The documents I’m staring at now are her medical records, doctors’ reports and bloodwork from the time she was sick. She had cancer, which I already knew, but it looks like she chose to forgo some of the more aggressive and potentially effective treatments.
“She never went through chemo,” I murmur. “I don’t get it. If Luca loved her so much, why wouldn’t he make sure she tried every kind of treatment available?”
Marcus looks up from the laptop. “I don’t know. What are the files named? I’ll look through them too.”
I rattle off the names so he can search for them on the laptop, then continue scrolling on my phone. My breath catches in my throat as my gaze snags on a report from a checkup.
“Holy fuck. She was pregnant.”
“What?” Theo’s head whips up, and he glances from Ryland to Marcus. “Did you know about that?”
They both shake their heads, and Marcus picks up the laptop in front of him. “Here.”
He carries it over to the couch, settling between me and Ryland. It’s a bit of a tight fit for us all to cram onto the small sofa, but it lets us all see the screen of Marcus’s laptop.
Pulling up the file I was just looking at, he zooms in a little, and the four of us read in silence.
“Yeah, she was definitely pregnant,” I say quietly. “I guess that answers the question of why Luca couldn’t get her to try more aggressive treatment options. She probably didn’t want to endanger the baby.”
“What happened to his kid though? That’s the real fucking question,” Theo puts in, resting his chin on his knuckles as he leans in to read the notes. “Is he or she alive? I mean, we know by now that this whole ‘choosing a successor’ thing is bullshit, but is it possible he already has a successor? An heir?”
“Motherfucker,” Ryland mutters.
Marcus’s finger moves quickly across the trackpad, pulling up more of the medical records.
Silence falls again as we read through the documents in chronological order, from the discovery of Genevieve’s cancer all the way through her various failed treatments.
The picture that emerges is heartbreaking.
None of the treatments worked. They barely even prolonged her life.
And in the end, she lost her baby too.
She miscarried at thirteen weeks, and by then, the cancer was too aggressive to do much more than make her comfortable as it ravaged her body, eating away at her until there was nothing left.
She passed away four months after her baby died.
The computer screen blurs in my vision, and I realize a tear has slipped down my cheek. It’s hard to have any sympathy for Luca D’Addario, the man responsible for putting the three people I love most in the world in danger. But I do feel for his wife and his unborn child.
“That’s fucking awful,” I murmur, and Theo’s hand comes to rest on my knee, giving a gentle squeeze.
“Search for her name. Luca’s wife,” he tells Marcus. “See what else comes up.”
Marcus taps at the keyboard again, and a moment later, several documents appear in the search results.
“That one.” I point.
Among the medical records, obituary, and photos, there’s a document simply titled My Love. Marcus clicks on it, and when it opens, I realize it’s a letter. A message Luca wrote to his wife after she died.
I almost feel guilty for prying this deep into the man’s life, into his soul like this. The things we’re reading now have nothing at all to do with the Viper, and they won’t help us prove that Luca has been living a double-life, working hard to solidify his power in Halston while the competitors and their families went after each other.
But I need to know. Now that I’ve started reading, I can’t stop until I understand what happened all those years ago. How it shaped the man Luca is today.
The letter isn’t long, but every word on the screen bleeds pain.
Agony.
I have a feeling he wrote it one day when he just couldn’t contain the heartbreak raging in his soul anymore. Luca doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who keeps a diary, so he probably had nowhere else to put his feelings down. He just opened a document and started typing.
Dearest Genevieve,
I miss you. I miss you so fucking much it hurts to draw breath. The world without you in it doesn’t make sense, and I don’t think it ever will.
Why did I have to lose our child with you? Why did our son have to die?
I held the barrel of a gun under my chin last night, and for a few glorious seconds, I dreamed of joining you. But I know if I do that, we’ll never be together again.
I watch people, those who still have families, those who still have children, and I want them to understand my pain.
I want to burn the world, if only so the fire in my heart will have company.
I love you.
I will never stop loving you.
Until the day I die.
My teeth clamp down on my lower lip as I read, and by the third pass-through, I realize I’m biting so hard I’m about to break through the skin. I loosen my hold, blowing out a breath as my abused lip throbs.
“It still isn’t proof,” I murmur. “Not the kind of proof we need. But this is the beginning of Luca’s scheme right here, isn’t it? This whole thing about pitting the heirs of the most powerful families against each other wasn’t just about gaining more power for himself. It was about balancing the scales, at least in his eyes. If happiness was torn from him, he wanted to take it from others too.”
Theo scrubs a hand down his face, blinking at the screen. “Fuck. That’s dark as shit.”
“I get it,” Marcus murmurs.
My eyebrows shoot up, and I turn to look at him. He’s gazing down at his laptop, his face unreadable.
I shake my head. “You get what?”
He glances over at me, and the depth of emotion burning in his multi-colored eyes makes my stomach flip over.
“Some people love in a nice way. In a simple way. In an easy way. When those people lose someone they love, they mourn, but eventually they move on.”
He stops speaking for a moment. Then he moves suddenly, grabbing me and hauling me onto his lap. I let out a startled yelp as I straddle him, my dress twisting awkwardly around my legs. He bands one strong arm around my waist, holding me close as his other hand fists my hair, forcing me to meet his gaze.
“That’s not the way I love you, angel. That’s not the way any of us love you. It’s not nice. It’s not soft or wholesome. It fills me up so completely that sometimes I can barely fucking breathe.”
The hand that’s gripping my hair shakes with the intensity of his emotions, a bite of pain stinging my scalp as I gaze helplessly into his eyes, unable to look away. Theo and Ryland close in on either side of us, and with all three of them looking at me, surrounding me like this, I can’t think of anything else.
“It’s not healthy,” Marcus grits out. “It’s not right. But I’m not taking it back. I love you with my whole goddamn soul, and if I ever lost you, I’d raze the fucking world to the ground. I’d ruin it, just for existing when you didn’t.”
My heart slams against my ribs as the full force of his words washes over me.
I should be afraid.
I should be terrified.