Aleando has confided in me that Gianluca knows about Andrew. I had never meant to tell the boy. I admit because I have been down that route before. In order to keep the family alive, some sacrifices have to be made. I have sacrificed much of life, and I am sure Gianluca can do the same, to ensure there are no hopeless orphans on the street.
Paula recalled the passage and stifled a groan, “That crazy old man.”
From the writing in his journal, Leonardo Bianchi may have viewed his life spent as a sacrifice, but Gianluca, who would have been smashed a table at being referred to as a hopeless orphan, Paula was sure, would have viewed living his whole life as a waste.
Gianluca was a monster, but now Paula had a window to what lay beyond his apathetic eyes. Oh, he was still going down. He had shot her with the intent to kill, it was only fair that she did the same.
Megan was outside, roaming the university this hospital was a part of. Paula had forced her out, telling her she must have been sick of eating hospital food, but in reality, the more her aunt looked at her, the more she could see Megan hurting inside. The place was indefinitely secure, and spinning a ruse about her aunt under threat, Paula managed to hire a bodyguard from an American company for her as well.
Megan needed a break, but so did Paula. Her hands clenched, bunching up her hospital bed sheets, and she felt her eyes grow hot and wet.
“Dad,” she choked, a lone tear streaming down her face. Paula knew the dangers of bottling up her emotions, and it was time she let it out. She was lost and so tired, so, so tired. Her father wasn’t here anymore, nor her mother. Megan, Paula loved her, but they could not intellectually connect the way she could with her dad, who was always a step ahead of her.
Another tear slid down, splattering on her hand. She would not think about how things would be like if her father were still alive. Paula had to face reality.
She had to be in the present, and right now, she did have someone she could turn to for support. She took out her phone and slowly began to type an email to Jose.
It was short, it was succinct. Paula did not expect him to reply instantaneously, and for him to provide her his personal Skype account. After some thinking and apprehension, Paula decided to voice-call him, deciding it was better for him to not see her tearstained face at all.
“Hello, Paula?” He was calm as always, and Paula felt like she had been transported back to his office, and this was another session. “How have you been, my dear?” he asked from hundreds of thousands of miles away.
“I... I will be okay, Jose,” Paula stated. She tried to take a breath, but it turned into a shudder.
“Of course.” He did not mention anything out of the ordinary, although Paula was pretty sure anyone could have deduced that she had been crying from her voice. “You will be okay, and you will take care of whatever it is you need to take care of, right?”
“Honestly, are you a mind reader?” Paula muttered.
“Not at all. What’s the fun in reading minds?” There was a ruffle of some papers on the line. Had he called her while in office?
“Wait, are you at work?” Was she imposing on him? Paula didn’t want to cut into his work like this due to the time zone difference.
“You’re much more important than work,” Paula was very glad he couldn’t see her blush over the line, “And I’m just about done as well.”
“Good. I would hate to disturb you like that,” Paula muttered.
“It’s no problem. So, I take it Italy has not been treating you well?” Jose inquired. Paula bit the inside of her cheek.
“The problem is not with Italy. There have been setbacks, but there have been some findings too.”
“That’s how it goes. You solve one problem, and another shows up to take its place. What did you think of the letter?” he asked at last, and Paula felt a bit bad about not reciprocating the gesture. Yet.
“It was wonderful. I really needed it. The timing was too good, in fact. Have you been keeping tabs on me?” Paula added in a scandalous tone, jokingly.
“Shoot, when did you realize? I might have to fire that private eye now. The quality of detectives has been falling lately.” Jose moaned, and Paula giggled.
“Is it their quality that’s going down, or my keen eye for detail they can’t escape from?”
“I guess they underestimated you.”
“Yeah,” Paula snickered, before stopping as the movement shifted her wound.
“You will be okay, right?” Jose asked, still not asking Paula anything she hadn’t mentioned herself.
Sitting in his office in New York, he could tell that something was up, but the man did not want to intrude. Jose was confident in Paula’s ability to handle anything the world threw at her, but he could help but be worried a bit. The best he could, the psychologist decided, was to not show his worry, but maintain an aloof attitude.
“Of course, I will be. I have finally seen an end to this problem,” Paula said, her tone growing dark. “It’s really a shame, though.”
Paula wished she could tell Jose about Gianluca. The psychologist would have been ecstatic at knowing another person and power like hers for his research purposes, but knowing the killer, he would just put a bullet between Jose’s eyes as well.
“A shame about what?” Jose asked curiously.
“Just life. It isn’t fair,” Paula mused. “But that sounds pretty cheap and banal, coming from me.”
“Well, it does. But what if life is fair by virtue of not being fair to everyone else? Being humans, we all find problems we cannot personally tackle at some point in our lives,” Jose said, giving his insight.
“You’re right. Say, Jose?”
“Yeah, Paula?” He picked up a pen from his desk and tried to spin it.
“After I come back, let’s go somewhere together.” Paula glanced outside the window to her room, looking at the setting sun.
“Oh. Do you have a place in mind?” The pen clattered to his desk as he failed the attempt. It was a Parker fountain pen, should he have tried something lighter?
