Page 94 of Captured Innocence

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“Don’t worry about what I’d doing, baby. You will be protected.”

“What if we set a trap?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

She tugged at my shirt then fiddled with the buttons. “Maybe you should hear me out.”

“Why do I have a very bad feeling about this?”

“Because I’m a very bad girl.”

I captured her mouth, holding our lips together for a few seconds as I rolled my other hand around her waist, keeping her close. The need to hold her was more intense than ever before, the ridiculous fear crawling through me unusual. I’d never feared facing an enemy before. I’d never even thought about the danger I’d be in or the injuries that I could receive.

But I’d been alone. Very much alone. Now I had someone to care about. A weakness. The asshole meant to take what the three of us loved the most away from us.

That meant we needed to play the game smarter. The rules were entirely different. Now it was time to adjust them again to our benefit.

As I thrust my tongue inside, I could tell she was trembling. For all her strength, all her brilliance, she was an innocent girl looking for her knight in shining armor.

I wasn’t certain I could scrape off the tarnish in time, but I would try if it was the last thing I did on this earth.

She was mine to adore, to protect.

Mine to die for.

After ending the kiss, I locked eyes with first Enzo then D’Artagnan, the understanding of what needed to happen settling in. It was time to go on the offensive instead of waiting for the hammer to fall. Did that place our families in harm’s way? Likely, but if we waited, the outcome would be much worse.

And that would allow history to repeat itself. The Ghost. According to the Oxford Language dictionary, the definition was an apparition of a dead person believed to manifest to the living. There were two men who undoubtedly fell into that category.

Franco DeLuca and Roberto Lazarro.

Whoever was using their deaths against us had innate knowledge of how our family worked. It was time to narrow that down and the best way to do that was to provide something they wanted.

Our complete devastation using our greatest weakness.

The people we loved. If I was wrong, we would never recover. But if I was right, the game would end forever.

“I have an idea,” I told everyone in the room.

And so it was set to begin. May God not fail me this one, single time.

CHAPTER 26

Sophia

Games.

Secrets. Lies. Games.

Now the three words were forever woven together, the plan that had been put into motion leaving the two women I’d been sequestered with as riddled with anxiety as I was. However, I sensed the person responsible was getting antsy himself since he’d been unable to collapse any accounts or hijack any business shipments. Even all his fake emails to our clients had been blocked.

The ruse had been developed after I’d carefully crafted a web. Diamonds weren’t only a girl’s best friend, Mattia’s idea of using them as the sparkly bait irresistible. I sent a quick email, which had been crafted as an enticement to Mattia and the others at the DeLuca compound only seconds before. I was pretending to be the Don of the Romano family, happy as could be to allow not only his docks to be used in accepting shipment but also the newly built bridge that connected the island of Sicily to the mainland of Italy. It was a win-win for everyone to the tune of several hundred million dollars.

Unfortunately, it was completely falsified, other than the Romanos were in on the game, providing the physical appearance of accepting shipment and having it transferred to several trucks that were currently on their way to a warehouse fifty miles west of Rome.

I’d spent hours setting everything up while Mattia, Enzo, and Dar handled the issues with the warehouses and businesses, the chaotic scenes finally under control. The fires had been little more than a smokescreen, the perpetrator playing additional games just like sending the fake to the train station. Now I was certain we’d turned the tide. If the asshole wanted to hurt us, he’d need to reveal his identity.