I sip a neat Scotch as I lean back in the seat and stare at the clouds through the window. My entire world just flipped on its axis and my need to get to the bottom of this is consuming me. It’s nine in the morning, and we just left LA. My body has no idea what time it is because I haven’t slept a wink. I’m too worked up to do anything but think.
“This is all so fucked up, D,” Maximo says quietly as he sips a vodka.
“I know.”
“I can see the cogs turning in your brain. Anything you want to share?”
There was always the three of us — him, me, and Lorenzo. But Maximo has always been my sounding board, listening while I think out loud.
“I don’t think Kat knows my father had any interest in her,” I start. The thought that she’s somehow mixed up in something with him and has been playing me all along has crossed my mind, and it almost ate me up, but I don’t believe it. Or maybe I just can’t.
“I agree. Kat is an open book, D.”
“Leo said my father asked for details including dates, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So something about when Kat was taken is important. Something about Elmo and Tony taking her is important. But why didn’t he already know what Leo told him? Elmo and Tony worked for him. Why didn’t he ask them what happened?”
“And why did he send them to your house that day, knowing Kat would be there and would probably identify them?”
“He wanted me to kill them? He knew that I would.”
“Hmm.” Maximo runs a hand over his beard. “Why not just do it himself though?”
“And why not kill Kat? Why send me to do it?” I add with a frown.
“Maybe so that his hands stay clean?” Maximo offers.
I roll my eyes. As much as my father likes to remind everyone he was once the most powerful man in all of Chicago, he never did have the stomach for killing. He had other people to do that for him, and as soon as Lorenzo, Maximo, and I were old enough, it became our job. “But he risked us finding out something he obviously wants kept hidden?”
“I doubt he thought you’d let Kat live,” Maximo says. “It’s not exactly been in your nature to show mercy.”
“I don’t go around killing innocent women though, Max,” I say with a scowl.
“That’s not what he thinks.”
I run a hand through my hair in exasperation. It feels like the answer is staring me in the face, but I can’t quite reach it. “At least now I know why he was so pissed when I brought her to the house.”
“And why he suggested you kill her when she got pregnant.”
“Kill her or marry her,” I remind him.
“Kind of two ends of the spectrum.” Maximo laughs darkly as he takes a swig of his bourbon.
“Kill her or make her one of us? She knows something, Maximo.”
“I thought you said she had no idea what was going on?”
“I don’t think she knows what she knows though. Or she saw something and she doesn’t understand that it means something?”
“What could it be that would make him go to these lengths though? Why not just tell you what the fuck was going on?”
“Because whatever it is, must be something I wouldn’t let slide. And as much as I despise the man, when it comes to business, I can only think of one thing we have ever disagreed on so strongly that he would go to these lengths to hide it from me,” I snarl as more pieces start slotting into place.
“The Santangelos?” Maximo says with a deep sigh. “I thought all that fucked up shit was dealt with a long time ago.”
“Maybe it was?” I say, wanting to believe that even after everything he’s ever done, my father is not involved in what I think he is.
“You want me to come with you?” he asks. As soon as we land in Chicago, visiting my father is my priority.
“No. I need to handle this myself.”
“Lorenzo?”
“He doesn’t need to know. Not until it’s done.”
“Whatever you say, D.”
It’s evening by the time I arrive at my father’s house. I waited until after seven when I know his housekeeper will have left for the day before I let myself in using a spare key he gave me when he first bought the place. He has two armed guards. I don’t know them. That will certainly make it easier to shoot both of them in the head before I leave.
They smile at me when they see me walking down the hallway. I rarely visit him here, but I’m Sal’s son. I mean him no harm, surely. One of them is about to take a bite out of a meatball sub, but they both stop and make small talk about the weather and the Bulls.
“Where is my pop?” I ask.
“In the den. Watching TV,” the one with the sub replies.
“He alone?”
“Yup.”
“Thanks,” I say before heading off toward the den.
He’s sitting with his feet up on the sofa and a glass of cognac in his hand when I walk into the room.
“Hey, Pop,” I say with a forced smile.
“Dante?” He turns off the TV with the remote. “What are you doing here?”
“I finally found Leo Evanson,” I say calmly as I sit on the armchair beside the sofa.
