Chapter 11 - The Bitter Truth
Harper felt the air completely vanish from her lungs.
She stared at the glowing screen of the dead mafia boss's phone, her mind desperately trying to reject the reality of the words illuminating the dark mahogany desk.
The phone number belonged to her mother.
It was the exact same number Harper had called every single evening for the past three years to say goodnight to a frail, sickly woman confined to a nursing home bed.
Now, that same number was casually reporting a successful assassination trap to the most ruthless crime lord in the city.
Vincent pulled away from their embrace, his breathing still heavy from the adrenaline of the massacre outside.
He noticed the sheer terror paralyzed across her pale face and immediately followed her gaze down to the bloody desk.
Harper panicked, operating on pure survival instinct.
She reached out and slapped the phone off the edge of the desk before Vincent could read the screen, sending the device shattering against the marble floor.
Vincent narrowed his dark eyes, instantly suspicious of her erratic movement.
He demanded to know what she had just seen on Marcano's locked screen.
Harper lied to the dangerous man standing in front of her for the second time.
She forced a violent shudder and claimed the screen had lit up with a photo of Simon's mutilated body, a gruesome image she simply could not bear to look at again.
Vincent studied her trembling frame for a long, agonizing moment before the tension in his broad shoulders finally relaxed.
He wrapped a heavy arm around her waist and guided her away from the carnage of the shattered office.
He whispered softly that the nightmare was finally over, completely unaware that a much darker one had just begun.
Harper walked silently beside him through the blood-soaked hallways of the fallen compound.
Her mind raced frantically through every memory of her childhood, searching for the invisible cracks in her mother's perfectly crafted facade.
She remembered the strange, unexplained sums of cash that would mysteriously appear when rent was due.
She remembered her mother's terrifyingly calm demeanor whenever the neighborhood gangs caused trouble outside their run-down apartment.
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Harper suddenly realized the woman who raised her was not a helpless victim of circumstance.
Her mother was a ghost, a predator hiding in plain sight, and Harper was nothing more than the bait used to pull Vincent Rossi into a fatal crossfire.
