“Fucking asshole,” Taviano muttered under his breath, and abruptly jumped up and paced across the floor to the bar to pour himself another drink. “I despise that fucker.”

She nearly smiled, more because she realized all the brothers were alike, even down to their colorful language. And they seemed to believe her. At least they knew Anthon and had observed his behavior so what she was telling them wasn’t so far out of line they wouldn’t hear her the way the police and judge had been with her.

“You aren’t alone,” she told Taviano. Because, in spite of the language, if there was a person on earth who could be described with that one word, it would be Barry Anthon.

“Keep going,” Stefano instructed.

She took a deep breath, trying to keep the door in her mind from cracking open, the one where she relived finding her sister dying on the blood-slick floor of their apartment.

“She spent the night with Barry at his condo and she called me very late. She was upset because she said that he had talked to her about this multimillion-dollar fight that was huge, televised, a title fight that had been in the making for a couple of years. She wasn’t into the fights at all and she was a little bored that he went on and on about it. That evening he bragged about how much money he made betting on the fight. He kept repeating how he knew how to pick them.”

“The Henessy and Morrison fight,” Giovanni guessed.

Francesca nodded. “Those were the names. He was called to the door and he went outside with a couple of his men, who seemed to be upset. He’d left the door to his office cracked open. Usually it was locked. That was the one room in his home she’d never been in, so she peeked in to see what it was like. Cella told me she wandered around a little bit and then as she was going to leave, she was behind his desk and she saw a book open with names and numbers, and she recognized the name of the fighter who lost—the one Barry said everyone expected to win. It looked to her as if he had paid the fighter to lose. In case, she took pictures of the pages with her phone and then a video of the entries, and there were hundreds of them.”

“The book was just lying open on his desk?” Ricco asked, his voice disbelieving.

She bit her lip hard before she realized he wasn’t disbelieving what she was telling him, more that Barry was an idiot for leaving such a thing out, maybe for even keeping records, although she suspected it was for blackmail purposes.

“Cella said that he was in his office working late. He was interrupted by a commotion at the door and several of his men took him out where she couldn’t hear. She’d been in the kitchen cooking for him. He liked her to cook whenever she came over. Cella wasn’t the best cook. She worked all the time, but because I usually did the cooking for us at the apartment, she took the opportunity at his condo. She went into the bedroom and called me and told me she wasn’t going to spend the night. That she wanted me to call in a few minutes and say I was sick.”

Her voice faltered and she put her hand to her throat defensively. Already a lump was forming. Tears burned behind her eyes. She took another deep breath to keep from going to pieces. “I should have gone straight home right then. I needed to study and I was already at the library. It was so silly really, how important I thought it was to do research for a paper I was writing.” She shook her head and had to swallow several times. Her chest hurt, her lungs burning for air.

“Just tell us the rest, dolce cuore—say it fast and get it over with,” Stefano murmured, his mouth once again against her temple.

“I called about ten minutes later and told her I was sick with the flu. She made lots of sympathetic noises and made her excuses to Barry. She didn’t realize he had a camera in his office and everything she did was recorded. When he found the door open, he looked at the feed and apparently saw her looking at the book. He went after her.” She tried desperately to separate herself from the rest of it, to be unemotional and recite the events as if they’d happened to someone else, but she couldn’t. Her voice shook, betraying her. She sounded strangled, close to tears and no matter how many times she took a breath, she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.

“I came home late and the apartment was dark. The moment I tried to get in, I knew something was wrong because the door was cracked open. I could smell blood and I heard a mewing noise, like a wounded animal in terrible pain. The lamp was closest and I turned it on. Blood was everywhere. All over the walls, the furniture and the floor. Cella lay close to the couch, in a pool of dark red, her clothes red. Her hair was matted with blood. I ran to her, dropped to my knees beside her and tried to stem the blood and at the same time call 911.”