“Holy fuck. She was pregnant.”
“What?” Theo’s head whips up, and h
e 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?