Page 43 of Sinner's Vows

If I did kill a nephew of Igor Petrov, irrelevant how many times removed, I’ve fucked up. Badly. And there’s a kink in our armor. A weak link. One I’m going to have to fix.

I still haven’t spoken to Matteo, and Luca only raised his hands in aWhat the?andWhat the fuck now?andHow fucked are we?gestures. We decided to defer admitting to the fuckup until tomorrow.

For now, Boris and Boryslav are in the walk-in fridge in the basement, but they can’t stay there indefinitely. Especially not once Petrov starts asking about the whereabouts of his two favorite Borises, one being his fucking nephew.

I’m too tired to figure it out tonight, but the question really is how do Fiore, Petrov, and this woman connect? It could all just be coincidence. Luckily, Vincenzo still has a tongue, and he will talk. Tomorrow is going to be a motherfucker.

Whether this woman is connected to this mess or not, she’s right in the middle of it, and it’s time I start figuring her out. If she really heard anything from what happened in the basement, she’d know better than to test me.

“Want to tell me how you know Franco Fiore?” I ask, taking my food from the microwave.

“We grew up together,” she says, without missing a beat. She glances up at me where I’ve frozen with my plate hovering above the counter. “Well, technically, he was already grown up.”

“You grew up together?” I repeat, shocked to my core.

If she grew up with Franco, she’s as Mafia as any of us. I don’t know why I was thinking she’s an innocent woman who got lured into a human trafficking ring run by Randazzo.

“My mom died when I was eight, and I was put into foster care in Franco’s uncle’s home. He was already twenty-two at that time and only around at random times.”

“I see, he’s fourteen years older than you. How old are you now?”

“Twenty-seven.”

See, no chance in hell this woman is our sister. She looks young, but it’s her slight build and delicate frame giving her the gangly look of a girl who hadn’t filled out her curves yet. I’m not sure if that’s because she’s been starved or just her genetics. Either way, Gabriella will be twenty-two years old now, so the ages don’t match.

“So Franco was forty-one when he died.” Not a bad innings for someone that fucked up.

“Yes.” She looks down and stirs the food in her plate. Mentioning his death could kill anybody’s appetite.

I wasn’t expecting her to open up like this. “Where in Italy?”

“Franco’s uncle had a small holding in Calabria. Between Vena di Maida and Cortale, literally in the middle of nowhere.”

“And what’s his name?”

She hesitates just a millisecond, signaling to me she isn’t sure she should share this information. “Antonio Mancuso. He lives on a small holding where he farms pigs.”

“Okay.” Why does that name sound so familiar? I make a mental note to get information on this guy. It might come in handy. “And who were your parents?” Her dad must have been dead by the time her mom had died for her to go into foster care.

“My mom was an international student from Finland who went to study Italian and Archeology in Italy. She fell in with the wrong crowd…or rather, she fell in love with the wrong man on an extended excavation in Sicily.”

I quirk a brow. That’s fucked up. And that explains her Nordic looks. “You speak Finnish, then?”

“Not really. My mom never went back to Finland because she fell pregnant with me and then she died?—”

“How?”

She puts her fork down and stares at me. “I feel like I’m being interrogated.”

You are.I shrug. “Just imagine you’re on a bad date with some douchebag you swiped right on when you should have swiped left.”

This makes her chuckle, but then her face falls. “She died in a car crash.”

Our eyes lock, and so many things hang in the air between us. Terrible. Sad. Heartbreaking. Sudden.Convenient.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say as I put my fork down. “And your dad?”

She sighs. “Can I have some water?”

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