Page 102 of I Would Beg For You
“Go on.”
“Billings was found in a former safe house for the cops.”
Which suggests…
“You think they have anything to do with this? Retaliation?” Horror fills me as some threads start to connect. “Smith?”
“He’s not done with her,” Luciano says softly.
I shake my head. “But why now? He’s all but dropped off the face of the Earth. None of his friends or associates want to touch him with a ten-foot pole.”
“Let’s think this through,” Antonio states. “What did he want with her all along?”
I think through the past months, sift through the information we had about Joel Smith and what he did to Naomi.
Then the lightbulb comes on.
“The money,” I say. “The trust fund she’d unlock when she got married.”
“When did you get married?”
I frown at Fletcher Boyle. But if he’s still here, it means Antonio vetted him. Plus, Don Giorgio sent him in the first place, an associate of his, if not a friend outright.
“In April,” I reply.
“Most trust funds require a moratorium of three months from the date of marriage to unlock if it were dependent on that clause. Yours hasn’t been three months yet.”
“So, the trust can’t be accessed yet?” Luciano asks.
“Unless it doesn’t have such a clause.”
Reeves should know about this. I text him and ask.
All this for money?
But then again, this has been the driver of Joel Smith’s life all along. He seduced a naïve young heiress when she was fifteen and turned her head, so she’d end up married to him, giving him access to her fortune. He has no respect for human life, only seeing a bottom line.
Here’s the thing which disgusted my father even more than Smith’s treatment of his wife so far—Smith all but offered her up to my dad if the latter wanted to sleep with her after the birth of Naomi. Aoife Reeves-Smith faced massive complications during the birth of her first child, which resulted in her needing a hysterectomy. With her unable to give him more children, and especially a son, a true heir, she was of no use to him.
Who says he didn’t graduate to selling her body for money?
And now, he’s doing something similar with his daughter. She’s just dollar signs to him.
How can he be pulling this off, though?
“Who could be helping him?” I ask.
“Not any of the families,” the lawyer says. “You are Don Andretti now, one of them. Not unless they want an all-out war.”
No one wants a war between the families. That would be suicide.
“It won’t be the Irish mob, either,” Antonio says. “Don Vitale all but wiped them out once. They won’t attempt anything again, much less on his territory.”
The Irish mob killed Don Vitale’s only son, Matteo’s father, over a decade ago. They learned their lesson when the old man all but scorched them into the ground in legitimate retaliation.
“I don’t see the Bratva getting involved in this,” Luciano says.
“No.” They stick to their thing, don’t get their hands dirty on other territories.
