My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 788

Chapter 788

Another second they had to move her.

Another second for someone to make a decision I couldn’t undo.

My fingers tightened around the phone. I had spent years making decisions without knowing why certain things. mattered to me.

I understood now.

Gianna mattered.

And it was not because she was useful to the Outfit, not because she was connected to the Toricelli empire, not because she was a bargaining chip, not because she belonged to some fucking war between families.

She mattered because she was Gianna.

That was enough.

My phone vibrated, I looked down. The marker for her phone had stopped.

Fuck.

My mind immediately began running through every possibility. Why had it stopped? Had someone taken the phone? Broken it? Thrown it somewhere to make me lose the signal?

That meant they had gotten to her?

I checked the last known position against the previous movements.

My pulse stayed steady but my thoughts didn’t. I stared at the screen, running through every possibility before keeping all of my attention now on the tracker hidden in her necklace.

It moved, slowly at first, then faster. My eyes narrowed. She was moving, not walking, not running. The signal was traveling along a road.

She was in a vehicle.

My grip tightened around the phone, “She’s been moved.”

Ciro glanced back, “Where?”

I turned the screen toward him, “Somewhere.”

He looked at the tracker, then back at me. I watched the marker continue across the map. One thing was certain. They weren’t keeping her in the estate anymore.

They were moving her.

That meant they had realized they couldn’t keep her where she was. My eyes stayed fixed on the tracker as the signal continued across the map. And if her phone had stopped because they had destroyed it…

Then they knew.

They knew I was coming. They were trying to cut the one line I had to her. My jaw tightened.

They could break the fucking phone. They could move her across the city. They could bury her behind walls, guards, and miles of concrete but they didn’t know one thing. As long as that necklace stayed around her neck, I

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15 Benus

still had a path to her and I would follow it straight to her.

My jaw tightened, “Keep going. Faster!”

Ciro nodded. I looked back at the screen. The little marker continued moving through the darkness.

“Just stay alive, Gianna,” my eyes remained fixed on the signal, “Stay alive until I get there, don’t do anything stupid.”

They moved her toward the coast.

The island, the fucking island. A location isolated from the city with limited routes, easy to control, difficult to reach without being seen.

Smart, but not smart enough.

I opened another screen and started building the possibilities in my head. If they took her there, they would expect us to come through the obvious route.

They would expect the Capones to make noise. They would expect retaliation. They would expect me to act like an angry man who had lost his mind over the woman he loved.

They were right about one thing.

I had lost my patience.

They were wrong about the rest.

I wasn’t going to give them the man they expected. I was going to give them the man who had already spent the entire flight thinking ten moves ahead.

My phone showed the tracker again. I stared at the screen. Alexithymia had never made me incapable of feeling. It had only made some feelings difficult to name.

Gianna had solved that problem for me.

I knew exactly what this was.

Fear.

Rage.

Love.

Possession.

And something far more dangerous than all four.

A promise.

I would get her back. I didn’t care how many doors stood between us. I didn’t care how many men thought they could stop me. I didn’t care what the Council decided. I didn’t care what Giovanni Toricelli called his empire.

Philadelphia could belong to him.

The Council could belong to itself.

None of it changed the one fact that mattered.

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