Sophie… God, I loved her.
Maybe my father hadn’t foreseen us actually falling in love, but that was what the fuck had happened. We had fallen in love and now the way we lived was about to jeopardize the happiness that we hadn’t even gotten to experience yet. There was no way I was losing her. Things were just turning around, and then this shit had had to happen.
What was keeping me with her now?
If her father was gone, did that mean the deal he and my dad had struck when the two of us married was officially null and void? Did that invalidate our whole marriage if one of them was no longer in the picture? Did they expect us to do something? Split up, or anything like that? Because it wasn’t happening.
She had all the reasons in the world to leave—and she hadn’t. I wanted to give her reasons to stay because I didn’t want to be without her, not since I had experienced what being with her was like.
She had told me that she loved me, but if the only thing that was really keeping her at my side was the agreement that our fathers had made, she had reason to leave now. The news had nearly knocked her dead, and there was no telling what was going on with her day by day. I hoped I was doing the right thing. I wanted to be there for her and support her, but I wasn’t sure I knew how. I had never wanted or needed or loved a woman like I did Sophia.
Who was I kidding, she had all the reason in the world to leave. She was completely heartbroken—and it was my fault. Maybe she would just leave to spare herself the trauma that was surely in store if she stayed with me. I had no idea what I was doing, or if it would matter at the end of the day. I couldn’t read her, and she could hardly give me anything back. I was desperate. I was willing to give up many things, but not her.
I had grown up knowing this about my family my whole life, why was this making me so nervous? Not only was there the baby and Sophia; there was Sophia’s people, too. Her father was dead; her mom had become a widow. She had family in Jersey, who whether they were in the business or not, were targets now. If they could go for the head, Frank, what was stopping them from going for anyone lower on the totem pole?
There was still work to do, even if I wanted out, making a clean break was harder than it seemed. You couldn’t just leave. I thought about Sophia’s mother. The last and maybe the only time we had talked was at the wedding. Maybe we had chatted a couple times before that. She wasn’t exactly as on board with the whole thing, but like Sophia, it wasn’t like she had had much of a choice in the matter.
We had gotten closer during the last couple of months, out of necessity more than anything. I doubted her estimation of me had risen, but I was the person who was making sure her daughter was alright in all this, so it was a necessary evil. She didn’t talk to me like she hated me, but she didn’t really do it like we were friends either.
I couldn’t have just abandoned her. This was my fault. Someway, somehow I knew it was. It had to be. Shit like this didn’t just come from nowhere. Sophia’s life had become significantly harder as soon as I had shown up in it, and I owed it to her and the people that it was affecting to at least act as if I gave a fuck.
Mrs. Dandolo took a minute to answer the phone when I called her.
“Hello?” she said.
“Mrs. Dandolo? How are you?” I asked her. She had never come to me making any pretense that she liked the idea of having a son-in-law. My mother had fallen in love with Sophie, but Mrs. Dandolo… let’s just say that she wasn’t encouraging me to call her “Mom.”
“Fine, how are you?” she said sedately. It was the voice of the weary widow, the one that she had had to use the whole two months, talking to people offering her condolences that she was sick of receiving.
“I’m okay. I wanted to know whether everything was fine. I’ve had a patrol around your house since Frank passed. You haven’t had any trouble, or noticed anything suspicious have you?”
She was silent for a beat.
“Oh, I thought you knew,” she said to me.
Knew? Knew what. That was never good. I didn’t like not knowing something that I was expected to know because that meant that someone was a step ahead of me—and that was always a bad thing.
“What’s been going on? Has something happened?”
“Well,” she sighed, “I didn’t think to tell you sooner because I thought it would blow over by itself before it got to be an actual problem.”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck raise.
“What do you mean? Mrs. Dandolo, are you in trouble?” I asked.
She made a sound that sounded like a yawn. She had completely tapped out. I didn’t think she had a single part of her that still cared what happened to her since her husband had died.
“I mean, I’ve been hearing things, Marcelo. There was a man who came by the house offering his condolences. He said that Vinny needed to watch his back.”
Vincenzo was one of Sophie’s uncles. I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my hands. God dammit.
“He’s been calling me. He says he’s gotten phone calls warning him that someone is after him. That his brother was first and that he will be next,” she said.
“Does he know who the phone calls are from?” I asked her.
“No. Whoever is contacting him never said.”
I wanted to tell her that I could do something about it. It was too late to try and tell her that I knew all this shit and I was already on it. I wasn’t. Someone had cut me off at the pass, and that person was trying to get my attention. That had to be it. I was at the center of all of this because what the hell else could be the answer? Sophia was innocent. It was her involvement with me that caused her all this stress. I told her mother that I would look into it and immediately placed a call to Louis.
