“That fucking brother of his told him of his little escape plan hours before it actually happened! If you’d been there, you could have found a way to stop it… to make sure the meeting still happened.”
I laughed harshly. “God, you give me way too much credit, little brother.” I leaned back in my chair. “I was still just the goddamned hired help, Luca! Even if I’d known Dante and Magnus would show up, how would it have looked to Marcus if I’d suggested he keep that meeting? That’s whyIwent in eight years ago and you didn’t,” I said as I pointed at him. “You have all the finesse of a bull in a china shop when you decide you want something. They would have made you on day one!”
Luca leaned forward across the table, his eyes glittering with anger. “Then explain to me how akid,who was and still is our best hope of finding my son, is alive and well two years after he was supposedly killed during a scuffle inside the Parks mansion before it blew up? Explain to me what fucking hold he has on you that you would choose him over the child you loved like your own son!”
Con put his hand on Luca’s arm to draw him back into a sitting position, since he was practically in my face by the end of his rant.
“You want to know why, Luca?” I asked. “Because I just couldn’t do it anymore,” I said. “I couldn’t leave one more victim behind, even for a day, a minute. You all say I was the best equipped to go in after Gio, but not one of you knows what it’s really like in there.” I shifted my eyes to Con briefly, then pinned Luca with the harshness of my gaze. “I’mthe one who listened to their screams every day as they were being violated.I’mthe one who had to look in their terrified or dead eyes day after day as they tried to find a reason to take their next breath.Ihad to listen to them cry every night for their mom or their dad or whoever was out there in the world looking for them. You got them out after I told you about them, Luca. That’s fucking fantastic. But I never got to see any of that because I was on to the next monster trying to find Gio. Every day for eight fuckingyears I’ve watched kids suffer and I blocked it off so I could remember that Gio was the one waiting, the one who needed saving.”
I paused to pull in a breath and automatically glanced at the stairs Aleks had disappeared up. Then my eyes were back on my brother and my friend. “So yeah, I saw an opportunity and I took it. I set Aleks free because I knew you’d want to use him. You wouldn’t have just sent him home or found him a new life like the others. You’ve become so fucking blind to everything in your desperation to find Gio that I couldn’t trust you to let Aleks go.” I pointed at the stairs. “His family came for him! Just like we’re coming for Gio. Aleks and his brother had a right to put their lives back together. And the fact that you can’t see that…”
Luca’s mouth was set into a firm line and he didn’t even move a muscle as I spoke. But I saw something flash in his eyes the moment I accused him of not letting Aleks go… of choosing his son over Aleks’s freedom.
I was surprised when he finally lowered his gaze and stared at his hands.
“What would you have me do, Vaughn? Every second that passes, my son waits for me to come for him. Eight years… eight years of sick fucks hurting him and him calling for me.”
Con settled his hand on Luca’s shoulder, but Luca pulled away.
He lifted his eyes to meet mine and I saw a moment of agony before he hardened his jaw. “Yes, I would have taken advantage of having Aleks in my hands, but he would have been safe. And I would have made sure he made it home, both then and now. I did some unforgivable things in those early days when I was trying to find Gio, but I’m not… I’m not a fucking monster. If anyone should know that about me, it’s my own goddamned brother.”
With that, Luca stood and headed for the front door. I reached for my gun with the intent of calling him back so I could keep him in my sights, but Con reached across the table and grabbed my arm. “Don’t,” he said softly. “Let him go… he can’t go anywhere and there’s no way for him to call anyone.”
I sighed and lowered myself back down to my seat. “What didhe mean about that unforgivable part when he first started looking for Gio?” I asked.
Con shook his head. “I don’t know. You know he doesn’t talk about those first couple weeks where he tried to find Gio on his own. Maybe he just meant the guilt about not asking us for help sooner.”
I stared at the door my brother had walked through. Con could be right, but I wasn’t so sure. My brother wasn’t one who dwelled on the mistakes of the past. He put them behind him and moved on; he focused on the task at hand.
But then again, Luca wasn’t someone who spoke about what he was feeling, no matter what. Neither of us did. Our father had been a good teacher when it had come time to instill that particular lesson.
Covellos didn’t feel.
Even fake Covellos like me.
“We need to figure this shit out together, Vaughn,” Con said. “Otherwise it will just be you and him running.”
“We?” I asked. “Do you actually expect me to believe Luca suddenly only has Aleks’s well-being in mind? Because you know him as well as me, Con. He’s going to put Gio first, no matter what. And I get why… I’ve been doing that for eight years now! I love Gio and I hear the same screams and pleas from that boy that Luca does. But I will not use Aleks like that! Hell, it’s not even a sure thing… it never was!”
“King was able to confirm those were Stylianos’s men,” Con said quietly as he lowered his eyes.
My stomach dropped out. I’d suspected as much, but somehow hearing it out loud just made it all the more real. For whatever reason, the man was obsessed with Aleks, even though there was no evidence he’d ever even met Aleks. The rumor was that Stylianos and Marcus had gotten into a contentious bidding war over Aleks when his previous owner had sold him, but there was no proof of that. But if the bastard really had sent five men to get Aleks within hours of Aleks’s parents airing that picture and giving away both the fact that he was alive and where he was in the U.S., it was pretty telling how desperate the man was to get his hands on him.
“Is King on his way here?” I asked.
“No, he’s still cleaning up the mess you left behind,” Con said. “You can’t leave five bodies in the middle of nowhere and expect it to just get swept under the carpet… at least not without a little help.”
While King himself wouldn’t be doing the actual sweeping, since he was a more hands-on type, he employed enough people who had the skills to make things disappear, at least on paper.
“He’s heading to Chicago to see if he can pick up on anything… maybe there’s something we missed with Stylianos or one of our informants has heard something about Gio.”
I nodded, even though I knew King’s search would likely be fruitless. In the two years since we’d almost found the man who was only known by the name Stylianos online, we hadn’t had any real clues leading to him or Gio. That fact explained some of Luca’s uncharacteristic show of desperation.
He’s starting to lose hope.
I covered my eyes with my hands and felt a sharp pain shoot up my arm from the wound Aleks had inflicted on me. It was a reminder of why I was doing all this.
“This is undoing everything Aleks has accomplished in the last two years, Con,” I said softly. “The blackouts… he never had those with Marcus and the few he’s had since I got him out weren’t violent ones. His mind is so fucked up right now and his brain is trying to protect him in the only way it knows how. How am I supposed to ask him to be a part of something that did that to him? How am I supposed to ask him to give up what little bit of a normal life he managed to find in the last two years?” I shook my head and dropped my hand. “I can’t… I won’t.”
