novelxo Scorned Love: Chapter 32
My chin dipped. There was no avoiding this conversation. I’d been wanting to confess to Ivy from the beginning. I turned around to face her fully.
“What tipped you off?”
“Milk and cookies.”
I winced. I had to confess to more things. Still, I couldn’t help from choking out, “What?”
“You put something in my milk that night, right? My sleepiness was different. I thought I was just tired from all the events that day.”
I took a wary step toward her, relieved she didn’t back away. I doubted she would. My Ivy was a fighter and she’d probably kick my ass if I tried to intimidate her. That coward Sinclair tased and tied her up. Thinking about how that unfolded made my blood boil. Edward Sinclair might be dead and buried, but the desire to dig him up and kill him again was strong.
“I’m sorry.”
She cocked her head and closed the distance between us. Her chin tilted up, and we were so close, the tips of our toes almost touched. “Are you? Would you do it again?”
“I don’t know.” I was thankful for the evening shadows hiding my expression. Of trepidation. Of uncertainty. Of fear certainly. Fear that I might lose her. But for Ivy and me to stand a chance of a future, I had to come clean. I was also curious about how she came to the conclusion. “Surely, it wasn’t just the milk and cookies.”
A faint smile curved my mouth despite the rattling inside my rib cage. I was thankful for the years of becoming an expert in keeping my face calm even when I felt like puking my guts out.
“Just how my brain worked and connected the dots. After my abduction, there was still this distance between us…we hadn’t…”
“Fucked?”
She gave a scoffing sound. “Made love. And it was understandable. You were thrown in jail. I got abducted. Edward…” She exhaled sharply. “Edward’s gone. We dealt with a lot of emotions.” She clasped my hands. “You held me at night in understanding. More than sex, that was what I needed. But I felt something coming from you, too. It wasn’t guilt. It was something you wanted to tell me, but you weren’t sure. Each time we were in the room together and we fell into silence, the silence was heavy with unspoken words I expected to hear from you.”
I stared at her.
“You never denied killing Joe Rossi. At least to me. How did you do it? Did you have help? Who else…” I squeezed her hands when her questions stampeded over each other.
“Baby, we should sit down.” Partly because it might take a while to explain, but mostly because energy deserted my legs with a relief that the secret I hated keeping from her was out in the open. I guided her to the pergola’s seating where we had made love after the fashion show.
“You’re making me more nervous. Who else knows?” she asked.
“Sandro. Me. And now you.”
She stared at me for a few seconds. “Trevor, Dom, Matteo?”
I shook my head. “Too risky.” I blew out a breath. “I have a suspicion Dad knows, but then little else escapes him and I knew he would never ask me. He understood what I had to do. He would have done anything to protect Mom. As long as Joe Rossi was alive, he would always go after the woman I loved. I couldn’t let that happen. Joe helped plan the loft attack. He gave Max and Sinclair his Harlem boys so as not to be directly involved in it. He confronted you at the restaurant to make sure I knew history was going to repeat itself. But the last straw? When he wanted to ruin what you and Xander worked so hard for by burning down your warehouse and stealing the goods. He would never leave you in peace. He would hurt you as long as you’re in my life and fuck if I was going to walk away from you. I’m not letting you walk away either.”
Ivy stared at me for a beat. “So Sandro just helped you out of the goodness of his heart to kill his boss?”
“It was Sandro who approached me.”
“When?”
“Remember that time I came to the loft, and I found you on top of Trevor?”
“That far back?”
“Yeah.” I settled us further into the cushions. “I’d been staking out Joe Rossi at night. I knew the nights he visited his mistress. I really wanted to see if the Scavo brothers were reporting directly to him.”
“And?”
I told her about the time I started staking out Joe Rossi.
I stood in the shadows between the two buildings across the street where Joe Lollipop was keeping his mistress in luxury. No sign of the Scavo brothers. They might be lying low, but everyone knew they were Joe’s attack dogs. Funny that Ivy sent them running like dogs with tails tucked between their legs. There was more to Daniel’s sister than met the eye. I couldn’t count how many times I rewatched that video and got a hard-on.
Too late, the barrel of a gun kissed the back of my head. Fuck.
“I expected more from you, De Lucci.”
Alessandro fucking Rossi.
“If you’re the one who got the drop on me, my ego is intact.”
A scornful chuckle. “Should I be flattered? What are you doing here?”
“Yes. And isn’t it obvious? What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in your Harlem kingdom?”
The gun disappeared from the back of my head and Sandro stood beside me. I glanced at him briefly. He was staring at the house of Joe’s mistress.
“Keeping an eye on him.”
“You’re spying on your own?”
“I spy on who I think is a threat to the family.”
“And that’s how our evening rendezvous started. We staked out Joe’s house, made plans.”
“That’s strange. It always occurred to me you didn’t like him.”
“He’s all right. I just don’t want him around Bianca.”
“But why is he spying on an acting boss?”
“Apparently, the Scavo brothers brought their grievances to Sandro after Joe’s orders to harass your warehouse ended up with them getting their asses kicked. They’d fallen from favor after that. As it turned out, Edward and the Rossi crime family had a long history of doing business right around fashion week. With Edward’s access to SMG, he can report which warehouses to hit that would benefit the smuggling of luxury goods that eventually would feed into the dupe business. When Joe took over, he wanted a bigger cut.”
“This makes my blood boil,” Ivy fumed.
And I wasn’t even exaggerating anything. Edward Sinclair was a fucked-up hypocrite pretending to be a champion of fashion designers when in reality he was helping with the theft of their work.