How many people were going to have to die because Sophia and I had gotten married? The number currently was one—and that was already too many. There wasn’t enough time to call a meeting, but I could talk to Louis. I could have asked him to come to the house but Puglia was closer.
He showed up about fifteen minutes after I had arrived.
“What can you tell me about Vincenzo Dandolo?” I asked him, skipping the niceties completely.
“Mrs. Dandolo’s been getting guys telling her that he’s next,” he said simply. I tried very hard not to let my outrage show on my face. In knew I was on my way out, but when did that mean they would completely leave me out of the loop?
“Why is this the first that I’ve heard about this?” I asked him.
“We couldn’t come to you before we had a name or at least an idea of who it was,” he said. He had a point. Regardless, I was mad.
“Well, what's taking you so long?” I snapped. I had no right to ride his ass about this, but this was serious. “That’s my wife’s uncle. When were you planning on finding out who it is? Hm? After he was dead? After her mother was dead? After she was dead?” I asked.
“We’re doing the best we can, boss. Whoever it is, it’s not someone we’ve dealt with before.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it isn’t one of the likely suspects. The guys you can bank on to be up to something just ain’t involved. It’s someone new. Someone different.”
I sat back in my seat and swore.
“Whoever it is, I expect you to tell me soon. You can't act like this isn’t urgent. I need answers.”
I let Louis go and made my way back to my car. This was going to be a lot harder than I originally thought. My phone rang suddenly. I picked the phone up and saw it was Sophia. I was surprised, pleasantly surprised. The last two months had been hellish for her; it was good that she wanted to talk to me. I wanted to talk to her. The slight feeling that something was wrong ran through me as I picked the call up.
“Babe?”
“Marcelo?” It was good to hear her voice. It was hard to feel like she was still there a lot of the time because she was so depressed. I hated seeing her like that, and to be honest, it was hard. She wasn’t there, and I didn’t
want to use that as an excuse to try and get what I needed from another person, but it was still difficult. She was doing what she could, and I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. I hadn’t lost my father, she had. She was also coming off the drama with the pictures and Alana. She didn’t deserve all of this. If anything, I was going to find the guy who had done this to her so that I could break his neck personally.
“How are you, Sophie. Is everything okay?” I asked.
“You won’t guess who just came to visit.” She was right, I couldn’t. Had she had someone over? Was it Elena? She sounded different than she had been sounding lately, a little more alive if you know what I mean. All the same, the way she said it made my guard rise; something made me feel that I wouldn’t like what she was about to tell me.
“It was Bachelorette number one, Alana.”
I rolled my eyes. Something really had to be said for Alana’s determination. Now I was less inclined to call it determination and more inclined to call it obsession. Obsession with me and Sophia and the life that she thought she was going to get as my wife. She was really a piece of work. After the pictures? After sending pictures of her and I having sex with the intention of breaking up my marriage, she still felt she had any right to walk her ass into our home for any reason?
After clearing up the picture situation with Sophie, I had talked to her—on the phone because I didn’t want to see her again. One more thing. One more act of harassment towards my wife or to me and the police were getting involved. It didn’t even matter what. Whatever we had to do to get her legally obligated to leave us the fuck alone, that was what it was going to be. She was more than a pest. She was endangering my marriage and she was stressing Sophia out. If anything happened to Sophie and the baby because of her, I wouldn’t know what to do. She had begun calling me again, and I had blocked her number because it was no longer a number I needed for any reason.
She might have been able to be my friend at one point, but she had shown that she was definitely not. Sophia didn’t care for her, and it wasn’t like she’d be the person either one of us would think to call if we ever needed a babysitter in the future, or wanted a friend to housesit for us in case we traveled. No. She was most likely fucking around again, trying to start trouble—and I couldn’t have it.
“She was asking for you, screaming that you weren’t getting back to her, and she was mad about it. But then she saw my stomach and she suddenly ran away. She didn’t know?”
“Nope,” I said. “Why would she. She isn’t a friend or family.” In reality, very few people knew. I had ended up telling my father when I saw him, but otherwise, just our mothers knew. It wasn’t something that needed to be broadcasted, not that I wasn’t proud and happy about it. I was. Other people, however, might not be—and that wasn’t a risk that I was about to take with Sophia or with the baby.
“Could you come back home?” she asked. If Sophie had wanted me to come to her and she was half way around the world—right then—I would have done it. This was what it was about. She was my family now. She was my world and whatever she needed, I was going to do it.
