Luca tilted his head to the side. “I don’t think Callista is Hannah Carducci’s daughter, either.”
Willow’s and my eyes both shot to Luca in shock. “Seriously?” Willow asked.
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe Illiana is pulling some crazy kid scheme, having children with all these different families to try and exercise control, and Denise and Callista realized it,” Marco said.
“That would explain the cease-fire,” Willow said. “If Anthony and Illiana realized that Denise and Callista were working against them, they would turn their attention to dealing with their own families over each other.”
I nodded, feeling it starting to click into place. “And if Denise was remaining in the Binachi’s control for the purposes of taking them down, too, that would explain the sudden alliance between the Carduccis and the Binachis and why dad was trying to get into the Carducci’s pocket.”
“You think dad knew?” Luca asked. “I mean, why would he unless…”
The room went silent as the realization washed over everyone. Slowly, everyone’s heads turned and landed on Gabriel. Gabriel’s eyes were wide, and he was staring off into space. Stacy had a hand over her mouth, and the
sudden tension in the room was palpable. Everyone had to be remembering exactly what I was at that moment—the way Denise turned and looked at Gabriel when she introduced herself to us back in Stacy’s studio.
“Oh my god,” Gabriel whispered.
“You never knew your mom, Gabe?” Willow asked.
“My dad always said she was dead,” Gabriel replied. He looked up at Luca, and suddenly, he was the innocent little kid that my dad had to lord over to protect. “Am I a Costa?”
Luca shook his head. “You’re a Varasso.” He sighed. “It doesn’t do us any good to worry about it. Dad’s dead, and it’s not like we can go ask Illiana Costa for a sonogram.”
Gabriel was visibly shaken. Even as Stacy tried to rub his back and comfort him, his eyes were wide and wavering. “I’m good.” He clearly wasn’t.
For the first time, probably ever, Luca, Marco, and I were on the same page about Gabriel. He’d been bullied by Luca and Marco coming up, and it was always difficult for him to feel like part of our family. Our mom wasn’t good to him, and we never understood why my dad stepped out on my mom. Why would he do that and then bring the product of that illegitimate affair back to our house? I fought to have Gabriel considered one of us, and my dad was always resolved in saying that he was. He was a Varasso, and we never knew who the woman was that he’d cheated with. For our entire lives, Gabriel felt like this added facet to our family. It was like trying to fit a triangle piece into a square hole, but at that moment, our overprotectiveness of our family kicked into overdrive. Whatever happened to get him there didn’t matter to us anymore. Gabriel was a Varasso, our brother. That was it.
Fuck you, Angelo Varasso.
We believed that his alleged stealing of money from the Binachis was the biggest of our concerns, but our dad had left eggs in several spider’s nests and didn’t prepare us for the hellstorm that would create. The more I learned about him and the way he conducted business, the more I felt like it should have been obvious that someone would show up and put a bullet in him one day. Leaving us in the dark on so much was flat out reckless disregard for his kids.
I was starting to feel how Luca and Marco felt about him.
“We have to end this.” I stared directly into Luca’s eyes as I said it. “All of this.”
Luca nodded. “We aren’t letting these people run our family into the ground anymore.” His eyes were blazing with an anger that the rest of the people in the room shared unanimously. “I’ve had enough of the Binachis trying to take my family from me, so we’re not waiting anymore. I’m taking a page out of my brother’s book.”
His lips curved into an evil grin as he stared back at me. “It’s time to get a little ruthless.”
26
Willow
The tension in the room would require a sharpened butcher knife to get through. We all remained silent as we pulled on bulletproof vests and laced our waists and chests with different types of firearms. Everyone’s arms were different. Luca and Marco both had big guns, with long barrels and scopes. Those had to be carried, and Molly tucked different sized pistols around their waistbands and in the holsters around their chests. Luca tried to force a big gun on Molly, but she refused. She was stashing knives over her person instead. At her husband’s insistence, she finally tucked a single gun against the small of her back, but Molly wasn’t a shooter. If she could handle situations with her fists, that was her preference, even if her circumstances had begged for something other than that in the past.
Alessandro armed himself with his personal weapons, those he’d gotten from his dad. He lifted a twelve-gauge shotgun from the arms closet in Luca’s office and felt it over in his hands. It was the same gun that he’d used when he’d gone rogue and stormed the Binachi’s hideout in California when they were threatening Marco and Kelly. It was a nasty weapon, and I could see him considering that fact as he rolled it over in his hands. He looked up at me, and there was conflict in his eyes. He didn’t want to do anything that he thought would upset me, but now wasn’t the time for those considerations.
“One last time,” I huffed to him. “After this, never again.”
He nodded before turning his attention to loading shells into the gun. When he was done, he pulled out a couple of lighter, smaller guns and handed them over to me. He hesitated, but I reached forward and grabbed them, arming myself the same way as the others. I was going to march into the Binachis territory at their side, and I wasn’t going to do it unarmed, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the weak link.
Stacy grinned at me as she saw me getting myself weaponized. “That logical brain will be good for good aim.” She winked, and I smiled. Somehow, having her support gave me an incredible amount of confidence.
She turned her attention back to getting her own guns situated on her person before she started to aid her husband. Unfortunately, Gabriel still seemed to be a little out of sorts. He also wasn’t much for guns and had managed to avoid taking any kills himself until the Binachis kidnapped us. He always kept pistols on him, and those were his weapons of choice going into our final duel, but he did everything with an air of distraction.
“Gabe.” Stacy was the first one to say anything in about forty minutes. Gabriel looked up at her, and she put her hands on either side of his face. “Are you okay? We don’t even know that it’s true.”
Gabriel’s jaw flexed before he replied. “It’s true. I don’t have any proof, but it just all makes sense. It explains so much.” The other Varasso brothers had to be thinking the same thing because they avoided their brother’s gaze as he spoke. “I didn’t think my mom was out there. That’s just sort of fucking me up right now.”