“The Scavos also suspected that Joe was acting outside family interest, which we now know is a transnational crime group who wanted to cut out Edward Sinclair from the dupe business deal. Joe assured them that he had other ways of accessing the warehouse information, and they didn’t need Sinclair anymore.”
“So, there was another party involved?”
“Yes. Edward and Joe both had skin in this. Joe fucks me up by attacking you. Edward gets you back by fucking me up and destroying your dreams. They both got money. But Edward found out that Joe was going to double-cross him, so he sent Max to kill him.”
“Wait. We know Max and Pancho were the people who attacked me in the loft. Pancho was at Edward’s penthouse. I also saw a third man briefly. I think I saw him at Edward’s that night.”
“Bingo.” Ivy must have been mulling this thing over in her head for a while. “Hans Fitz. A low-level hitman who Sandro actually had a file on. He was on the tarmac with Pancho. Edward sent him as advance security, but the Rossis already had him under control.”
“You mean I went up against hitmen and mercs?”
“You sure did, baby.” I tried to smile, but every time I thought about her attack at the loft, I gnashed my teeth and shuddered at how badly it could have ended if Trevor hadn’t arrived.
“But how did it all go down that night?”
I sighed. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Understand that Joe Rossi was already preordained to die that night. There was no way he could dodge Max’s bullet. Funny thing was, Max did me a favor when he tried to frame me by wearing a similar leather jacket I’d been seen wearing.”
“Was that how a witness identified you?”
“Edward had a cop in his pocket show a witness a picture of me on several tabloid articles wearing that exact leather jacket. Talk about dupes.” I smiled grimly. “Dad and Dom took care of that. Don’t ask me how. Just when the detectives on the case went to get his formal statement for the DA, the witness retracted.”
“Well, if it’s fabricated…”
“So, Sandro and I got to Max the day before Joe Rossi’s hit. Made him tell us everything. I can’t tell you specifics. All I can tell you is I wouldn’t want to be at the opposite end of Sandro’s interrogation.
“We knew Joe Rossi’s habits. He seems to have sleeping problems and would smoke a cigar under the awning of the French door at the front of the house. What he didn’t know was we could spot the ember from his cigar, even through the thick hedges surrounding the property.”
“According to witnesses, someone walked on the sidewalk, shot him, then got into a car at the corner street.”
“Yep, so when Max’s body turned up, and he was wearing the leather jacket.”
“So he framed himself.” What were the odds of that?
“It was flawless.”
I could feel Ivy’s eyes scrutinizing me. I stiffened.
“So who killed Max?”
“I can only confirm that the only person I shot that night was Joe Rossi.” I turned my own scrutinizing eyes on her. “You know what that means, princess?”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
I hugged her close and whispered in her ear, “You’re the only other one who knows the truth besides me and Sandro. Can you handle that?”
She put her arms between us to give us space, and even in the darkness, I could feel her glare. “You don’t scare me, Nico De Lucci.”
I dragged her close again and growled, “I’m a lucky bastard. I don’t deserve you.”
“How can you say that? You tried to protect me.”
“But it was my shit that got you hurt.”
“No, Nico. Remember, this whole spiral started because of Edward. He was working with Joe. They conspired together and got what they deserved.”
Her voice was fierce as we gripped each other desperately.
God, I loved this woman.
But she was right. Everyone got what they deserved.
The three men who attacked Ivy in the loft were dead, courtesy of Sandro Rossi, living up to his name as a legendary assassin.
Edward was out of her life.
Joe Rossi was dead.
In the end, I didn’t kill him for revenge, but to protect the woman I loved.
“One thing though…”
I tensed at her stern voice.
“Don’t drug me again.”
“I didn’t—”
“Zip it.”
My brows shot to my hairline and my cock twitched. Pounding the sass out of her was always a pleasure. I didn’t even feel guilty now. I had a warrior in my arms who asked for no quarter.
“It was a sedative.”
“Semantics.”
“Don’t make me sound like what Edward did to you.”
She drew circles on my chest. “You never got mad at me for going to him.”
I sighed. “Would it stop you from doing something similar again in the future?”
“Well, I’d hoped you’d have an airtight alibi next time, so I wouldn’t have to.”
I barked a laugh. “Have I corrupted you, princess?”
“I don’t know. But I hope it means you’ll trust me to protect you, too. I protect what’s mine.”
“That’s my line.”
Ivy was mine, but we had this symbiotic relationship, so she owned me, too.
A few minutes later, the warm milk must have taken effect and Ivy was snoring lightly on my chest. I didn’t want to move from the pergola. Under the stars and skies of Manhattan, I surrendered my worst secrets to her, and she’d fallen asleep peacefully.
I picked up my phone and opened the image of Ivy sitting on Edward’s lap.
I hadn’t reacted to it much since the day Sandro ended his life with a lethal form of Hybernabis. A hitman’s drug of choice when you wanted to kill your mark and not leave a trace. It didn’t show up on tox screens unless specifically asked for.
I hadn’t deleted the image and kept it on my phone, not because I wanted to torture myself, but because I hadn’t confessed to Ivy about assassinating Joe Rossi yet. Past my initial anger that Edward had his hands all over Ivy, I trusted her implicitly not to cheat on me. That she had a reason for being with that son of a bitch. With that trust, I hung on to the hope that she would understand why I would end Joe Rossi’s life without regrets.
Now, it was time to let this go.
Ivy and I were solid.
I permanently deleted the picture.
The ghosts of our pasts had been laid to rest—literally. It was time to plan our future.