“I’ll be right there.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sophia
I couldn’t explain it, but Alana’s visit, or rather the conversation I’d had with Marcelo afterward had had a revitalizing effect on me. I wouldn’t say that I was happy now, but it had cheered me up. It was a little petty, but I liked to think that he was on my side. Of course, he was on my side, but more than that, he was opposed to Alana. I had expected nothing less, but it did feel good to hear him defend me. It had also felt good to see Alana’s face after I had told her about the pregnancy.
She looked like she had just seen a ghost. What the hell did she think was going to happen? I felt foolish even thinking a while ago that the stunt she pulled with the pictures had affected me so deeply. Did she really believe that she had the power to break us apart? I might not have had much faith in the relationship initially, but I did now. Marcelo had shown her—and he had shown me—whom he was here for…and it was not her.
I felt so good, I didn’t even want to go back to bed anymore. I tucked my phone in my waistband and went to the kitchen instead and looked through the cupboards and the fridge for something to prepare. I wanted to cook, to get something ready so Marcelo could sit with me and we could eat together.
There was close to nothing in the house that I could whip up into an easy meal. There was the usual food that Daniella would cook and put in the refrigerator and that would just have to do. Marcelo was going to be right home anyway. I wasn’t sure where he was, but he had said that he was coming. I chose a cold lasagna and set it on the counter while I preheated the oven.
I turned my head hearing the sound of a car pulling up to the house. I turned the oven off and went to the door. He was here. I opened the door up, hearing him walk up the steps to the door expecting to see him.
Only it was not Marcelo. It was Alana. She was back—and this time, she had brought reinforcements with her. In her leather gloved hand was a pistol. My immediate instinct was to raise my hands in the air on either side of my head.
“Get inside,” she said. I backed into the house—and she quickly followed me, closing the door behind her.
What fresh hell was this? It took me a second to register what it was that she started to yell at me.
“Sit down,” she shrieked. I walked over to the dining table slowly, still facing her. “No, bring the chair here.” I lowered an arm to drag the chair across the floor, into the great room and sat. My hands went protectively over my belly.
“Alana, what’s going on?” I asked her.
“Where’s Marcelo?” she demanded. Was she a toddler, did she only know how to say that one phrase?
“He’s not here. Alana, you don’t have to do this,” I said.
She laughed at me. She shrugged out of the trench coat she was wearing to reveal the same dress she had shown up in for her first visit.
“Don’t have to do what? All I want to do is wait for him. That’s it. We can do it together,” she said sweetly.
I struggled to keep my breathing level. I couldn’t succumb to the panic and the stress. I couldn’t. That would have been potentially disastrous. I kept my eye on Alana. She was walking around the room watching me, keeping the gun pointed in my direction like a cat, stalking its prey.
“What do you want to talk to Marcelo about?” I asked her.
She smiled serenely and swung the gun around, motioning with her hands.
“Oh, I think the time for talking with Marcelo is over. I’m not stupid; he has nothing to say to me anymore. I know that. I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Then what do you want to do?” I asked.
My overactive imagination steered me towards every horrible thing conceivable. She had a gun with her. She would not have brought it if she didn’t intend to make use of it somehow. But how was somehow? What did she want to do and, to be honest, did I really want to know? If she wanted to kill me, she was going about it all wrong. The best time to have done it was when I opened the door for her. She would have had a close range shot, I wouldn’t have had time to run, and she would have been able to make as quick an escape as she had made an entrance. Instead, she had asked me to sit in a chair and wait for Marcelo to come home.
“Sophie, I’m going to kill him.”
If it was not obvious that Alana was completely off her rocker before, it sure was now. She had said it so calmly like she was answering the question, ‘How is the weather today?’ She laughed looking at me.
“Did you think I just came to say hi?”
“That probably would have been a better scenario… what do you want with me?”
“You’re going to watch.”
I sat in my seat, feeling hot and cold all at once. She wasn’t bluffing. The woman was dead serious. What the hell was happening? How had this entire day turned into TRUE CRIME all of a sudden? I had to do somethi
ng, but what? It wasn’t like she had me tied down or anything, but she was holding a gun and she was clearly agitated enough to do something crazy if I pushed her. I was pregnant besides; I couldn’t risk her squeezing that trigger —on purpose or by accident.
I slid a hand into my waistband where my phone was. Calling somebody was too risky. She would be able to hear their voice and know what was going on. I was getting out of this alive. If I could keep her talking, she would be distracted. I turned on the voice memo function on my phone as discreetly as I could as she walked over to the window by the door to see who was outside.
The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance Page 20