I don’t miss the subtle twitch of his eye and the tick in his jaw before he says, “Good. You get my money back?”
“Naw. That’s long gone.”
“You kill the son of a bitch, then?”
“Sure did.”
“Good. So, it’s dealt with?”
I ignore his question. “Would you believe he tried to offer up his own sister to pay his debt?” I ask. “Seems it’s a thing with him. Piece of shit.”
“Waste of oxygen. People like that never change, mio figlio. You did your wife a favor getting rid of him.”
“Yeah. You met him then, Pop?”
He frowns at me. “No.”
“Oh, just seemed like you knew him is all.”
“Never met him in my life.”
“I thought you were at the poker game that night?”
“No. Benetti was there. Not me.”
“So you never met him?”
“I already told you I don’t know the guy.” He gets impatient now, that infamous Moretti anger flashing in his eyes.
“Not even when you asked him about what Elmo and Tony did to his sister?”
His eyes narrow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? Why did you send Elmo and Tony to see me and Lorenzo that day?”
“They’re good, loyal soldiers.”
I shake my head. “You see, at the time, I didn’t give it much thought because I was too busy torturing the sick fucks to death, but you had no reason to send them to me and Lorenzo. We didn’t have a job for them. You sent them because you knew what they’d done to Kat.”
He bangs his fists on the sofa cushions beside him. “I had no idea they’d taken her. You think I would have sent them to you if I’d known they had raped your wife, mio figlio? I would have dealt with them myself.”
“I never told you they raped her.”
“What?” He blinks at me.
“I never told you that.”
“I assumed.”
“You knew. You just said it. They raped her.” I stand and then take a seat on the coffee table directly in front of him.
“How did you know, old man? Why did you send them to my house when you knew what they’d done to my wife? And why the fuck did you send me after Kat in the first place when Leo had already given you back your money?”
He opens and closes his mouth and his eyes dart around the room as he scrambles for a reasonable explanation — another lie he can feed me. “Vic, Emilio,” he shouts to his guards outside, his voice filled with panic and terror.
A few seconds later, the two of them come running into the room, but I’ve already drawn my gun from the waistband of my suit pants, and I shoot them before they can take more than a few steps into the room.
My father looks at me again, his face ashen as I train my glare on him. “Why?”
“Dante,” he pleads, his arms held out in surrender.
I shoot him in the kneecap, and he howls in pain, clutching onto his injured knee as he curses at me.
“You know how many bones there are in the human body, Pop? I will shatter every single one if you don’t start giving me some answers. And you know I will do it because you’ve watched me do it before.”
Saliva dribbles from his mouth as he stares at me while bleeding onto his expensive carpet.
“Why did you send me after Kat?”
“Because I thought you’d kill her,” he spits. “Trust you to grow a fucking conscience at the worst possible time.”
I force down the rage that bubble in my chest. I need answers to so many things before I end his miserable life.
“But why did you want her dead?”
He licks his lips, looking at his injured leg and wincing. “She saw something she shouldn’t have. At least I think she did, but now… I don’t know.”
“When Elmo and Tony took her?”
“Yes. Stupid fucking idiots were supposed to kill any girls they took back there. They swore to me they had. But they were so hopped up on meth half the time I don’t think they knew what the fuck they were doing. When I found out she was still alive…”
“Took back where? What did she see?”
He clamps his lips together, his jaw clenched in anger.
“What did she see?” I bark as I point my gun at his other kneecap.
“Cages,” he blurts out the word. “People in cages.”
My stomach churns. I fucking knew it. I didn’t want to believe it, but a part of me knew all along. “People?” I spit. “Or children?”
“Both. Women and children.”
Bile burns the back of my throat as I’m confronted with the true nature of the evil that spawned me. “So six years ago, when Maximo and I wiped out the Santangelos and thought we’d put a stop to this vile, disgusting stain on our family’s name, all we did was cut off the tail of the snake? You were the head. I knew there was someone bigger backing Jimmy and his boys, but it was you?”
“I was supposed to bring you and Lorenzo in on it when you were old enough, but after the way you reacted when you found out about Jimmy and his boys being mixed up in it…” He shakes his head, as though he is bitterly disappointed in me.
“I wish you had tried, because I would have killed you six years ago too.”
