Devious Vow: Chapter 33

The news articles and tidbits of gossip I find online don’t help much. There are a few stories here and there about Luca’s death—that he was in Paris when he had a heart attack—but even that isn’t clear.

Some sources whisper he was with a prostitute when it happened. Others claim it was while sitting on a toilet. One even has him at church, of all places.

Basically, it boils down to whichever source each gossip blog interviewed, and how they wanted to paint Luca.

The thing that jumps out at me is that there seems to be some confusion about when he actually died. According to the earliest reports, Massimo officially announced his father’s passing three days after Luca’s death. This all coincided with his ascension to the Carveli throne.

But there’s another story with one of Luca’s drivers reporting him as missing in Paris almost a full week before Massimo’s announced date of death. It’s suspicious as hell, but given that Luca Carveli was a notorious crime boss, nobody’s exactly looking into it too hard.

Either way, there’s nothing on this mysterious first-born son of Luca’s—Massimo’s alleged older brother—who appears to have died young. The boy my father went out of his way to tell Luca he’d grieved for.

I exhale as I sit back in the bed, glancing at my phone nervously.

Obviously, Alistair having dinner with Massimo has me on high alert, even if he’s assured me that it’s all fine. But I haven’t heard from him at all, and it’s getting late.

I want him here, with me. I need him here, with me. And not just for the sex—for the animalistic way he pounces on me, or the way he fucks me with this intoxicating blend of primal aggression and slow, sensual ecstasy.

I need him because I just need him. All of him. His warmth, and his arms. His comfort, and his strength.

I need the way he just seems to fit and makes me feel safe.

The way he feels like home.

I glance at my father’s letter sitting on the bed next to me. I don’t know why I’m so fixated on it, but I can’t stop thinking about my discovery that Massimo had a brother.

Frowning, I go to my laptop again and bring up Google. There’s obviously lots of information about Massimo—mostly about his playboy lifestyle, and his violent public tendencies. There’s even a nauseating puff piece in some gross celebrity gossip blog that focuses on the mafia world concerning our wedding, with some blurry paparazzi shots of Massimo grinning at the altar while I look like I’m heading to the guillotine.

But there’s also plenty about Luca’s decadent lifestyle and playboy antics. By all accounts the man was a vile, cruel, abusive asshole, yet seems to have had mistresses and scandalous affairs all over the place.

A washed up movie starlet, a US Senator’s wife, the daughter of a Council Minister of Italy… It’s like bad reality television, reading about this crap. It’s all total trash, but somehow I can’t drag my eyes away from the litany of Massimo’s father’s scandals.

There’s even some crazy story involving Will Cates, the missing-presumed-dead bass player for the band Velvet Guillotine, stealing one of Luca’s girlfriends and taking her on tour, which resulted in Luca literally trying to storm Madison Square Garden with a small army of mob enforcers during a concert.

No wonder his son is an angry asshole with zero impulse control.

Then I find another story about Luca. This one details yet another mistress of his dying in a horrible car crash while allegedly trying to escape from Luca himself, who may or may not have orchestrated the actual crash.

I wince as I scan the pictures in the old news article, which show a horrifically twisted wreck of a car where it landed after being slammed off the West Side Highway and bouncing and rolling eleven times.

Obviously, the poor girl was killed. What makes it even more heartbreaking is that there were apparently two other passengers in the car that died—another adult, and…horribly…a child.

I look away, shaking my head. Then, slowly, I turn back. My eyes widen as I scroll back to the top of the article and read the publication date.

The crash was twenty-eight years ago.

Something starts whining in my head—a small noise I can’t quite ignore.

You’re insane.

Just the same, I go to the Crown and Black website and click on the “About the Partners” tab. My mind flashes to what feels like a hundred years ago, in the dark heat of an elevator during a blackout, when Alistair told me things he’d never told anyone before.

How he came to live with the Black family. How his parents had been killed in a horrendous car crash.

I click on his bio on the website, telling myself over and over how utterly insane this is, and that I’m connecting dots that aren’t there. But when I start to read, my face pales.

The bio mentions Knightsblood, and law school, and how he and his brother—sons of the much-loved Vaughn Black, attorney at law—befriended Taylor Crown and founded Crown and Black.

