Damian was now at my side, breathing loudly through his nose. He looked liked a fucking dragon about to spit fire. “Don’t listen to him, Bash. He’s a liar. Wellington isn’t trying to take shit from him.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Fitzy hissed at Damian. “And how could you possibly understand? Your father was a spineless, arrogant piece of shit.” He sneered at him. “You may call yourself a Salvatore now, but you will always be Damian Townsend. The biological son of a conman, and the adopted son of a criminal.”
Of all the things to say to Damian. He loved Arlo even more than his bio dad. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t have done for him. And with that, Damian wrapped his hands around Fitzy’s throat, lifting his feet off the ground.
Damian slammed his back into the bar and then his head. “You hated my dad because he had the balls to stand up to you.”
“He was nothing!” My grandfather gasped for air, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone. “Just like you.”
I ripped the phone from his hand. “No one is coming to save you.”
“My security team is downstairs,” he growled. “You won’t leave the premises alive.”
“Your security team is clueless, old man. Do you really think we would come here without a plan?”
Damian bashed his skull into the wood again. I had to pull Damian off my grandfather. We couldn’t kill him, not like this.
Even if we both wanted to rip him limb from limb, it had to look like he died of natural causes. That was the deal we struck with Carl Wellington when we met with him at our estate.
If we could pull this off, Carl would become the new Grand Master of The Founders Society. They would finally grant the Salvatores standing within the organization. The marriage to Alex would only be a bonus. All of our problems would go away.
But first, I had to kill one of my few living relatives. It didn’t matter to me. He never acted like my grandfather or treated me like his flesh and blood.
Damian pressed down on Fitzy’s shoulders, pinning him to the bar. I grabbed a glass of scotch and emptied the contents of five capsules into the drink. It was the same drug used to murder Evangeline Franco.
Even the same dose.
Wellington Pharmaceuticals had taken the pills off the market because of the lethal side effects. It would look like Fitzy had a heart attack. An easy death for someone who deserved so much worse.
But what choice did we have?
We couldn’t murder the richest man in the world and then bury his body. He was on the boards of too many companies to go unnoticed, which would only draw suspicion back to my family. As his next of kin, I would have his ass cremated before anyone could challenge his death.
His eyes widened at the glass in my hand. “What are you doing with that?”
I moved it closer to his mouth. “You’re going to drink it.”
He swatted at my hand. “The two of you think you’re so smart.” Even with his imminent death rapidly approaching, he still didn’t back down to me. “You have been chasing ghosts for years.”
Damian tightened his grip on my grandfather, using his body to hold him down, so I could pry open his lips and pour the contents of the glass into his mouth.
I forced the drug cocktail down his throat and covered his mouth with my hand. “This is for Alex,” I told him. “And for the years you treated us like shit. Like we didn’t matter. For everything you would have done to our family if you lived.”
When I moved my hand, he tried to spit at me but slobbered on himself. “The Lucaya Group didn’t kill your parents!”
I leaned over him. “Then who killed them?”
He groaned as the pills worked their way through his bloodstream. His eyelids fluttered and then closed.
I tapped Damian on the shoulder. “Let him go.”
My grandfather’s lips parted, struggling to get out the words. His hand flew to his heart, and as the bastard took his last breath, he said, “I had them killed.”
All of us were on the edge of our seats waiting for Damian and Bastian to return. So Luca opened a new bottle of Macallan and turned on music. Marcello joined us in the sitting room after he disabled the security system at Fitzy’s house.
It was all part of the plan.
Bastian had been texting with Luca, giving him periodic updates until a few hours ago. Then all communication ceased. They had turned off their cell phones, so Marcello couldn’t even track them.