She was unmanageable in New York, and spending time in Sicily has helped her morph into a nightmare.
I can’t stand that she slid her arm through Paxton’s, and he so easily allowed himself to be fooled by her tricks.
They may be intended for me, but he certainly benefits from them, which makes me lock my jaw now.
I knew she’d be trouble since I walked into the Gallos’ home, ready to strike a deal with Bianca’s father.
I knew what I was getting myself into, and honestly, I didn’t have a choice.
One twisted event made me indebted to him, putting me on a collision path with their world.
Giorgio Gallo had always played dirty.
My late father had warned me about him. He told me everything about this family. Their most disgusting deals, their penchant for useless deaths, not to mention their unhinged women.
His last words as he was bleeding to death were about the Gallos.‘Save yourself and pay our debt. Find out who did this to you and make them pay with their lives. Don’t spare anyone. They haven’t spared us.’
He died a few moments later.
He was convinced the Gallos were behind everything that led to our empire crumbling.
Within the span of a week, I got ambushed, lost half of our most loyal men, including my father, had shipments confiscated by the authorities, and was suddenly knee-deep in debt, with my back against the wall.
The money that hadn’t come through wasn’t mine to begin with. It belonged to one of our worst enemies.
Stefano Varela.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and feelings have no place in this business.
Money is money, and sometimes, the circumstances dictate how we go about making it. There is no code of honor, although I wish there were.
The lines of a territory are not neatly drawn on a map.
You gotta do what you gotta do.
The whole story had the fingerprints of betrayal all over it.
It’s just that the events unfolded so quickly, and there were so many moving pieces and so many layers to that story that it was hard to figure out who the players were.
My father was convinced that Gallo wasn’t innocent.
He went so far as to suspect that Stefano Varela, a mobster with strong connections to the Chicago mafia, might’ve orchestrated the whole thing in collaboration with the Gallos.
It sounded crazy, but I trusted my gut and my old man.I had the same feeling.
Framing an enemy and making them take the fall for a loss they weren’t responsible for had been done before.
What did Stefano gain? It’s hard to tell.
He got the money that I owed him from Giorgio Gallo. I paid Giorgio back and married his daughter.
You’d think I was lucky I didn’t lose my life over that.
Initially, I thought that too. But then I realized that something was amiss.
Giorgio Gallo contacted me in a flash and threw me a lifeline out of nowhere. And I was supposed to believe that someone had spared my life out of the goodness of their hearts?
Color me suspicious.
