Page 79 of Savage Claim

“Isabella, please.”

The armor that my anger had become cracked, just a little, enough that I had to bite back a sob. No matter how angry I was with her, I didn’t want my sister to die. Sent away, absolutely. I should have let Lorenzo do that from the beginning. But if Lorenzo took Gemma to the basement, or handed her over to Damian and Elio, I wasn’t sure if I could come back from that. I might truly lose my mind.

I could only hope that Lorenzo would listen.

CHAPTER 51

Lorenzo

“You let them come into my home. You let them interrogate mywife.”

“Lorenzo.”

I tutted. “We’re not friends, Agent Tucker.”

Miriam made a pathetic noise that set my teeth on edge. “Don Vitali,” she tried again. Her voice was froggy and filled with fear. “My director took your case out of my hands. They brought in the Organized Crimes division to handle things when they realized that there was crossover between the Cosa Nostra and the Syndicate. There was nothing I could do about the SWAT.”

“I’m hearing a lot of words that sound like excuses. You do remember that I have been paying for your darling daughter’s cancer treatments, right? How is she doing?” As if I didn’t already know. I kept up with Hannah Tucker’s treatments and prognoses probably more than her parents did. She was a skinny little thing, just turned eight, and being her benefactor has kept Miriam in my pocket since Hannah was four.

“I’m doing what I can,” Miriam promised, panicked now. I didn’t often pull the “Hannah” card with her; I didn’t often have to. But Isabella being thrown into an interrogation room was one mistake too many. “But we need the person who built the bombs.”

At this point, I would leave Alfie’s corpse somewhere for the Feds to find. I was going to strangle him when I got my hands on him; there would be no way for me to stop myself, after all of this.

“Can I expect any more surprise visits anytime soon?”

“I don’t think so. From what I’ve heard, they know they don’t have enough evidence to make any kind of charges stick. They wouldn’t have sent the SWAT at all if it hadn’t been for the anonymous call.”

“Anonymous call?”

She hummed. “I didn’t get to listen to it,” she said. “But I heard another agent talking about it. They said it sounded like a woman, probably younger. She said that there was evidence of your connection to the fires in your house.”

I didn’t need to hear anymore to know who had called. I was almost surprised that I wasn’t angry to know that my sister-in-law had betrayed me. Maybe the betrayal was so unsurprising that I couldn’t actually be upset about it. Instead, I felt very clear about what needed to happen next: Gemma had to die, irrefutably.

She betrayed me. She betrayed Isabella. She had been the source of all of the conflict between Isabella and me since I brought her sorry ass into my home. Now, that was done.

I reached for my cell and sent Isabella a text, asking her to come to my office. The way she crept in a few moments later made my gut go tight. “Did you know?” I asked.

Isabella closed the door behind her. “We had a fight in the kitchen just now,” she said. “She let it slip.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, trying to read the carefully blank expression on her face. “And you were going to come and tell me, were you?”

“After I calmed down, yes,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if I believed that or not. “I wouldn’t keep something like that from you.”

Either you trust her, or you don’t, I thought, and I forced myself to let it go. She wasn’t trying to hide it now, that was all that mattered. “You know what comes next,dolcezza.”

Isabella wasn’t crying, but her eyes were wet and pleading. “Send her away,” she said. “Send her as far away as you can; we never have to see her again.”

It wasn’t good enough. “I could live with her being a pain in my ass,” I told her. “I would have sent her away eventually for that. But to bring the Feds to our home? To get you hauled in for questioning?”

Isabella took a deep, shuddering breath. “I can’t forgive her for that,” she admitted. “I don’t want her here, but I don’t want her dead either.”

“It’s too late for that.” I kept my voice even and unemotional, like we were discussing something mundane. “You can’t save her this time.”

She began to shake. “Lorenzo, please.”

“No,” I said. There was nothing that she could say to make me change my mind. “If she wasn’t your sister, I would have given her to Elio to play with for what she’d done.” Isabella’s shaking got even worse, and there were tears now, falling down her face like rain. Her chin trembled as she tried to keep her sobs in.

“I will do anything,” she murmured and slowly, without breaking eye contact with me, Isabella lowered herself to the floor. “I am literally on my knees begging you to send Gemma away.”

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