“I don’t have any particular place in mind,” Paula said as Jose reached for a ball-pen on his desk. “Let’s just throw a dart on a map and go.” She just wanted to spend time with him.
“Okay. I will look forward to it.” Sensing the conversation coming to a close, Jose breathed out slowly, “Good luck, Paula.”
The line was silent for a while. “Why do you say that, Jose?” she asked.
“Call it a hunch, but I feel like you’re about to go and do something big.”
“Well, you’re not wrong,” Paula said, drawing some lines on her bedsheet. “You seem to have a lot of faith in me.”
“I’ve been observing you since the day we met, before even, if we go by your files. You have given me a reason to put so much faith in you, Paula. Now give them hell, whoever they are.”
Well, talk about a confidence booster. Paula smiled to herself, thinking how lucky she was to have met Jose, even if they had gotten off on a rocky start. “Thank you, Jose. Truly. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye. We’ll talk again soon,” Jose said, finally managing to spin the ball-pen he was playing with. And with that, the call ended.
Paula put down her phone and slid her legs off her bed, walking to the washroom to wash her face of any tear tracks before Megan came back.
Right now, Paula did not have the strength to fight Gianluca, but after this long, she was sure the man had known he wasn’t dead. She wanted to finish reading her grandfather’s journal before she faced him again. Paula never dreamed much when she was on medication, but sleeping pills were something she swore long ago to never use.
She looked into the mirror, seeing her face, grim and stern yet still attractive. She traced the shape of her nose, something she had inherited from her father; thin and straight, except for a small bump at the top of
her bridge. Some might view it as an imperfection, but Paula considered it the best part of her face.
“I miss you, dad,” she said, closing her eyes and shaking her head. She had a job do. “I will stop that man. Not because I am hungry for vengeance, but because he will kill again. He will come for aunty, and I can’t let that happen. I swear.”
She walked back to the sofa, now quite familiar with it, and opened her grandfather’s journal, flipping the pages to where she had last left off, and continued to read it.
• • •
Gianluca touched down in Italy on his private jet, mildly annoyed. After shooting Leonardo’s granddaughter, he had taken to the US from Tokyo, where he had been on a business trip.
He was excited to attend her funeral. Paula Lindsay was quite famous, and a single search on the internet turned up quite a lot of results. Lindsay Corporation was sure to put out an obituary, and while there would be reporters, Gianluca knew how to stay out of the camera’s eyes.
Things were going according to his plans.
Gianluca had killed Leonardo without much thought, overcome with betrayal and anger. It was probably one of the best days of his life, breaking free of his shackles. He had contacts within the police, whom he promptly called and with a bit of quick thinking, the narrative changed to ‘Mafia boss killed in a shootout by undercover detective’ instead of Gianluca, keeping his record spotless.
Aleando Mitri stormed his house the day Gianluca cut ties with the Bianchi family. The blond recalled his face, one of the funniest sights he had seen, the face of an old man scrunched in self-righteous fury.
“You disgraceful rat!” Aleando kicked a stand, sending a centuries-old Chinese vase crashing to the floor. “I know it was you! You jealous creature. He gave you everything you could have ever wanted, but in the end, you cannot change the nature of a snake.”
Gianluca had been tempered by years of experience and watched as the man went through his possessions like a bull in a china shop, smashing antiques and breaking his stuff to vent out his rage. “You have no proof. I may have left the family, but if you kill me, it won’t go unpunished.”
Aleando paused in his rampage, throwing one final paperweight through a grandfather clock. “The same goes for you, you son of a bitch.” So, he had come prepared.
“Get out of my house then,” Gianluca said, knowing they were at a stalemate. Aleando glared balefully, but left without another word, which came as a surprise.
The penance for breaking into and ruining his home followed swiftly, with Gianluca winning over the businesspersons of the family except for a few, still making deals with them despite officially being in the family. They believed his innocence and considered Aleando an old geezer with a few screws loose after losing his best friend.
Gianluca remembered those days fondly, stripping away everything Aleando had one by one. Unfortunately for him, Lindsay Corporation was much more robust- and impervious to his machinations, and Andrew Lindsay was no pushover either.
Gianluca didn’t let his limitations stop him, however. He simply went after the next best thing, the love of Andrea’s life, the woman he had married. It was such a shame to waste a Bentley though, those were some beautiful cars. Andrew Lindsay’s death soon followed, fake as well to keep the authorities off his back.
Gianluca would have liked to remove a digit from his hand for every time old man Bianchi had wronged him, which would have left him fingerless and then some. Instead, he had to satiate himself by telling Andrew just who killed his wife before his own demise.
The expression the former owner of Lindsay Corporation had made was priceless and the revelation, even outclassing Aleando’s vitriolic countenance the day he learned of Leonardo’s death. He liked this new method, killing off people close to someone, and then telling it all before he ensured the death of another.
The faces they made, acting so outraged and sad, their despair which he could almost taste, although it never came close to what he felt inside, it was sort of satisfying. Megan Lindsay was next. Gianluca wondered what sort of face she would make when he would tell her of how Paula died. He couldn’t wait.
