I shook my head, refusing to accept that.
I was leaving. I would run. I had my diversion in place and I believed that I’d figured out how to pay off a few EMTs to transport Esmeralda to the facility, if he didn’t kill her first.
No war would be fought over me. Not if I got away and started a new life somewhere else.
“You’ll regret this,” he warned again. “You don’t understand what you’re choosing.”
“I do understand. And I’ll never choose to be your pawn again.”
He disconnected the call. The tone clicked.
A dam broke. Crying louder, I let the burner phone drop to my lap as I hunched over and sobbed for my cousin. For the man I wanted the freedom to love. For all the years of abuse and neglect I’d suffered through as his niece.
“What have you done?”
My breath stayed lodged in my chest at Andre’s voice.
I whirled around, facing him as he stood at the open door and glowered at me.
“What the hell have you done to me?” he demanded.
I swallowed hard, realizing he’d come and overheard my conversation. And with him demanding me to tell him what was going on—in Italian—I realized he’d picked up on more than I ever wanted him to.
Oh, fuck.
27
ANDRE
Iheard enough. Her loud shouts alarmed me, and I’d come running. But watching her shoulders shake as she screamed at someone on the phone, I realized I was finally getting somewhere. I was finally getting the answers I’d been needing to analyze for too long now.
She gulped, staring at me with wide-open eyes of fear. Like a deer caught in the headlight, she locked down in shock and terror.
Nope. No fucking way. Her doe-eyed innocence wasn’t going to weaken me now. Her tear-streaked face wasn’t going to soften me.
I strode into the room, slamming the door shut after me. Oleg had wanted to activate a recording device and mic that was in here already. While Sofia napped, we’d discussed how odd it was for a bug to be detected, yet not accurately found. I’d told him to set more throughout the house, to listen in to Sofia. I’d instructed him to activate the dormant mics we had in the building, a trick that I leaned on previously for when I held ameeting here. But when I’d told him to go ahead and listen in to what was said even in my most private room, my personal quarters, I’d been expecting to clear her name and erase the suspicion.
Not prove how wrong I had been about her. Just in case he hadn’t started that step of spying here, I started to record on my phone as I came to face her.
Cornering her as she sat on the side of the bed, I dismissed how scared she looked. How horrified she seemed.
“Tell me,” I ordered in English. “Now.”
If she thought that she’d been hiding anything just for using another language, she was mistaken. I was fluent in several languages. What worthwhile negotiator wasn’t?
“I’m—”
“No. I don’t want to hear an apology,” I warned. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
She broke. Her face twisted in agony as she lowered her head and sobbed into her hands. Before I’d need to order her to start talking again, she sniffled and faced me once more.
“My name isn’t Sofia Gonzalez. I am Sofia Giovanni, Roberto Giovanni’s niece.”
“Fuck!” I roared it, squeezing my hands into such tight fists that blood would be drawn with my nails.
“He forced me to get hired with that staffing agency to get hired here as a maid. When his spy, Emilio, was killed, he grew desperate for any intel he could find about your drug deals and how your operations ran.” She sniffled again. Tears pooled in hereyes, but she carried on. “He expected me to come here and take pictures of anything I could find and send it to him on, on, on…” She stuttered, picking up an old model of a cheap phone. “On this burner.” She held out to me, her fingers trembling so hard that she almost dropped it. “I’ve deleted all the messages and calls, since that was what he told me to do. But if, if, if he calls again, you can see for yourself.”
I stood rigidly, staring her down. “Go on,” I shouted. “Don’t fucking stop there.”
