Page 9 of Powerful Deception
And like Ella said, I can pay off some of the stuff that my dad left behind.
Would taking this money be a bad thing?
Surely if Mr. Lane didn’t want me using it, he wouldn’t have offered this much.
I nod as I feel tears, those filled with gratitude and not those of sadness, roll down my cheek.
I look over at Ella. “Thank you. Thank you to Mr. Lane. He didn’t need to do this.”
She gives me a small smile. “He wanted to make sure that you were taken care of for at least a little bit.”
“Thank you.” I give her another appreciative nod.
“Of course,” she says, standing up from the couch and making her way over to the door. Halfway through my small living room though, she turns back in my direction. “Can I speak out of turn, Miss Vitale?”
“Um,” is she going to lecture me on how to use the money? “Sure.”
Her whole demeanor changes. When she was sitting on the couch, she was relaxed but now it’s as if she’s ready to go into battle.
“I know that you may have a lot of questions when it comes to what happened to your father. The rumors circulating around definitely don’t help putting those questions at bay, but if I could offer you a piece of advice, it would be this. Don’t go looking into things that aren’t meant for you. Especially not into anything that has to do with Dante Rosetti.”
Dante Rosetti?
“I’m sorry, I think I’m missing something. Who’s Dante Rosetti?”
As I ask the question a faint memory pops into my head from last year sometime where I was having dinner over at my dad’s house and he got a call. I remember he walked out of the room to take it, but before he was fully out ear shot, I heard him say one thing, Rosetti.
Is it the same Rosetti that Ella is talking about now?
I look at Ella and she turns to the table where my laptop sits.
Following her line of vision, I see that the link I had clicked on earlier finally loaded and opened up to a picture of a man. The picture looks like a mugshot and a man with dark hair and an olive skin tone a bit darker than mine stares through the screen.
It's a simple picture, but it feels like there is nothing simple about the man in it.
I don’t have to ask to know that this man is dangerous and shouldn’t be crossed.
“That is Dante Rosetti,” Ella states, taking me out of whatever trance that picture has put me in. “Only a few people know who he is, but some in Chicago know him as the devil and you should stay away from anything that has to do with him.”
The Devil has a name.
I’m faintly still aware that Ella is still in the room. I don’t pay her any attention. No, I continue to look at the screen on my table as if it’s going to change in a few seconds.
This is the so-called devil of Chicago. Not only do I now have a name, but I also have a visual of what he looks like.
Now I can really dig. This is what I needed to start my journey to bring down those that went after my father.
And I will start with Dante Rosetti, because if the rumors are true and he’s the reason my dad is dead, then he’s the one that has to suffer first.
The only thing that I must do is figure out how to do just that.
How do you destroy a man that goes by the name the devil, for everything that he has?
3
Ella left soon after she told me who Dante Rosetti was.
When she said the word devil it was like everything around me was forgotten and I was only concentrating on that. I didn’t even realize she had excused herself and left until I turned to ask her a question and noticed I was alone.