“So you just gave it away?” I asked.

“I sold what I could to legitimate buyers,” he said. “I shut down the rest. I paid off the soldiers who wanted to retire, and I cut loose the ones who didn’t.”

“Marcus Vance didn’t want to retire,” I said.

Giovanni’s jaw tightened, a hard line forming along his cheek.

“No,” Giovanni said. “Marcus saw it as a betrayal. He wanted the empire. I wanted a family.”

“You should have told me,” I said, the tears finally burning behind my eyes.

“I wanted to bring you a clean slate, Lauren,” he said. “I wanted to hand you a deed to a normal life, with no blood on it.”

“But I left before you could finish,” I said.

“You left because you were terrified,” he said. “And I don’t blame you for that. I was too slow.”

He looked down at the ledger, his fingers tracing the red ink lines that crossed out the old family businesses.

“By the time you took Luca, I had already dismantled seventy percent of the operation,” he said. “But Marcus was already moving in the shadows. He saw my weakness.”