Chapter 63: Tristan

Damn it to fuck.

What the fuck am I going to do now?

What am I going to do, and what the hell is with me?

I walk down the corridor, consumed by lust and rage. A deadly combo. Something that could make a man like me go ape shit and on a rampage to destroy everything in his path.

Jesus Christ, I’m supposed to be focused on dragging the truth from her. I’m supposed to just get the damn location of her father, but as I looked at her naked body, all I wanted to do was fuck her. I wanted to fuck her well before then, knowing she wasn’t wearing anything under the gown.

Now I have this conundrum of shit.

She won’t tell me where her father is, and I can’t think past my dick.

It’s because I kissed her. I can’t think past my dick because I had a taste of her, and the taste wasn’t enough. My body wants more, and I can’t go there. The woman had more of an effect on me than I realized, and I need to control myself because she’s lying.

She’s fucking lying to me. She has to be.

I barge into the kitchen, kicking the door open so hard it almost flies off the hinges.

Candace jumps, startled. She was standing by the breakfast table talking to Dominic. She was smiling. The smile, however, falters when I enter, and she moves over to the counter to resume chopping the vegetables she was going to use in the soup she was preparing for lunch.

Dominic set up a camera in Isabella’s room and motion sensors that alerted me when she woke and started moving around. I was down here when that happened and headed upstairs to face her.

“What did she say?” Dominic asks, straightening up.

“Not a fucking thing.”

Dominic looks over at Candace and gestures for her to stop. “Babe, why don’t you go rest. The staff will be here soon to finish that.”

“Okay,” Candace says, setting the knife down. Without looking at either of us, she leaves the kitchen, and Dominic returns his focus to me.

I’m glad he told her to go because I absolutely hate having to tamp down my rage when I feel like this. I don’t want her to be around me when I’m pissed and have cause to fear me.

Not me, the enraged animal, the beast. Isabella couldn’t have been more right.

She’s right. Everything she said was right, except I never wore any mask.

“Tristan, tell me what happened,” Dominic says.

I blow out a ragged breath. “She said she doesn’t know where her father is. She doesn’t know Dominic, and no one knows. It has to be bullshit. How can she not know? How can no one not know?” It’s fucking bullshit.

“Fuck,” he hisses. “She has to be lying. That makes no sense. Of anyone who should know where he is, it’s her.”

“Exactly. There’s no way she can’t know, and I guess maybe we underestimated the situation if taking her hostage hasn’t scared her into telling the truth.”

“Tristan, we’ve come too far for it to end here with stubbornness.”

I couldn’t agree more. “I have to find a way to make her tell me the truth.”

“What though?” he asks, and worry fills his eyes. “Tristan, you … we can’t torture her.”

The fact that he could warn me against that shows just how much he’s thought I’ve changed.

“Relax, little brother; I’m not completely evil… yet.” His face goes rigid at my words.

We don’t do violence against women, and I won’t start now in my desperation. No matter how far gone I am—our methods of torturing lead to death.

“I wasn’t implying you were. I was just…” His voice trails off.

“Cautioning me. Don’t worry; I’m not Andreas. I wouldn’t kill the innocent to get what I want. Not yet anyway.”

I need air. I need to think about what I’m going to do, so I step away from him and head through the door.

Dominic calls after me, but I keep going. I can’t talk to anyone when I’m like this, least of all him. I don’t want to fight with him now, and everything I said to him just now was gearing toward a fight.

Mentioning Andreas alone was enough. I knew he didn’t mean he thought I would stoop as low as Andreas, but fuck it, I’m still pissed at the situation as a whole.

I’m pissed that Andreas betrayed us, and sometimes I’m pissed that no one talks about him or what he did. I get that the hurt is still there and the pain from being betrayed, but everyone glosses over the fact that he was our brother.

I walk outside, and the warm air of paradise greets me. This island is supposed to be a refuge and sanctuary. It’s become anything other than that, however—almost a waste.

I called it Pelogos Island after the pet bird I had when I was a kid. It was a Peregrine Falcon I cared for when I found it injured in the woods. It had lost a leg but was resilient until the end, when it died several years later.

When Pa built the D’Agostino empire and ruled the oil industry, he gave us each a million dollars. I invested mine in property development that made me a pretty penny in a noticeably short time.

That’s how I was able to buy this place. I bought the land and built the castle-like house based on the childhood fantasy of the boy and the girl who dreamed it all.

Me and Alyssa. We were just two kids who took comfort in each other.

