Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 103124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
“No, I never met with the feds. Your mother was to arrange a meeting with her contact, but she died before she could speak to him.”
“What happened after her phone call that night?”
“Alberto and I sped to your place. I knew I had to get your mother out of there. When we arrived, there was a gunshot. We heard it as we entered the home. In your father’s den, she was dead on the floor, and your father stood over her with a gun in his hand.”
He pauses.
“Keep going,” I demand.
“All guns were drawn. Your father said he knew everything. The affair. The feds. He said I would be dead by dawn. We argued. He knew he couldn’t explain a dead wife and a dead best friend. He knew the heat it would bring. I mean, your father was a creative man when it came to disposing of his victims, but as much as he wanted me dead, he knew I wasn’t worth the risk. Now that he knew the feds were sniffing around, he had to rein in the body count. Your mother’s death was impulsive. His emotions got the better of him, and he made her pay. He had time to think about me and the blowback my death would cause.” He sits back in his big leather chair. “Your father’s last words to me were, you leave for America tonight and I never see or hear of you again. It was a trade-off. A new life for me in America if I kept my silence about what had happened.”
I think back to that night. About seeing my mother being loaded into the back of an ambulance, and the grief I felt as a seventeen-year-old boy comes surging back.
“Did he ask you why?” My voice is hoarse. This life has taken so much from everyone. “Did he want to know why you planned to rat him out?”
“Weeks earlier, I told him about my plans to move Bella to the US. I’d already lost two children, and I didn’t want to lose her. He resisted it. Said I was needed there. I was his lieutenant. But he had a change of heart about a move to America after he saw the potential in expanding operations on American soil, and he agreed to let us relocate.”
“But remain in the De Kysa Mafia?”
“Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to let me leave the organization. Then your mother mentioned the feds to me—”
“And you saw your way out.”
He nods and exhales deeply. “Standing in that room with our guns drawn, it was easier for your father to kick me out of the family than to dispose of me. But I knew he would come looking one day.”
Me. The sudden knowledge echoes in my head.
My father did go looking for Vincent. But he sent me to do his bidding.
A new reality begins to emerge. If what Vincent says is true, then my father stoked the fire in me with all his lies, knowing I would exact my revenge on him somehow.
I look at Vincent. “Did you love her?”
“No.”
“Did she love you?”
“No.” He pauses, then adds, “But for a moment there, we were each other’s only sunlight.”
I feel sick under the weight of my father’s legacy. He gave me this. The venom polluting my veins. But I embraced it. Because I was a seventeen-year-old boy fighting a broken heart.
And in the end, I did exactly as he did.
Steal a wife. Force her into a life she did not want.
A real chip off the old block.
My gaze shifts to Bella.
How the fuck am I going to make it up to her?
She reaches for me. Her touch soft on my arm. Her eyes gentle. She gives me a kind of strength I didn’t know I needed. But I need it now.
I also need the truth.
And I mean, the real truth. Not the recollection of an old man who was one of the three people in the room. Sorry, the three alive people in the room.
Let’s not forget that this happened as they stood over my mother’s body.
“I’m going to talk to my father,” I say, then abruptly turn and leave the room.
I’m almost at my car when Bella’s voice calls out to me. “Nico.”
I look up at my wife standing at her father’s front door.
“You’re not going to kill him, are you?”
Despite my dark mood and the burning itch to find out the truth, I can’t help but chuckle. That’s what I love about my wife.
She knows me so well.
“Never say never,” I grumble, climbing into my car and driving away.
37
Nico
“I hate you. Why are you trying to ruin my life?” My new stepsister’s voice floats through the open front door as I climb out of my car and walk to their stoop.
“I’m not the one ruining anything!” her mother replies, strained.