for news happening in her city. It was there—her death. Her death showed within hours on the local news outlets in her area. He had her killed because I wouldn’t follow his orders.”
Horror twisted inside of her. “I’m so sorry.” She let him go. How can he touch me? Nash has to hate me.
“You have nothing to be sorry for! You didn’t do it! That bastard did! I went to the police. I stormed to the local PD, and he was there. Waiting for me. Smirking. He put me in the back of a limo, and, as he sipped champagne, Carmello told me that he could wipe out everyone I ever loved. My biological father was still out there—he could eliminate him with a phone call. He could take out Ryan. Agnes. Everyone in my family. The family that had taken me in and loved me for years. The family that had given me a home. He was threatening to kill them all. Told me that he’d kill every single one of them, and then he’d kill me. Because one way or another, he was going to get you back. He wasn’t going to lose you the way he’d lost your mother.”
That little shed was as silent as a grave after those words. Grief and rage battled inside of her.
“Carmello promised me that he would give you the world. And that he’d give me death. If I tried to stay with you, if I didn’t send you away, then he would leave a trail of bodies around me. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I was in way over my head, and I just knew that when I stared into his eyes, I was staring straight at evil.”
Her grandfather had always been so cold. So withdrawn. She’d known that her mother feared him but…
I never knew this. How could she have possibly known this?
“Carmello swore that you would be safe. Told me that you would have an army around you. That you’d want for nothing. He could give you everything. I could give you—well, he said I would be dead before I could give you anything at all but pain and grief.” Anger rolled in Nash’s words. “I asked him why the hell he didn’t just kill me right then and there. Death would be easier than losing you.”
Death would be easier than losing you.
She shook her head, frantic. It felt as if her heart had been ripped from her chest.
“Carmello sipped his champagne and said he’d killed the man his daughter loved, and that every time she looked at him, he could see the pain in her eyes.” Delaney caught the faint click of Nash’s swallow. “Carmello didn’t want you looking at him that way. He didn’t want you to ever see a monster. So he was giving me a way out. You were never supposed to know. I was never supposed to reach out to you again. I would get my life, along with the cash to pay for the rest of medical school and to cover the training for surgery and the start-up of my practice, and you’d get a life with him.”
The pain in her heart would not stop. “You didn’t become a doctor.”