Gianluca waited a few days in New York, not having any more dreams with Paula yet not hearing any sign of her death. Was it possible that she had survived? “How annoying,” he clicked his tongue.
It looked like he had to kill her again.
11.
Flawed Execution
The remainder of the journal was held information Paula was not prepared for. At some point in time, it seemed that Gianluca had told Bianchi about his dreams, and as it turned out, Leonardo had some prior knowledge about such things.
My boy tells me of dreams he has, dreams that take him to the future. Always showing him deaths. It reminds of another woman seven years ago, convinced she could see the future. At that time, I did not take the pitiful thing seriously. She was a victim of the drug cartel we were trying to suppress, so I had sufficient reason to doubt her.
Some of the people who knew her called her an oracle before she vanished. I still remember her face, and there is no resemblance between her and my boy, so I think the power to see these visions is not sealed within bloodlines.
I do not know much about this, nor do I have the time or resources to research this. I leave this bit of information for the awareness of whoever reads this journal.
Paula sighed. In the end, she only had her own experiences to rely upon. That night she slept and dreamed, but it was her own dream, as her enemy did not appear. She was dreaming that she was somewhere in France, which was a relief since she could understand French. A masked man tried to ram a truck crowd of protestors wearing yellow vests.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Paula closed her eyes, her Osprey vision flying through the terrified faces in the crowd as the onlookers realized what was going to happen, her vision the shifting to the truck’s windscreen, and then latching on to the handbrake.
Everything in this realm is yours to control, she could hear Jose’s voice like he was standing next to her. Paula concentrated, and the handbrake shifted a millimeter. She gritted her teeth, trying harder, and just when she thought it was useless, the brake activated. Tires screeched, and the truck which was going to ram into the crowd dead center hit a streetlight.
Paula sagged in relief as a bunch of police officers converged on the scene, to protect the driver from the wrath of the protestors and to arrest him. She separated herself from the crowds, even though they could not see her, and headed towards a park.
Time was limited, as she had no idea when her body would decide to wake up. “Right. So, everything I imagine can become true.” Putting that theory to the test, Paula held an open palm in front of her, scrunching her eyes closed as she concentrated on bringing a pencil into existence. She had managed to freeze a lake and materialize frost on some grass, among other things.
Paula was able to create certain amounts of matter; essentially, she was violating some law of physics. The more she concentrated, the more lightheaded she felt. Some invisible force began to squeeze her veins, making her blood feel like lead as it passed through it. Her hands felt hot until, with a small popping sound, something dropped in the palm of her hands.
Paula opened her eyes, greeted with the sight of an ordinary yellow pencil with a pink eraser at the end. “Yes! I did... it...” she swayed, her vision blurring. A drop of liquid fell to her hand, staining it red. “Huh?” the young woman felt her nose trickling blood. Thinking that she had overexerted herself, she fainted in her dream.
When Paula came to, she felt her nose a bit clogged and stinging, but not dripping. It seemed that the damage she accrued in the dream realm was mitigated a bit. It would also explain how she had survived a bullet in her dream.
In the day Paula kept her life as usual, and whenever she slept and dreamed, she would exert her control over the dream realm as much as
she could.
Most of her dreams occurred in New York, and in places she was familiar with, which was how she knew she was in her own dreams and not Gianluca’s. Megan had questioned her a bit, but never pushed it when it came to her dreams. Her aunt was often lost in her own thoughts nowadays, but then again, the same went for Paula.
The young millionaire finished her grandfather’s journal as well, reading about his final days. Leonardo Bianchi died not long after giving his journal to his close friend Aleando for safekeeping, with a small list of people he expected to come looking after him. He had made many enemies in his time, and so it was Aleando’s duty to make sure his next of kin, should they come looking for their legacy from the land of freedom, be adequately protected.
Unbeknownst to Paula and Megan, Aleando was pulling strings behind the scenes, and keeping them safe from the shadows from Gianluca’s acquaintances, which held positions in both legal and illegal organizations. Even the private protection Paula had hired for her aunt’s peace of mind was acquainted with Aleando, kept the old mafioso updated.
And that was not the only thing Aleando was up to...
• • •
Gianluca appeared the very picture of calm, meditating after working out in his home gym. He was sitting cross-legged on a blue exercise mat with only black sweatpants on. His lithe muscles were pumped, veins prominent. Inside, he was trying to organize his thoughts and practice patience.
That bastard Aleando had whisked away Paula Bianchi and her aunt, Megan from the hotel they were staying at. Gianluca had caught on too late, and now his targets for revenge could have been anywhere in Italy, their trail went cold. No report was lodged in the police regarding an American woman, which meant his contacts in the police force couldn’t give him any information.
It was always risky to poke his nose into hospitals. It was an unspoken rule among every criminal with common sense that hospitals were a sanctuary. Anyone idiotic enough to consider them a part of the battlefield would earn the ire of every other family for miles around, an unofficial, unspoken agreement that was introduced by the Bianchi family. The old man had left behind some good things for others...only for others, though. It was a pain in the neck for Gianluca at the moment.
The Family Secret Page 19
