Page 40 of Claimed By the Silver Fox

“To my father?” he crows, with obvious irritation. “You want to go back to him?”

I nod. I don’t see any point in lying to him, pretending that I don’t have some kind of connection to Antonio. I’m married to him, for God’s sake. Plausible deniability went out the window a long-ass time ago…

But he locks his eyes onto mine, flicking his tongue over his lips. “He’s dead, Julia.”

My stomach drops. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

But then—I hardly got a look at where Andreo fired that shot off. If he hit his father in the guts, left him to bleed out on the floor in the middle of all that chaos, who’s to say that he isn’t done for? The thought makes my knees tremble, and I grasp for the back of a couch beside me, trying not to drop to the ground.

But Andreo takes my reaction for something else entirely, and to my horror, raises his hand to my cheek. He caresses my skin for a moment, trying to arrange his face into the mask of something that looks like decency. As I gaze back at him, I can’t believe that I used to think this man really cared about me. Right now, it just seems like a game he’s playing, a role he has stepped into for as long as it takes to get me to give up on whatever I’m clinging to.

“You don’t have to worry about him anymore,” he tells me. “Whatever he made you do, it’s over now. And I know I hurt you, but we’re back where we belong.”

Suddenly, I snap back to my senses, and I bat his hand away from me. “Don’t touch me,” I fire back furiously.

I don’t give a damn if Antonio is alive or dead or somewhere in the middle—I’m not going to fall back to Andreo like I have no other choice. The way he treated me before, that’s not the kind of shit I’m going to return to, no matter what.

I glare him down, and something in him shifts again. Whatever front he tried to put on, it vanishes in a second, and he steps back from me, lifting his chin as though surveying me.

“You’ll see sense soon enough,” he replies, and he sounds utterly certain of it, like he has already made up his mind. Even though the thought of him touching me makes my skin crawl. Even though the very notion of him laying hands on me is enough to turn my stomach, especially after what I shared with Antonio. Even if the memories of the way he treated me are flooding to the front of my mind, insistent, violent, nightmarish. “And you’ll see that we belong together.”

He turns his back on me, making for the next room. “Rest,” he orders me. “Your bedroom is there. Well…” He glances back over his shoulder, mouth pulled into the shape of a smile again. “Our bedroom.”

I rush through before he can say another word or drop another hint, and slam the door behind me, throwing myself down onto the bed just before the tears start coursing once more. I can’t believe this. I know that things were messy with Antonio, but this—this is a million times worse than I could ever have imagined.

He’s gone. At least, that’s what Andreo wants me to believe.

The father of my child, snuffed out before—well, before he even had a chance to come to terms with the fact that he was going to be a father again. Every part of me feels numb, hollowed-out, like I’ve been ripped out of a life I was meant to live and dumped back into this mess with no warning.

And now, Andreo seems to think that we are going to reunite as if nothing has changed, even though the very thought of it makes me sick. I’m never going to let that man near me. I don’t care what he seems to think, what kind of threat he levels against me to try and twist my arm, my mind is made up, and there’s nothing more to be said.

I tuck my knees into my chest and pray that this is all a foul nightmare that I will wake from soon. But with every passing moment, I’m more and more certain that this is reality…

And there might be nobody coming to save me.

21

ANTONIO

“There,” Horatio, the medic, mutters, as he finishes stitching up my arm, leaning back to inspect his work. “That should hold for now.”

I grimace as I roll my shoulder, checking to see how my range of movement is after the shot I took from my son. It hurts like a bitch, but it’s not in my dominant arm and didn’t manage to bury itself too deeply, so Horatio was able to remove it pretty easily and repair the worst of the damage, at least for now.

The same can’t be said, of course, for everything else that suffered due to that attack on the mansion. The place has been all but destroyed, nearly a dozen of my guards losing their lives and another handful struggling to so much as walk after the assaults they took.

I’ve moved into an apartment block overlooking the city, somewhere I’m sure Andreo doesn’t know about, but at this point, it’s hard to parse what he’s aware of and what he isn’t. With Salamanca at his side, he has more influence and power than ever before, and it’s clear that Salamanca loaned him the men to lead that attack on the house, knowing it would destabilize me and my business in the process.

But the business is the last thing on my mind right now, if I’m being honest. No, all I can think about is Julia—Julia, pregnant with my child, no doubt terrified for her life, and probably thinking that I’m dead.

After Andreo walked away from her like that, it’s beyond me why he decided to come back and try to claim her once more—jealousy? Couldn’t let me have something that he had decided was his? Whatever the reason, it makes me sick thinking of her caught up in this mess, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to get her out.

My first instinct was to gather my remaining forces and send them after him at the first chance I got, but Cesc, mercifully, stopped me. Pointed out that they would be ready for whatever we threw at them, and that we’d need tactics and skill to track him down and catch him off guard, get Julia out, and close down the threat Andreo posed to the business once and for all.

Which means, of course, killing him.

Something I’ve been trying not to think about, though I know I’m eventually going to have to. Killing my own son? It feels like something out of a Greek fucking tragedy, but if I let him live, he has proven that he will be a threat to me and the people I care about, and I just can’t let that happen. He made his choice to betray me, and I have to choose my other child, my second child, over him. Give them the chance to be part of this family that he has so totally rejected…

Even if the thought turns my fucking stomach.