Page 153 of Scorned Obsession

“Yeah,” Nico and I said.

The screen came on and my world descended into hell.

A suppressed sob sounded beside me.

Bianca was staring straight at the camera. An emotion-filled hitch caught in my throat. My wife was trying to be brave. She was trying to work her wrists free from the cuffs attached to the ladder. Then she would slip and part of her head would submerge in water. Those shoes. She was stepping on a ladder rung. It was giving her a few inches above the water.

“Can she get out of it?” Nico asked.

“It appears to be double-latched,” Trevor responded. “So no.”

Someone was crying behind us. Divina.

I prowled toward her and grabbed her shoulders. “Talk.”

“Hey, get your hands off my wife!” Tommy came between us and shoved me aside. “It’s not her fault.” If circumstances were different, he would have probably punched me.

I jabbed a finger at the scene playing out on the screen. “Bianca took her place in the ambulance. If she’d known something then, she should have spoken up!” My voice rose to a roar.

“I didn’t have time,” Divina sobbed. “I just found out this afternoon, and I hadn’t connected all the dots.”

“What did you find out?” I asked.

“Griselda was embezzling the money that was funneled through the club. I think they killed the accountant because he was being hounded by Gian about the shortage.”

“Griselda? They? Did she stage this? She was working with Miller?”

“I didn’t know about Miller then, but Gian was confronting her. Gian told me that someone from the club was helping her, but he was keeping that to himself.”

The puzzle was falling into place, but I was having trouble wrapping my mind around it. Griselda and Miller?

“That was why I didn’t get into the ambulance. I didn’t know who to trust except Tommy. I didn’t know Bianca was going to get in.”

“You should have said something!” I shouted.

“That’s enough,” Arnie said. “She should have, but she didn’t know this”—he tipped his chin at the screen—“was going to happen.”

“What else?”

“That’s all I know.”

“Goddammit!” I lost it and kicked a box that was on the floor. Flashes of all the people I killed ran on a reel through my head. They deserved to die. But if I had known Bianca was going to pay the price for those jobs, I would have remained the dumbest foot soldier in the mob. I turned myself into the deadliest hit man, learned all the skills so I could protect Bianca, thinking her father had enemies. But it was my past that became a danger to her.

Rage like I’d never felt before reverberated deep inside me. Anyone who thought to calm me down was going to get punched in the face.

“Wait, I know where that is.” It was Sloane who spoke up.

I whipped around and saw her standing behind Trevor.

“Where?” Nico asked.

“That’s twenty minutes from here. It’s owned by the Albanians. It’s one of their interrogation houses. I cleaned it a couple of months ago.” Sloane screwed up her face in disgust. “Last time I’m doing it for sure. They stiffed me on payment.”

“Tell us where it is.”

“It’s better if I show you.”

My jaw clenched.

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