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He was right.
The silence that followed was deafening. The only thing that could be heard was the blood gushing past my ears at an accelerated pace. I had a frenzy of varied emotions filtering into my system, but the most potent was guilt.
Her family was a soft spot. She didn’t just lose her brother and father that night. Savina lost her mother and herself that fateful night. She lost her innocence, and was plunged into a world of blood and death.
“Andres?”
I snapped out of my internal debate and turned to look at my brother.
“We protect our family at all costs, Valerio,” I told him. “And our family, now, is my wife.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Savina’s POV
I stared out my hospital window as the sun dipped behind the large concrete trees. All I could think about for the past few hours was what Dimitri had told me.
Six hours earlier…
“Martina.” My uncle turned to his daughter. “Give us some room, please.”
“But, papa,” she frowned, “whatever you need to tell her I think you can tell me, too. I’m part of this family.”
“But you made it very clear you do not want to be a part of this world, cara. I’m only trying to protect you.”
“I don’t care for protection when it involves the two people I care most about in this world. I’m staying.”
“Mar,” I interrupted her. “It’s okay. Go and get some rest. I know you’ve been here for a long time, and you could use a shower and something to eat.”
“Vina…” The hurt in her eyes tightened my chest.
“Mar, please. He wouldn’t be saying this without good reason.”
She looked between her father and me until she finally relented and nodded her head. “Fine. I’ll be back later.”
I didn’t like upsetting her, but she had made it clear where she stood regarding matters of the Syndicate. She wanted to be as far removed from it all as possible, and I would respect that choice until she changed her mind.
She walked out of the room looking frustrated and angry.
I then turned my attention back to my godfather and waited. He looked nervous, which had me on edge. This man was not easily shaken, and yet here he was shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“I told you that the reason you needed to marry Andres was because of the Russian attacks that had been on the rise.”
I nodded. “I remember.”
“Well, the real reason I did that was because I needed Felipe close so that I could confirm my suspicions.” He swallowed hard. “Do you remember what I told you the first month of you being Boss?”
I licked my lips and my mouth suddenly felt incredibly dry. “Yes, I do. You told me to look at the finer details of things to understand the bigger picture.”
“For years we had been watching Vladimir, waiting for him to slip up and show us his true colors. But for almost a decade, the man has been flawless. He had supposedly turned over a new leaf and become a model citizen of society. But as you know, that was simply a smoke screen to what was happening behind the scenes. We thought that Vladimir was the one who ordered the assassination because he had the motive to do so. Your father demolished his Empire and left him with nothing. For a man, to dishonor the code in our world is seen as disgraceful. And the Vladimir we knew was a man of great honor. He upheld the code and lived by it until that fateful day, when he pulled the gun on your father and tried to take him down. He dishonored the code by doing so and was thus shamed.”
These were assumptions we had come up with over the years. None of it was new, so why was he just regurgitating what I already knew?
“I asked myself over the years why a great man like Vladimir would dare risk his reputation for something so trivial and avoidable.” He grabbed onto the edge of my bed, his eyes shifting from where I sat to the windows outside. “The answer is he wouldn’t. Vladimir would have never dishonored the code, Savina.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Dimitri. Just tell me straight up.”
There was that gnawing feeling at the back of my mind again. Slowly but surely, I could see the dots connecting. But the picture that it was forming was one I didn’t like.