The island is near Darby island, one of the little private islands in the Bahamas. It’s not on the map, and those who don’t have the coordinates for the location have no way of getting here. It’s several hours away from anywhere we know.

You can get here by plane or boat. We have the jet and a yacht the staff will use for going over to the mainland.

There are exactly five people who live in the house all the time to care for it and the island itself. Now there are ten more people on the island, including me.

There’s never been this many people here before, and it wasn’t my intention to allow more than the five who live here and my immediate family to know about the place. They’re already too many people here for my liking, increasing the risk of its secrecy being revealed.

I walk out to the beach and allow the fresh air to fill my lungs and cleanse my mind.

As my mind clears, memories of Alyssa enter.

I’d like to say I’m not one of these people who hang on to the ghost of the person they loved and lost, unable to move on. I’m not exactly sure what to say about myself other than I’m seeking revenge and justice. I can’t truly move on and allow my heart to heal until I kill Mortimer.

If I had things my way, I would kill everyone responsible for Alyssa’s death. But that would include starting with her father, and he’s not in this world anymore.

I will always, always blame her father for what he did. That was the start of our disaster, and it never had to turn out this way.

Her father never needed the money he sought from the man who was linked to Mortimer. It was greed. Then like all greedy bastards, he couldn’t pay up when it was time and ended up selling his daughter.

I wanted my revenge against him, but someone else got to him before me.

Six months after Alyssa was killed, his body was found washed up on the beach with bullet holes in it.

Anybody could have killed him, even Mortimer himself. The problem with having too many enemies is exactly that, and nobody knew who pulled the trigger when so many were itching to do it. Alyssa’s father was up to his eyeballs in debt and owed too many he couldn’t pay. He had a gambling problem that could never be satisfied. It was two million dollars I paid to release Alyssa from his debt. I paid the fucking guy he owed, thinking I’d gotten her out of trouble. Then weeks before the wedding, her father told her Mortimer didn’t accept the money. He wanted her body to give to Vlad, literally. The shit thing about it was Alyssa’s father didn’t tell us until it was too late. Selfish motherfucker.

When I think of Alyssa, I try to remember how she was. Doing so enables me to eradicate the image of seeing her head in the box. I can’t do it today, though; not today. There’s too much going on in my mind.

Instead of remembering the person she was, I think of what drew me to her. We were two broken souls seeking comfort, two children who’d lost their mothers.

Alyssa lost her mother to suicide. Guilt over an accident that killed Alyssa’s younger sister made her put a gun to her head. At the time we met, I thought my mother killed herself too. Massimo found her in the river, and people said she jumped off the cliff at Stormy Creek. Massimo went through his own grief, but so did I.

Grief and pain were the things that glued Alyssa and me together. We sought refuge in each other and fell in love, but she was the daughter of a prick who was always greedy for more.

Those events led me here. Now I’m more torn with the grief and pain life has thrown my way.

I can’t allow this plan to fail. If Isabella doesn’t tell me where her father is, the whole thing will go to hell. I can’t begin to think of the war that will ensue if Mortimer finds out we have his daughter.

We’re D’Agostinos, not men who fear anybody. We’re not scared of Mortimer, and we aren’t scared to die. What we don’t want is a fucking blood war on our hands.

Definitely not when the answer to where he is can be garnered from his daughter.

When I sit on the white sandy beach, my phone rings in my back pocket.

I pull it out and answer when I see it’s Nick.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hi, boss, just checking in,” he begins. “The guards think Isabella escaped. They started running around like rats this morning, looking for her. The guard they call Sacha put it in their heads she must have escaped sometime in the night.”

I figured Sacha would do exactly that to save his ass. I’m also guessing he might know Isabella was taken. When she promised him she wouldn’t do anything foolish; she meant she wouldn’t try to escape. I haven’t watched them long enough or heard them converse long enough, but the fact that he let her out suggests they have a relationship of deep trust. I’m willing to bet money he knows she was taken.

“It’s best they think that for a while,” I answer. “It bides us time.”

“I figured as much. Any luck on Mortimer’s location?”

“Not yet,” I say as if I have some plan up my damn sleeve to get it. I don’t have shit. “What are the guards doing now?”

“Searching. It’s going to be obvious soon enough she was taken though, and that Sacha enabled it by allowing her to leave the house.”

“Don’t worry about that. You just keep watch and let me know if anything changes.”

“All right, boss.”

I hang up and gaze out to the deep blue sea. I watch the waves crashing against the rocks and go over everything I can think of that will make Isabella tell me what I need to know.

There has to be something. I just have to find it.