Page 161 of Wicked Villain

The printed report in my hands shows that asshole is making big plans for his daughter. In today’s news, Corrado is trying to nail down a whole new marriage contract with the Bellandis.

Apparently, Danillo is willing to pay whatever he can to get his precious Gabrielle back, but his parents don’t support the new demands. They want the original terms.

Understandably, Corrado is trying to get more money and assets from them because of how much he’s lost—because I left the man with nothing.

What pisses me off is the asshole is acting as if he actually has a chance of getting his daughter back. He’s acting as if I’ve died and he’s won the war, and he’s free to do as he wishes with his daughter.

It’s not gonna happen. And this is not me underestimating him. I’ve never done that. I won’t start now. He’s not getting his daughter back because I won’t let him.

I lean back in my chair. Today was supposed to be a shorter day at work. I may stay a bit longer, but not too long.

I’m worried about Gabrielle. I was gonna take her out to dinner to get her mind off things. My guess is that she’s having these episodes with her night terrors because it’s getting close to her birthday. Twenty-one is an important age, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that every birthday must be hard for her without her sister. The psych report said she had it hard, too, when she turned eighteen. That would’ve been the first big age milestone after her sister died. Twenty-one is the next.

At the cemetery, she fell apart—as expected. Though I was far away and I didn’t hear what she said to her sister, I could read her body language. She looked like a broken person. All the bravado I’d seen in her over the weeks of getting to know her faded away, showing the rawness beneath. I understood that feeling all too well.

Part of me was like that after my mother and sister passed. But I took my grief and turned it into rage. That shaped me. I’m not sure it could’ve been any other way.

As for Gabrielle, grief seems to have broken her into different pieces, and I think she finds herself in her art. Her art is the only thing that has given me the real her and glimpses of what she could have been had the incident not happened. And not just the incident. She was subjected to Corrado’s strict control. That would have definitely broken her, too.

An email notification blinks in the middle of my computer screen. It’s from Cassian. I lean forward and click on it. Once the message decrypts, it appears on the screen.

Found some more details about your girl’s past. Nothing conclusive, just some of Mirella’s home videos and copies of a few medical records missing from the hospital system. I recovered them from Mirella’s private files.

I also found out that Corrado paid a guy at the hospital to keep certain records out of the electronic system. That explains why I can’t find more than I have. If the files never made it onto the system, there’s no chance of me getting it unless they still exist in the archives, but it looks like they burned the records. The question is why? There’s also nothing on the man with the dagger tattoo on his cheek.

I’ll keep looking.

Cass

I exhale a frustrated breath. I was hoping to find more intel on the man with the dagger tattoo. It bothers me that there’s nothing.

As for everything else, I feel like I keep opening one of those magical doors at a carnival, and skeletons keep falling out. What will I find this time?

I open the file labeled Missing Medical Records.

The answer to why Corrado wanted these records kept out of the system is going to be because there was something to hide. So, then the question is actually what? What did that miserable fucker want to hide?

The records I open are all dated before the kidnapping took place, and they contain files for both Gabrielle and Allegra.

I click on the first one and quickly learn that Gabrielle was diagnosed with endometriosis several years before her kidnapping. Allegra was evaluated, too, but showed no signs of having the condition.

Gabrielle had various treatments over the years to help her. In the end, doctors concluded that her condition was exceptionally severe and had left her unable to have children.

She had previously undergone two laparoscopic excision surgeries to preserve her fertility and avoid a hysterectomy. But after experiencing pain that could never be controlled, persistent bleeding and accompanying adenomyosis, the doctors recommended a hysterectomy as a last resort. Corrado was completely against it.

I think for a moment. Gabrielle has never mentioned any of this to me. And it sounds quite severe. My cousin Renee, who lives in Moscow, has endometriosis. She actually had to have a hysterectomy before she was twenty-one.

That sounds like it’s on the same level of severity as my wife. Prior to the surgery, Renee was in pain all the time. She never got a clear month without something happening.

I guess everyone’s bodies are different, though. It’s just that having lived with my wife now for over a month, I feel like I should’ve known something about this.

We’ve had several heart-to-heart discussions. She even teased me once about children. Why would she have done that knowing she can’t have any?

It’s not a problem for me. As Pakhan, it’s sort of my duty to have heirs, and I suppose I want them for reasons beyond mere duty now, but there are plenty of children in this world to adopt and love.

I click through the records. There’s no mention of a hysterectomy ever being performed, so it looks like Corrado got his way.

I understand why he hid this. No children means no heirs. The Bellandis would not have liked that, and they’re not like me and mine. They would be against adoption.