The Mafia’s Queen: Entangled With A Psycho - Chapter 160

Becca left home so early that morning, she barely ate. She said she had mountains of projects to oversee, endless meetings to attend. She never mentioned anything about meeting up with Johnny and if it hadn’t been for the informants mounted to keep a watchful eye on her brother, Leo would still have been utterly oblivious to the matter.

After the feat Johnny exhibited the other day, Leo expected nothing less than malicious treachery. Leo had it coming, he foresaw the whole thing like a phantasm. By norms, the best possible course of action to fix a situation such as this one was to permanently silence all potential recreants, mangle every threat to death. Doing so now wouldn’t even be too tedious, given that Leo was already a part of Johnny’s inner circle. And despite the myriad of trained men guarding Johnny against perils, Leo’s forces were still indisputably paramount in comparison.

Torture wasn’t even necessary at this point, a single bullet from a primed sniper could dexterously get the job done.

Johnny was a threat, an exceedingly cumbersome one at that, not just to Leo’s relationship with Becca but also to the progress of the Kane’s mafia. One word from that man’s mouth and everything would be over. Finished. Leo would rather die than watch all he had worked hard to obtain, slip out of his grasp just like that. Even that wasn’t enough to goad Leo to attempt such a drastic feat.

If the fact that harming Johnny would inevitably imperil the beautiful relationship Leo and Becca shared, wasn’t a decent enough reason why that was a sordid idea, then recalling the ten long years their friendship had lasted most definitely did the trick.

” Ten years,” Leo muttered lamely, under his breath. Ten long years repleted with fond memories were now gone, lost— burnt to ashes in the flames of the soaring hatred.

He stared out the window of his car, straight at the cafe his men said Johnny and Becca were meeting at. Conflicting emotions teemed from his gaze as he kept staring at the place. A visceral instinct within, frayed him so much, he wanted to bolt into the cafe and haul Becca out of there, far away from Johnny before something irrevocable happened. But then again, what was he expected to do? He couldn’t just let the spite cajole him into stowing her away from her own family like a sumptuous artifact of some kind.

Doing that would just liken him to his father. And one of the last things Leo wanted was to be anything like Lorenzo In terms of how he treated women.

” Oh, perhaps you have gone soft.”

Unease blossomed to life inside Leo. That voice. That voice.

No, not again.

” You are not real, I watched you die,” Leo muttered, clenching the steering wheel. This couldn’t be real. It had to be another sick game his twisted mind was playing on him, a way of writhing whatever form of fathomable thought he had left, to torment him, therefore, negating the firm helm he had on reality.

” I’m sure I taught you better than this. Never wait for manna to fall. Instead, take what you want, conquer all— use force if necessary.”

The voice, thronged with malignancy, creeping and whispering nefarious things into Leo’s ears in order to beleaguer him.

The voice; his father’s.

No, this couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t. His father was dead, Leo chanted, reminding himself of that overtly palpable fact. His father was dead. But when he looked to the seat next to his, he saw his father. Leo saw Lorenzo— in his prime, just as he remembered him.

” And perhaps that was how you were able to ruin a girl’s entire life.” Leo gritted as he heard Lorenzo scoff with an appalling sense of indifference.

” That girl, your mother, was mine to ruin from the start.”

The more reverie of Lorenzo’s words, gibed Leo so much, he almost crushed the steering wheel with how tight he gripped it.

This isn’t real, he chanted once more.

” I am not like you.” And I will never be like you.

Leo heard Lorenzo chuckle, the sound seemingly estranged from the sparse mollycoddled memories of the veritable happiness he experienced while growing up.

” No, you are not like me.” A wry smile unfurled on Lorenzo’s lips. ” You are even worse. Just like your grandfather.”

Just like your grandfather. The words rumbled through Leo like a tidal wave, snapping the last few strands of pristine lucidity he had left into inutile snippets. It felt like a derisive slur; being likened to a man like Salvador Kane was obloquy to Leo’s dignity. His hatred for his grandfather burgeoned right from childhood. So strong, it was almost intrinsic.

The exasperation escalated when he put a gun in Leo’s hands and ordered him to shoot.

For the family business, his grandfather said. That same business was one of the reasons Leo couldn’t sleep peacefully at night.

Salvador was no different from his two sons. All three of them; vile monsters without a single shred of goodness in them.

Irked, Leo positioned the rearview mirror to face in Lorenzo’s direction. And just as expected, his father’s reflection didn’t appear in the mirror.

Leo let out a sigh, sinking deeper into his seat. It wasn’t real. Just like the badgering voices that frequented his thoughts, this was also an illusion conjured by his mind to mess with him. It wasn’t aberrant though, with the baffling amount of times it had happened, the occurrence was almost normal to Leo.

His hellish life.

Becca. The thought of her plugged Leo back into reality. He grabbed his cane from the backseat, clutching it with his right hand as he careened into the cafe, his avidity plummeting with every step he took.

Though still visibly stricken by trembling thoughts, somehow, meeting Johnny’s loury gaze managed to enervate Leo’s resolve.

Time ostensibly froze as Becca turned to stare at Leo, the questions and confusion in her eyes causing him to stop.

She rose and Leo’s heart dropped.

” Leo, I need the truth now.” The hurt in her voice drilled insufferable agony through him.

For a few moments, he couldn’t help but remain static, his legs like blocks of lead. He tried to speak but all of the sudden, his tongue felt stiff, his whole body went rigid and his thoughts were befuddled, barely comprehendible.

Becca’s eyelids fell shut and she let out a defeated sigh.

” I don’t even want to hear it anymore.” She snatched her phone and purse from the table in a fit of rage and trotted away.

With bloodshot eyes tinged with crimson streaks, Leo shot Johnny a hostile glare.

Johnny, he told her!

Leo knew Becca had to unravel the truth at some point but if it had been up to him, he might as well have kept it from her for much longer, as long as he possibly could. Anything to protect the pristine good image Becca had of him, so she would forever see him as her guardian angel and not the repulsive monster everyone else deemed him to be. She was the only one who never judged him by his scars when he let her see them.

Now everything was ruined. Everything was over.

And by the time he snapped back into his senses and tried to catch up with her, she was already gone.