I stumbled backward, my back hitting the wall of the small hotel room. My heart was racing, but my brain was telling me I’d heard him wrong.

No.

This was Andre.

The Andre that I trusted with my life, and that would offer me support when I needed it. The same man who went out of his way to go out and get me Coco Pops and candy because he knew I liked them.

The Andre that promised to protect me.

He held his hands up in surrender. “Emerson, just listen—”

“Listen?” I snapped. “How could you!”

I looked around, finding a vase filled with flowers on a table beside me. I picked it up, throwing it as hard as I could with my good arm, right at his face. He ducked, and it hit the carpet, bouncing along the floor and scattering flowers and water everywhere.

“You need to listen,” he hissed, fire in his eyes. Just minutes ago, I thought this was a man who, despite having this darkness inside him, would never hurt me. And now, I was wondering whether I was about to suffer the same fate as my sister. “I loved Sophie.”

Of all the things I expected to hear come out of his mouth that was not one of them.

“What the hell do you mean?” I demanded, narrowing my eyes.

He hung his head, taking a few deep breaths. His hands were clenched into fists, and I started to search the room looking for anything I could use to protect myself.

“Yes, okay, this all started as a way for my brother and me to get vengeance for our family,” he explained, the words making my body shake in anger. “When our dad was killed, Tobia went back to Italy with Mom to look after her, and I was made to stay here, to take on another identity and eventually get myself involved with the DePalmas.”

“You…” I couldn’t even find the words I wanted to express the rage that was building inside me in that moment. I wanted to hurt him. The part of me that would have usually run when coming across someone who could possibly kill you—it had been replaced by this need to punish him.

I felt lied to, deceived.

But he’d said three words that made me stop and squash all those emotions for a brief second.

I loved Sophie.

“I’d had it burned into my brain that the DePalmas had brought this shame upon our family. My father was killed, my mother broke down into this shell of a woman. Our family was destroyed.” He took a step forward, his eyes no longer dark and angry, but glazed and full of sorrow. “It wasn’t until Angelo took me in, that I finally heard the full story about what had happened. I wanted to walk away, ashamed of what my father had done… but then I met Sophie.”

“You could have still walked away,” I accused, not understanding why he chose to stick around instead of convincing his brother that they had ultimately done wrong.

He shook his head. “You don’t just walk away from this life, Emerson. It’s blood in, blood out. And I was fucking selfish.”

“Tobia killed my sister… your brother murdered my sister!” I screamed at him. “You could have stopped him! If you loved her so much, why the hell didn’t you do something to save her?”

The tears were burning at my eyes now, I could tell they were about to spill over, but I was trying to stay strong. I needed to somehow get out of this, somehow get to Angelo and warn him.

He growled deep in his throat. “We are wasting time here. We need to get to them before they’re all dead. Tobia is crazy as fucking hell, but he’s smarter than you would think. He set it up so those men knew the wrong information, just in case this happened.”

Andre… or Dom… or whatever the hell I was supposed to call him now, rushed toward the kitchen and snatched the car keys off the counter. “I managed to convince him that Sophie was just a part of the game so he would keep me in the loop, but he’s gone off the rails. He wants to end this, and he wants to do it with a big bang. I think I know where they’re going, I need to stop them.”

He rushed toward the door. “Wait,” I called out, causing him to freeze and look over his shoulder at me. I turned and ran back to the bedroom, tugging open the side table where, without fail, Angelo had a gun stashed. He’d also taught me how to use it. I walked back out into the room. “I’m coming with you.”

He started to shake his head. “Angelo would—”

“Kill you?” I asked sarcastically. “I think you need to face the fact that once he figures out who you are… that’s going to be a huge possibility anyway.”

“I know,” he said calmly, as though the realization that he wasn’t going to be able to walk away from this mess alive, was one he’d already come to terms with and accepted. “But I already lost Sophie, I refuse to let you be a victim of Tobia, too.”

I lifted my chin in the air. “I’m not a victim. He’s tried to destroy me once, it won’t happen again.”

