Page 84 of Savage Proposal

“Well, who’s fault is that?” I shot back immediately. I was tempted to hang up, but I couldn’t do that, not while my father was getting Gemma to agree to God knew what. The best I could do, for now, was keep him talking. “I didn’t sell myself to the Mafia.”

“But you don’t have an issue being Don Vitali’s slut, do you?”

“How did you know that?” My throat felt like a vise was wrapped around it. I didn’t even have time to be upset about the insult. Instead, my insides felt like they were freezing together.

“You’d be surprised what I know about what you’ve been up to.”

That was the least comforting thing that I had ever heard. “It’s your fault that I’m in this situation,” I repeated. “I was finebefore all of this; I had my life in order. And youruinedthat for me.”

He made this pathetic sound in his throat, a mockery of some kind of kicked puppy. “You know that I would never intentionally hurt you,” he said, and it was scary how sincere he sounded. “I will never forgive myself for getting you into this mess.”

He’ll never forgive himself, but he hasn’t bothered to ask for my forgiveness at all. “Put Gemma on the phone,” I told him. “Now.”

My father scoffed. “I don’t remember you being so rude before you became Lorenzo’s pet, Isabella.”

“It happens when you learn what I’ve learned in the last few months,” I snarled. “Put my sister on the phone right now.”

He deflected again. “Why are you acting like this? When have weeverspoken this way to each other?”

My father wasn’t exactly wrong. Despite all of our issues in the past, despite my keeping him at arm’s length as an adult, I had always tripped over myself to be polite to him. I didn’t know if it was filial duty, or if I was so hellbent on turning him into the kind of father that actually was worth something that I became a doormat.

“I think I’ve earned the right to speak any way I want to you,” I said. “Don’t you think?” When he went silent, anger boiled in my veins. “You don’t have anything to say? Really?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I scoffed. “Are you not even man enough to admit what you did to me?” More silence, and I was in a full rage now. “Yousoldme to pay off your gambling debts. Not once, buttwice!”

“What are you?—?”

“I almostdied,” I shouted. “You knew what they were going to do to me, and you let it happen. Would you have even cared if I had bled out on the floor?” Tears, hot and embarrassing, rained down my face. There was so much I wanted to say, to scream, but the words were getting clogged in my throat. This would be the last time I spoke to my father, if I had any say in the matter, and I wanted some kind of excuse or explanation as to why he didn’t care about hurting me.

But from the pit of silence on the other end of the line, I knew that I wasn’t going to get that from him, and I had to be okay with that.

“Put Gemma on the phone.”

“No,” he said, completely ignoring everything that I had just said. “If you want to speak to your sister, you’ll need to do it in person. I’ll text you the address.”

Panic gripped me. “Santino.” I swallowed hard. “Dad, put Gemma on the line.”

“Come alone, honey,” he said. “I don’t want to involve the Vitalis in our family business.”

And then, he hung up.

CHAPTER 53

Lorenzo

Iwas going through the security tape of Damian’s attack again, looking for anything that I might have missed, when Isabella all but kicked open my office door. “Isabella, what?”

The haunted look on her face stopped my words in my throat. “My father is with my sister.” She explained that she had called Gemma to talk and maybe set up a lunch date, and Santino picked up the phone. My hands curled into fists thinking about the man. “He told me to go to this address alone,” she said and held out her phone to me. “I don’t know if Gemma lives in the dorms or not, but that address isn’t anywhere near her school.”

No, it was in Bratva territory. What in the hell was Santino up to now? I looked at Isabella, who was gnawing on her lip. I reached out and eased her bottom lip out from between her teeth. “Relax,” I told her.

“He has my sister,” she said. “Would you be able to relax if someone you would never trust had Cristian?”

Absolutely not…but I knew that my brother would never allow himself to be taken like that. Even though he had joined theseminary, our father had made sure he went through the same training as I did.

But I didn’t say any of that; it wouldn’t have helped to calm her down. “What do you need?”

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