Page 19 of Tito
“Tito?”
I looked down at Valencia then up at the dining room. I’d been so distracted that I never even remembered coming down the long hallway. Looking over at her, I smiled. “I’m sorry, I was a little preoccupied.”
“Yesh, I saw that. Are you okay?”
I felt bad as she was the one who’d gotten a shock earlier and here I was wondering about the damn butler that had been here for… sixty years. What Valencia had said earlier came back to me now. If my uncle was sixty—
“Tito.”
I looked up to see my brother Rocky. Keeping a hold of Valencia’s hand, I led her over to where he stood. “Hey, bro. What do ya know?” I gave him my usual greeting as I pulled a chair out for Valencia. After she sat down, I pushed the chair in, then leaned down to tell her, “I’m sorry, babe. I will now be present.”
She shrugged. “It’s ok.”
I looked up at Rocky. “Have you seen Uncle Stephano?”
He shook his head. “Not since breakfast, why?”
“We need him to check…” I paused as I realized it. “Hell, you can do it!” I don’t know why I’d been stuck on finding my uncle, when my brother was highly trained in IT work too. He actually worked in that capacity for Uncle Stephano many times.
“I can do what?” Rocky asked.
I glanced around to see no one was close by, then explained it, “We got some information today. It was from Deacon.”
“No shit! Really?” Rocky asked in surprise.
“Shhh…Yes, really.” I shushed him. “Can we keep this between us?”
Rocky’s excitement dimmed a bit as he paused to narrow his eyes at me. “What do you mean?”
I knew my brother well. He was thinking I meant to keep it from the family and especially from our uncle. Rocky had the same rules that I did. He wouldn’t go along with any deception. “No worries, Uncle Stephano knows about this and I wanted to ask him to run down these images to see if they were legit. But I realized you can do that.”
Rocky nodded. “So where are these images?”
I glanced over at Valencia.
She had been listening, of course, so she handed her cell phone over to me.
Looking down at it, I tapped in Rocky’s phone number. Then I texted him the attachments.
His phone pinged and he took it out to stare down at it. It took a minute, maybe two for his eyes to widen and his head shot up. “No shit?”
I nodded. “He had texted earlier saying he wanted Valen to meet him. She decided it would be too dangerous and asked if he could just send what he had for her.”
Rocky paused to look over at Valencia. “Damn, this must have been like…”
Nodding, she said, “A total slap in the face. I’ve been trying to face the fact that I was never a Walker.” She shook her head. “But if that is true?” She motioned to his phone. “It changes my whole life.” Looking up, she stared at the doorway. “But Julianna is gonna suffer more than me, I think?”
My brother and I looked over to where she was staring.
Romeo and Julianna had come into the room. Julianna still looked pale and unsmiling.
“She was so happy before this,” Valencia said. “I can’t blame her either. She knew who she was and where she came from. I mean everyone knows that, right?” She shrugged. “Maybe not? But now, she’s unsure. And I don’t even wanna think about what will happen when she, if she…” Sighing, Valencia seemed to lose the words.
I sat down next to her and took her hand, before I looked up at Rocky. “So, you can see how important this is.”
He nodded at me. “I will get right on it after lunch. It is gonna take some master sleuthing as this goes back what? Twenty-five years or more?”
I nodded back at him.