“I never wanted him to hurt either of you. I tried to push him in a different direction. Sophie spoke about you—”

“Stop,” I said sharply, not about to listen to him speak about her right now. I raised my gun, and he stood a little straighter. “We were friends, and I really liked you. But don’t think that I won’t shoot you if you try to hurt the man I love.” I couldn’t say it wouldn’t be hard as hell to pull the trigger on someone, who five minutes ago, was a man I cared deeply for. But if the choice was between him, and my family…

I wouldn’t hesitate.

He nodded. “Noted.”

I followed him out and down to the lobby. I tucked the gun inside my jacket, refusing to take my hand off it. While my gut told me that I could trust Andre, in that all the pieces of his story and his relationship with Sophie was adding up, how did I know he hadn’t just faked it with her either. How do you trust someone when you’ve found out they’ve spent the last three years living a lie?

He climbed in the driver’s seat, and as soon as I was settled in the back, he took off down the street. With everything he’d said, I’d forgotten this was a race against time. If Angelo and the others were actually walking into a trap, they could already be dead.

I had to take deep breaths through my nose, trying to calm my body and mind, not wanting to think of what would happen if Tobia was successful. Anthony, Gio, and Angelo were all top men in the DePalma family.

Would he be satisfied there?

Or would he be so bloodthirsty that he would then go after Rico and Celia?

Were they safe?

With Andre weaving through traffic, I needed to distract my mind, and I also needed to ask questions before we got to our destination and this turned into a shitstorm.

I cleared my throat. “Did Sophie know?”

I kept going over the conversations that we’d had in my head. She had fallen in love, and she had chosen to walk away from him, but it had devastated her.

 

There are just some people who aren’t meant to be together, Emmy.”

“How can you say that when you’re obviously so miserable?”

“I let him go, and now there’s no way to get him back.” Her smile slipped again, and it’s like a shadow had fallen over her, dragging her into a place she’d much rather forget. “It’s best for everyone this way. He knows it, and so do I.”

“Sophie…” I started, reaching out to grab her hand.

Her eyes seemed haunted like this one decision had altered her entire life, like there was no escape from the pain she was feeling after losing him.

 

He instantly stilled, his hands gripping the wheel, knuckles turning white. “Did she know who I really was?”

“Yeah,” I replied softly.

“No, not until Tobia told her,” he answered, twisting my stomach even more. “She was in the light, people watched her every move. It would have drawn attention to the DePalmas, and it could have had a serious impact on her career.”

That was why Sophie had seemed so filled with regret about what she had done. She’d chosen career first and family first before herself, and she knew instantly that she’d chosen wrong, but was just ready to accept her actions.

If things had been different, if Sophie was still here, and she truly loved Andre, I had no doubt that she would have ended up walking away from her career to be with him. I could see it in her face and hear it in her voice. She knew she’d given up on something that was real, but the thing with Sophie was that she’d have never let that beat her. She would have fought back eventually.

She was just never given the chance.

Sophie had missed out on a lifetime with the man she loved, whether they would have lived happily ever after or gone down in flames like a new age Romeo and Juliet, no one would ever know. You don’t get to choose who you fall in love with, it just happens, and more often than not, in the most unlikely circumstances.

I liked to think that if things had been different, and Tobia didn’t exist, that Angelo and I still would have found each other, somehow. All I knew right now, was that losing her had brought me him.

Was this something I should be grateful for? I really wasn’t sure.

But I knew that Sophie would want me to be happy either way.

“Do you even know where we’re going?” I asked, my leg bouncing nervously and my palm starting to sweat around the gun clasped in my hand.

“Hunts Point,” he answered, weaving through traffic. I cursed as he ran a red light, luckily there were no other cars around. I didn’t know the city well enough to know where Hunts Point was, but I could tell from the direction that we were traveling that we were probably heading toward the Bronx.

That alone made me nervous.

“You’re going to get us killed,” I snapped.

He shook his head. “No, I’m making sure that Angelo and the others stay alive.”

Please let him be alive.

I was stronger now and knew if I lost him, I could make it through.

But I didn’t want to.