It’s a very standard, paint-by-numbers, LinkedIn-style bio.

But at the very end, almost as a footnote, it gratefully mentions his adoption by Vaughn and Marilyn. How he’d been involved in a near-fatal car crash that took the lives of his birth parents before his adoptive ones gave him a new chance at life.

My face goes numb.

A car crash that occurred when he was six, twenty-eight years ago.

On the West Side Highway, in New York.

The little whining noise in my head becomes a full-blown air raid siren.

Holy. Shit.

I grab the letter from my father with shaking hands, re-reading it again.

“I hope you know I grieved for you when your son died.”

The letter falls from my hands. In a daze, my head spinning, I slowly close the laptop, slip out of bed, and start to pace the room.

There’s no way.

There is no fucking way that⁠—

I gasp as my phone rings. My arm jerks out to grab it, my heart pounding as I look for Alistair’s name on the screen. But then my brows knit.

It’s not Alistair. It’s Rosa, my father’s caretaker.

The color drains from my face as I answer the call and cautiously bring the phone to my ear.

“Rosa…” I choke. “My father⁠—?”

“Ms. LeBlanc!” she gushes excitedly. “It’s okay! Your father… He’s waking up!”

I almost drop the phone. My hand clamps down on my mouth to stifle the scream rising in my throat.

“What?!”

“Oui!” She almost screams herself. “I am at the hospital with him now! The doctors are helping him slowly come out of his sleep, and he’s waking up!”

I start to sob big, happy tears of utter relief.

“How?!” I blurt.

Curiously, Rosa doesn’t immediately respond.

“Rosa?”

“Ms. LeBlanc,” she says quietly, caution suddenly in her voice. “I… Are you safe?”

My brows furrow. “Yes?”

“I mean really, Eloise,” she murmurs.

“I’m safe, Rosa.” I frown as I wet my lips. “I’m actually not even with Massimo. I’m…hiding.”

“Bien,” she exhales. “I don’t mean to frighten you, it’s just…”

“What the hell is going on, Rosa?”

“Eloise, you know I’m a registered nurse, oui?”

I do. It’s required for her in order to be my father’s full-time caretaker, given his condition.

“Yes. And?”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned that I’ve been working as a private caretaker while I am back at medical school, studying to be a doctor. Neurologist,” she clarifies.

“No, I didn’t…” I swallow. “That’s wonderful, Rosa⁠—”

“That isn’t why I’m calling,” she says cautiously. “Eloise, your father had a doctor who would visit once a month and bring the various IV drugs that he needed while he was in his coma. Except that doctor was due a few days ago, and never came. I called, but his mobile number had been disconnected.”

I frown.

“Obviously I didn’t want your father to go without his meds. One of my professors at school said she could fill the script for me, so long as she knew specifically what the prescriptions were for. I didn’t know, so I brought an empty IV bag for her to test.”

My frown deepens. “Rosa, what⁠—”

“Eloise, the doctor who stopped coming wasn’t giving your father medicine,” she hisses urgently. “He was giving him Propofol.”

“I’ve never heard of that. What’s⁠—”

“It’s a nonbenzodiazepine sedative, Eloise,” she says, her voice tinged with fear. “They use it to put and keep people in medically induced comas.”

It feels like I’ve been punched in the chest. The air leaves my lungs. My throat closes. I stumble backward until I fall back into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, numb.

What the FUCK.

“I’ve given the police the name of the doctor who disappeared. I have a picture, too. Can I text it to you, as well? In case you recognize him?”

I’m unable to speak.

“Eloise,” she says softly. “I’m so, so sorry. But your father, he’s going to be okay! They’re going to gently wean him off the Propofol and he’ll be up as soon as⁠—”

“Text me the picture,” I croak. “Please.”

“Oui, of course.”

My phone dings. I pull it from my ear and tap on the text Rosa’s just sent me, and my stomach plummets through the floor.

The missing “doctor” is Rocco.

“Rosa?” I hiss, my heart pounding. “Are you safe where you are?”

“I.. Oui, yes?” she says cautiously.

“I need you to call the police. Tell them that ‘doctor’ they’re looking for is a member of the Carveli criminal organization.”

