Page 94 of Surprise Twins for the Mafia Prince
“Of course, I was!” Her voice cracks, and it takes everything I have not to charge in and wrap her in my arms. I need more information first. “You’re my dad, and I thought you were dead all this time!”
Holy fucking shit.
Keith Foley is alive? The same Keith Foley who’s supposed to be rotting in the ground?
“What happened?” Paige continues. “You said you’d been in hiding this whole time, but how? Someone was killed in your car. Did Lorenzo get the wrong man?”
Keith laughs, a cold sound that raises the hair on the back of my neck.
“Don’t be an idiot. I killed that man. I had to fake my death after I stole from those fuckers.”
So my father was right. We had nothing to do with Keith Foley’s supposed death.
But I’m about to have everything to do with his real one.
36
PAIGE
He killed someone?
Maybe it’s hypocritical to be so freaked out by that when I’m pretty sure Dario has a body count high enough to fill a small cemetery, but this feels different.
My father didn’t just kill someone. He disappeared from my life for fifteen years, letting me build a shrine to his memory that he never deserved.
I don’t know why the news that he faked his death still feels so shocking. Hetoldme he’d been in hiding.
But hearing his voice—this ghost materializing from the grave—scrambled my brain. That’s the only explanation for why I rushed over here without even telling Dario where I was going.
What the actual hell was I thinking?
“How...how could you do that?” The words scrape out of my throat like they’re lined with sandpaper.
I’m standing in the middle of this stranger’s living room—this stranger who shares my DNA—while he perches on the armrest of a couch that looks like it gave up on life in the ‘90s.
He doesn’t seem relaxed exactly, but he’s far too casual for someone who’s just demolished the foundation of my childhood.
“The guy was a low-life criminal, Paige. No one important.” He shrugs like he’s discussing swatting a fly. “And Lorenzo hadn’t figured out that I stole from him yet, but I knew it was coming. He would’ve killed me.”
“Wait a minute,” I shake my head so hard I’m surprised my eyeballs stay in their sockets.
Every word out of his mouth fractures something in me—hairline cracks spidering through everything I thought I knew.
“You planned all of this, right? Probably for weeks?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot. It had to seem real.” He looks almost bored now, unmoved by my obvious distress.
“No, you’re not an idiot. But you are a man who abandons his family.”
My lip curls with the kind of disgust usually reserved for finding maggots in your food.
“How could you do that? How could you make these plans to escape and just leave us behind, picking up the shattered pieces of our lives without you? Wegrievedyou.”
“You seem fine now. Knocked up and everything.” His eyes land on my bump like he’s staring at a tumor rather than his grandchildren. “Fucked an Andretti even. So, I guess you didn’t feeltoobad about betraying me.”
I don’t even feel a sliver of guilt. That emotion left town along with my rose-colored glasses.
“Don’t do that. Don’t turn this on me. You left us. You left mom.” My voice catches at the memory of how his “death” broke her. The strongest woman I knew, reduced to a hollow shell.