“I’m your father,” he yells. “You would be nothing without me. Everything you have is down to me.”
“Everything I have is in spite of you. I would rather be completely broke than take any money from what you’ve been doing. Is that why you wanted me to marry Kat if I wouldn’t kill her? So that if she ever did remember seeing anything, then she’d already be my wife and you could silence her? The way you silenced Nicole?”
“I was protecting our interests.”
“But it was all for nothing. Kat didn’t see a thing. You want to know why I know that? Because she relives what your depraved animal buddies did to her over and over again and she remembers everything in perfect detail. If she had seen any women and children trapped in cages, it would have torn her apart until she freed every last one of them.”
“I had no way of knowing she hadn’t seen anything. I couldn’t be sure so I had to take precautions.”
“You were willing to have me kill her just in case?” I spit at him. “Just in case she might have seen something that would expose your disgusting secret?”
“No. Because she would have exposed a multi-million-dollar operation. That is all that matters, Dante. It’s just business.”
Business? I stand and walk away from him before I pound his face to mincemeat the way I did Leo’s not so long ago.
Pacing the floor, I run a hand through my hair. “How did I not notice? Women and kids are being moved like dogs through my city and I didn’t fucking notice?”
“We moved operations outside of the city.”
“We?”
His nostrils flare as he glares at me. “Dominik Pushkin.”
“For fuck’s sake. You’re working with the Russians?”
“I didn’t have much choice when you killed Jimmy and his entire family,” he retorts.
“You’ve still not forgiven me for that, Pop? And now I know why. I could never fathom why you were so pissed at us for wiping out a family of scum who made their money trafficking innocent women and kids. Kidnapping them to order for the highest bidder.” I spit the words out like they leave a bad taste in my mouth. “Is that what happened to Megan?”
He blinks in confusion again. Sick fuck doesn’t even remember her name.
“The girl from the coffee shop? Lorenzo and I thought you killed her, but you took her, didn’t you? Was she just another order to fulfil?”
His scowl confirms I’m right. “You think what you do is any better? We are purveyors of misery, Dante. That is our calling. Our legacy. There is no escaping it. Do not look down your nose at me for choosing to make money in a different way, because we are exactly the same.”
I punch him square in the jaw, and his head snaps back before he spits blood from his mouth and goes on glaring at me.
“I am nothing like you, you sick, twisted fuck. I have never killed a man who didn’t deserve it. And I would never hurt a woman or a kid.”
“What about Nicole?” He sneers.
“Nicole?”
“Yes. Your fiancée. The one you had slaughtered along with her brothers.”
“Did you know what Jimmy and those boys used to do to her?”
He shrugs. “What men do in the privacy of their own home is their business, not mine.”
“And what you did in the privacy of my home. Whose business is that, Pop?”
He blinks at me.
“You don’t think I know you raped Nicci too? You don’t think she told me about that?”
He smirks at me. He fucking smirks. I shoot his other kneecap, and he wails in agony before he starts cursing me again.
“Did you know you knocked her up too?”
That gets his attention. He spits more blood from his mouth. “So you killed her baby too. Your own sibling?” he hisses. “You are just like me, ragazzo.”
“Nope. You see, I never killed her. Nicci and your son are alive and well.”
“My son?”
“Yeah. He’s a cute kid. Looks a lot like Joey actually. But he will never know a goddamn thing about the monster who spawned him. Nicci and I will make sure of that.”
“You been keeping secrets from me too.” He laughs maniacally.
The pain’s making him delirious. He never could handle it. Not the way he taught Lorenzo and me too.
“Plenty, Pop. So from now on, I’m going to be completely honest. I’m going to kill you. You like to tell me that I’m weak, but protecting people who can’t stand up for themselves isn’t weak. As long as I’m still willing to kill a man who is a danger to the only people I love, I don’t care who thinks I’m weak or merciful. And that’s what I’m going to do, Pop. I’m going to look you in the eyes when I shoot you in the head. Then I’m going make it look like someone forced their way in here and I’m going to pin your murder on Dominik. Once the heads of the Bratva families find out what trade he’s been plying these past years, they’ll be happy to hang him out to dry.
I press the barrel of my gun against his forehead.
“You don’t have the b —” he starts, but I pull the trigger, splattering his brain matter on the back of his cream leather sofa.