Rosa’s breath catches. “Mon Dieu…”

“I’m booking a flight right now,” I blurt. “Just, please, please be safe, yes? I’ll text you when I’m enroute to the airport. And Rosa?”

“Oui?”

“Merci.”

My hands are shaking as I open my laptop again and start frantically looking for the soonest flight to Paris. Suddenly I gasp, startled by the sound of the front door to the suite banging open and Alistair walking in.

I grab the copy of my father’s will and the letter and bolt into the living room, desperate to tell him everything I’ve learned. Part of me is terrified that I’m digging into his past where I shouldn’t. Or insane for even going there with this.

But I also know it’s going to be okay, because he’s him, and I’m me.

And together, we’re us. The us that might have been ten years ago. The “us” that might despite everything still have a shot, somehow.

My heart races as I walk around the corner and see him, his back to me as he stands over the bar cart in the corner, his shoulders hunched.

“Hey!” I blurt. “I… This is crazy, but I have to tell you⁠—”

The smile fades from my face as he turns and levels the single most sinister, bleak, downright malevolent look I’ve ever seen on his face at me.

“Alistair?”

He keeps staring death at me. I swallow nervously.

“How was dinner⁠—”

Immediately, I’m gasping sharply and tripping away from him in fear as he storms toward me. His lips curl into a vicious snarl, his eyes blue fire as he surges into me. I scream, but it dies in my throat when he grabs it tight and slams me back against the wall.

“Was it you!?” he snarls with fury.

“What?!” I choke.

“WAS. IT. YOU?!” he roars. Fear cuts through my chest like ice, turning me numb.

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking⁠—”

“I’m talking about you stealing private files from me to pass to your fucking husband!!”

I want to tell him everything. I want to say how Massimo forced me. How he threatened Camille. I want to say I hated doing it every step of the way, and that I could hardly sleep some nights from the guilt.

But none of that comes out. None of that can come out, not with the way he’s looking at me, and not with the way I feel my face fall.

Instantly, I know my guilt is written clear as day on my face.

“Jesus,” he says quietly, shaking his head, a sneer on his lips. “Je. Sus.”

“Alistair!” I blurt as his hand drops from my neck and he steps away from me, unblinking, staring at me in horror and disgust. “Please! Let me⁠—”

“No, Eloise,” he hisses thinly. “Just…no. I don’t trust a single fucking thing that’s ever come out of your fucking mouth.”

It feels like both a slap in the face and punch to the stomach. I gasp for air, my eyes burning as I stare at him.

“Please—”

“This…” he growls quietly. “Whatever the fuck this was?” His jaw grinds. “It’s done. I was an idiot to ever trust you.”

“Alistair!”

He’s turning, striding across the room.

“Alistair!”

“Don’t ever fucking contact me again,” he hisses as he reaches for the doorknob. He stops and glares pure malice at me over his shoulder. “Needless to say, you’re fucking fired.”

He opens the door. And then, it’s like the whole world goes into frame-by-frame slow motion. I hear myself scream as if listening from another room as the gunshot explodes.

As Alistair wrenches sideways in a spray of blood and tumbles backward into the room.

As his white shirt quickly blossoms to red as he drops to the floor.

This isn’t happening.

It feels like my body is frozen; like my brain is numb, and reality has stopped making sense. I’m still staring at Alistair lying on the ground when Massimo steps into the room, a gun in his hand, flanked by five of his men.

Oh God.

My heart turns to ice as he smiles dangerously at me.

“What an age we live in,” he says with a sardonic grin on his lips. “Chicago, Illinois, right here on Central Park West.”

I bolt toward Alistair. Massimo’s men grab me and I try to scream but a hand slams over my mouth. I choke on my own breath as Massimo and his goons surround me, my heart jackrabbiting. Massimo’s eyes land on the letter and the will on the ground. He stoops to pick them up, his brows arching.

“My, my, my,” he muses quietly. His gaze slides from the documents in his hands to me. “I think we have a lot to talk about, don’t we…wife?”

Two of his men grab a motionless Alistair under the arms. I try to scream again, but a gag wraps tightly around my mouth.

A bag is yanked over my head.

And then all I know is darkness and fear.