I wouldn’t even know how to bridge my way back to what we had.
I sat without a word and pulled my phone out. Because I’d had a hunch that Sofia was getting to the point that she’d break and confess her secrets, I’d recorded it.
I pressed play on the recording after I laid the device on his desk for him to hear.
All of it.
He furrowed his brow and gave it all of his attention. Not saying a word, just listening. We went through it one full time, and I replayed it without his prompting.
I’d started to record as soon as I heard her shouting in Italian, so I caught some of the end of her call with Roberto Giovanni. Included was her rejection of his demand to poison me. I’d kept my phone in my pocket all while she admitted her sins to me. Every tearful word was captured. Listening to the anger in my questions and reactions made it sink in more.
This wasn’t a nightmare, but reality.
She’d really done all that. She’d owned up to it. This wasn’t some fallacy in my mind, some stretch of imagination.
The recording failed before she got to the part of admitting she was pregnant. Ruffling sounds took over, and I supposed that when I paced or when I lifted my hands, it jostled my phone in my pocket and it cut off.
As I sat there and felt the burn of my father’s stare on me, I was glad, though. Having to explain that she was carrying my child was another level of fuckery I wasn’t mentally equipped to discuss yet.
For several long, tense moments, my father didn’t say anything. He sat there, in solidarity with me, and seemed to be deliberating what to advise.
And he would. He had to offer a comment or command. Her being here to spy affected us all.
“You were right,” I said at last, uneasy with the silence. It was too stifling, sitting here in the quiet. A raging need to move and vent this awful energy inside me consumed me like a bottled-up bomb. “You were right about her.”
He let out a deep sigh and nodded. Steepling his fingers, he rested his chin on the tips. “What will you do?”
That was it. No scolding me—and why would he when I was an adult, not a child? No gloating about it—because he wasn’t a vindictive asshole with me.
He only wanted to know what I’d do now.
That question paralyzed me, though, because I truly had no plans, no reaction beyond figuring out how to breathe through the shock and let it settle with all the disappointment pooling inside me.
I can’t let her go.
“I should let her go.”
He stared me down, waiting.
“It’s imperative that I remove the threat of any spy who’d scheme against us.”
He cleared his throat and nodded.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t have.
She might have wanted to try, but I wasn’t stupid enough to leave papers out. That was why I preferred digital. And in the end, she was throwing him off with useless red herrings of supposed intel, giving him receipts about stupid shit.
“You expect me to be firm about eradicating any and all dangers to the family, to myself.”
Again, he sat there and watched me.
But she had no power to kill me.
We’d both listened to her defy Roberto and tell him that she had chosen me. But her word wasn’t dogma. Because Roberto had paid to have that mic put in that bouquet I’d ordered for her, she had indirectly been a means of his knowing how to set me up with that Rossi meeting.
“I should kick her out.”
He raised his brows. “And what, have her go back to him?” he asked. “She’s a loose thread now.”
