Page 2 of Her Ghostly Embrace
According to the stories Gia had been told, she’d been abducted by a man at the park, and when her mother found out, she’d hunted the kidnapper down to rescue her. The kidnapper and her mother had both died in the resulting fight. Luckily, Salvator had been there as backup, along with some of her father’s other men. They’d rescued Gia and brought her home.
Gia hadn’t thought about any of this in a while, and guilt immediately filled her. When you were the daughter of a crime boss, you became desensitized to a certain amount of violence, but that wasn’t why she’d done her best to never revisit this subject. She hardly remembered her mother, and the pain of losing her had only been made worse by the rest of her family’s determination to act like it had never happened.
Franco Balzano hadn’t run Ashton Lakes then, and he hadn’t wanted to talk about what happened—it must have been painful—but he’d indulged Gia more when she was little and answered her questions. To a point.
Surely she had the man’s name wrong. This subject had been closed for a long time. No one had mentioned Letti Balzano in any real capacity since Gia was about ten. Could she really expect to remember what her father had told her fifteen or more years ago?
Now she considered it, Gia didn’t actually remember her father telling her who had taken her and killed her mother. Not by name. She’d heard the name ‘Jeffrey Lockwood’ murmured between her father and his men while she’d been crouching outside his office door after they’d moved into the big house.
She’d been a terrible little spy as a child, but of all the thingsshe’d overheard, this stuck out, and for some reason, she was convinced it had to do with that horrible day at the park.
But why the hell was someone calling and claiming the man’s sister was heraunt?
Gia turned her phone on. A voicemail from a restricted number popped up. She ignored it and called her brother.
He picked up after two rings. “Hey, sis,” Marc drawled. “How are you feeling? Okay?”
So he’d heard about her latest episode. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to pretend with me, G. Want me to bring you anything? I’ll be at the house in about an hour.”
He wasn’t home? Gia had called because she didn’t feel up to crossing the sprawling estate to her brother’s room. “What are you doing?”
Marc sighed. “Nothing. Supervising. You know. Want something from Antonio’s? It’s on my way, and I’m guessing you haven’t had lunch.”
Gia gritted her teeth.
She didn’t understand why her brother and father half-heartedly shielded her from the less savory parts of the family business.Supervising. She knew who the Balzano family was and what they did. The drugs. The guns. The money. The people who disappeared. Gia had no choice but to be a part of organized crime, even if she was spared from getting her hands dirty.
So why the lackluster attempts to keep her in the dark?
Were they playing along with her disinterest? Gia wasn’t proud to be a Balzano. She had no interest in her family’s power and didn’t condone what they did, but she was helpless to stop any of it. People who disagreed with her father died. There was no leaving the family unless you were zipped in a body bag.
Gia’s stomach turned. “Yeah, sounds good, Marc. See you soon.” She hung up.
In a body bag. Like her mother.
Gia shook her head. Why was she thinking about it like that? Her mother hadn’t tried to leave. The kidnapper had killed her.
The man her mysterious caller claimed was her biological father.
Oh, god. Had her mother been trying to leave?
Gia rushed to the bathroom, unsteady on her feet as her head throbbed with renewed vengeance. She made it, pulled back her hair, and lost the meager contents of her stomach into the toilet.
When she’d heaved herself dry, she slumped against the wall, the cold tiles giving her chills through her thin sleep shorts. She shouldn’t believe the random caller. There was no reason to think Franco wasn’t her biological father or that her mother had cheated. Letti Balzano hadn’t betrayed the family.
Gia didn’t want to believe it, but she was cold and clammy, like she’d been hit with a sudden fever, her body telling a disturbingly different story than the one she had been fed all these years.
Another memory surfaced, much clearer than the day at the park.
“I’ve seen Ma with that man before,” Marc had said, tucked away in a blanket fort with Gia. He’d seemed so big, ten years old to her five.
“What man?”
“The one who took you.”
“He didn’t take me,” Gia had objected.
