I gritted my teeth and read.
The minute details were spectacular. The hitman wore a red-black helmet. The visor was down. The weapon was a semi-automatic rifle. Gabriella guessed it was .223. From the shells I’d seen at the construction site, my little wife knew her guns.
I laughed, a rough, barking sound.
The last paragraphs of the entry were about my line of questioning, and Gabriella’s own speculation over who wanted her dead.
That has to be why Papa gave me the tracker. He wants me dead, while pretending it’s Liam he’s after. Regardless, I won’t let Papa hurt Liam. He’s been good to me. Better than I deserve. Maybe Papa knows that I’ll never let Luca go. He wants the stain from his precious family gone, once and for all. He doesn’t have to worry.
I’ll be done the moment I can escape with my boy.
My gaze raked over the name.
The unknown enemy—there. He was real.
I threw the journal across the room. That was it! Finite proof that Gabriella had a secret lover. She didn’t hide the informationin the random spaces of the journal entries anymore. She spoke openly about a boy, one for whom her heart bled.
Dropping my head into my hands, I scored my scalp with my nails. I was going to find him. This fucker. And I was going to tear him limb from limb. He would suffer for years.
Gabriella was mine.
But even as I plotted this unknown enemy’s destruction, a darker thought seeded in my mind. Just because the bastard died, didn’t mean she would be mine.
Her attention would always be elsewhere. She was never going to be as obsessed with me as she was with him.
And the knowledge of her emotional infidelity didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the truth that she was always going to look at me as a demon, one who’d brought her into a living nightmare.
Eventually, I roused myself. The other piece of information from that passage pulsed in my mind. Deluca gave his daughter a tracker. He said it was for me, but it was Gabriella who was shot at. It was quite possible that my father-in-law had been offered to assassinate me. The Grimaldis had been. But it was equally reasonable that he wanted his daughter dead and a turf war on his hands in the name of vengeance.
Whatever the reason, I found the threat. It was something tangible that I could act on. It was an outlet for my depraved mind to fixate on, while my heart bled all over the fecking place. How dare the bastard use his daughter and coerce her into helping?
I’ll save her.
Even if she hadn’t written the truth in those pages, I would have suspected Gabriella of being innocent. My gut told me she was innocent. She might long for another, but the way she gave herself to me said that she didn’t wish me harm. I forgave her keeping the secret since she was a victim in this nightmare.
But her lack of hatred toward me wasn’t enough.
I wanted to be the one she dreamed of a future with.
Not the dead-man-breathing named Luca.
Picking up the journal, I was glad I hadn’t damaged the bleeding thing. Going to the shelf nearest the bay window, I replaced it in its hiding place. Then I pulled the piece of hair, that one long strand of nut-brown silk, and pulled it in front of the books that hid her journal. She would only keep writing her innermost thoughts if she didn’t know I read them.
I’m never letting her find out.
Chapter 30 – Gabriella
Today was all about testing theories. There were two of them, and the one was already panning out. As I wandered the aisles of the supermarket, ten guards in tow, I noticed a figure watching us in the distance.
The funniest part was that my guards were oblivious to Connor’s stalking. If they knew the boss’s right-hand man watched them, they would have subtly smirked or nudged one another, looking in his direction.
Which meant Connor was spying on all of us.
What a freaking waste of time.
He was undoubtedly Liam’s most valuable soldier, and there he stood, staring into a case of dairy goods, watching us through the foggy, condensation-coated door.
I threw a few random items into the cart, sighing under my breath. “Crap.”
