Let Me Love You (33)

Alessandro probably had sex all night to try and handle his tension like I’d nearly done.

But Constantine? My brother was a question mark at times, and I didn’t always understand how he could maintain his cool without exploding like I did.

“I worked,” he answered in a steady tone.

“Oh, great. Mergers and acquisitions are more important than our—”

“I worked on Bianca’s case,” he fired back at my shitty sarcasm. “I went through all our old files from the investigation. I spent all night on it.”

His words had my shoulders falling. My anger from last night was circling back without Maria in my presence to calm me down. “And?”

“And it doesn’t make sense. She had no enemies we were aware of, and she would’ve told you if something was wrong. You two were close.” He paused for a moment. “She didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. Not even a lover. Even if she kept them hidden from us, there would have been photos when we packed up her place. Or the guy would’ve come to the funeral, right?” He hissed a deep, frustrated breath over the line. “And as for work, she’d written a few stories and articles for a magazine, but she wasn’t an Erin Brockovich who might wind up with a target on her head. And no one would be stupid enough to come after one of us, knowing our family name.”

“Not everyone in the US knows not to mess with us,” I reminded him. “But we clearly missed something back then.”

“Unless . . . well, her murder wasn’t premeditated, and it was still a crime of passion as we’d originally believed. But instead, it was committed by someone else, and he had deep enough pockets or enough power to acquire a cleaner to assist him in the middle of the night to cover up a crime.”

“What if she went somewhere after that club? Somewhere before she went home?”

“She punched in her building’s security code at around midnight, though. Shortly after we had footage of her leaving that nightclub,” he reminded me. “Unless the cleaner tampered with that, too.”

“If the guy was that good to fool us back then, it’s possible he altered even more than just when she turned off her alarm to enter her apartment.”

“I know you’re blaming yourself right now, but we were young. Inexperienced. We couldn’t have known any of this.”

“And you didn’t spend all night blaming yourself?” I retorted, and his silence was my answer. Yeah, he felt the full weight of the guilt, same as I did. Because Bianca’s killer was still out there.

“CEOs, dirty politicians, criminal groups, and—”

“The alphabet soup of government agencies all use cleaners.” I finished his line of thought. “That’s a big pool to scour through.”

“Which is why we need to interrogate the cleaner ourselves. And I don’t think your friend’s boss will let us near him.”

“Why do I get the feeling you know Jesse’s boss?” At his curse in Italian, my body tensed. “What is it?”

“I do know him, and let’s just say he’s not my greatest fan.” Constantine dropped the shit news on me. “His name is Carter Dominick. Former army Delta Force. CIA officer after that. Now coruns Falcon Falls.”

I didn’t need an introduction. I needed him to get to the point of the problem. “And?”

“Back when I was in college, before I dropped out to join the navy, Dad needed a favor from me. Didn’t give me much of a choice.” He paused to let the beginning of the storm sink in. “A company was attempting a hostile takeover of our family business. We were smaller back then, and this other corporation was ruthless. The owner was up there with Warren Buffett in terms of his bank account.” Another pause that had me uncomfortable. “Dad needed me to try and buy some time to prevent the takeover.”

“What could you possibly have done?”

“I was in school with the competitor’s daughter, and Dad asked me to try and date her. Get her to fall for me so we could delay the takeover and strategize a way to prevent it from happening.”

But how the hell was Carter part of the story? And how much of my brother’s life did I not know about? As the oldest son, how much shit had he done to keep our family’s business going?

“I was young and did what Dad told me. Did what I thought needed to be done,” he explained. “It worked. And they backed off, assuming their daughter and I might marry.”

“Tell me you didn’t sleep with her.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, worried I was going to need to beat the shit out of my older brother for something he’d done two decades ago.

“No, I’m not that much of an asshole,” he hissed. “But her best friend was Carter Dominick. When Rebecca found out what I’d done to save the company, she was upset. And let’s just say Carter came at me, swinging for retribution.”

“I’m surprised her family didn’t hold a grudge and do their best to take us down because of all that.”

Constantine was quiet for a moment. “There was an accident not long after, leaving Rebecca the only one alive in the family. She was married to Carter, though. And then, um.”

My brother didn’t ever drop an “um.” What in the hell was he going to tell me now?

“Rebecca was viciously murdered in a home invasion in DC, and Carter went rogue from the Agency, not believing it was random. I offered to help him, still feeling guilty for the past, and he told me to go fuck myself and if he ever saw me again, one of us wouldn’t be walking away.”