CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AINSLEY
S omething in the air has shifted. It was so late when I finally crawled into bed with Gage, probably close to three, that I’m just waking up at noon. It was the most peaceful night’s sleep I’d had in over a decade. His mouth between my legs at the crack of dawn didn’t hurt either. I pretended to sleep through it, but I came so hard that a throaty scream tore from me. And he chuckled before pecking my temple and telling me to get some rest.
Bliss in a room, tinted orange with the daybreak sunlight. It was an extension of that too-good-to-be-true delusion I passed out to. But now, it seems far away.
I quickly throw on some shorts and a halter top, apply some light makeup, and comb through my unruly waves before heading downstairs. Felicity’s squawks greet me first, but then I hear muffled voices—stressed and unhappy.
Wells is the first to spot me as I round the corner, his green eyes far fiercer and demanding than they were last night. “Good. You’re up. Come.”
He jerks his chin and begins striding down the hall. Everyone else follows him without paying me any attention, only Ty and Rena lagging behind with me. Still, they say nothing.
I’m not sure what’s going on, but it seems as though that family warmth I was privy to has dissipated. Bile shoots up my esophagus. I haven’t even had a cup of coffee.
We all pile into Wells’s office. The space is tastefully decorated and warm, like the rest of the house. Antiques, hand-crafted bookshelves, molasses-brown leather furniture. The headquarters of a man in charge.
I’m brought back to all the times I was called to my father’s office over the years. I can’t think of any that were good. I’m not sure what this is—a family meeting or business. Rena and Celeste have never attended a business meeting with us, but this feels important. I’m flying blind right now. They all seem either worried or angry. And quiet.
Wells settles into his leather office chair behind a live-edge Koa wood desk while the guys grab drinks and occupy the chairs and couches near him. The girls spread out. Ivy bounces Felicity, who is slowly drifting off to sleep from the motion. And I stay planted near the door. Old habits die hard, and my gut tells me I may need to bolt. Not in the literal sense since I’m far outnumbered, but claustrophobia is less debilitating near an exit.
Gage has his arms crossed over his chest, bourbon clutched firmly in his hand, gaze averted. Cold. That’s a drastic change—not my imagination and not the spirit of the blizzard we last spoke of.
“Vargas got another message,” Wells begins. His accusatory tone isn’t my imagination either.
Or maybe I am freaking out. I suck in a deep breath, attempting to center my racing pulse.
“Okay,” I say as Celeste passes me a cup of coffee—peppermint creamer, the way I take it.
I don’t ask where she got it, but I thank her and breathe in the aroma—the subtle gesture of friendship—and hope for tranquility to find me.
“First”—Wells switches on the wall monitor—“this is what we did for you.”
There’s no sound, but a compilation of news coverage of a sinking cargo ship, rotten Morelli meats, an FBI raid, and our shell realty company going up in flames fills the screen.
That’s when I remember that Wells began our conversation last night with, “He did something big for you.” The rest of our discussion trumped that beginning.
Until now.
“You hit their primary holdings,” I state, summarizing what I’m watching.
“Yes,” Liam says, passing a picture to Rena, who hands it to me while she pushes a rolling office chair to where I’m standing.
The picture is a shot of a billboard—the one that towers at the border of my hometown—and it flashes the same times that I was taunted with. The last one—nine thirty-two—is circled, but instead of my name, it says, Kaboom . I’m guessing that was the time of the big explosion.
I take a seat and flick my eyes back to Wells in understanding. “A direct response to the last message about me.”
“Yes. And they had one for us today,” Wells returns, and I gather that’s where the issue lies.
He changes the image on the monitor. Three pictures stare back at me—Josh and me at the senior recreation center when we were young—George took that; Josh in the Navy; and a more recent one of Gage—somewhat grainy—from a security camera, I’d guess. There’s a note too.
What your little traitor gave Glines. You started a war for Judas. Turn her over, or we go public with this. She’s ours.
My hands begin to tremor, my coffee sloshing up the sides of the cup, my stomach plummeting. I set my cup on the floor, grasping their inference before they speak it.
“You knew he was alive,” Wells surmises.
That’s why they’re all brooding. It’s such a tangled mess.
“No.” I shake my head and peer at Gage, who appears more furious than hurt.
This wasn’t how we were supposed to broach this. We were going to fix things today.
Wells swipes a hand through his hair, irked and perhaps conflicted. “Did you give these pictures to Glines?”
My heart rate ratchets so high that pain lances my sternum, but I don’t hesitate to tell them the truth. “The two of Josh, yes.”
“The other could simply be something Glines had,” Liam suggests, and though his jaw is set, that seems like he’s throwing me a bone. “We know the Feds have PI and security pics of us. Maybe he was comparing them.”
“Start talking,” Wells demands, focusing on me again. “Why did you give these to Glines?”
“It’s complicated,” I begin and loathe the quaver in my voice. “Just let me think how best to start.”
Ivy moves her chair closer, a few feet away from me, in what appears to be an act of solidarity. And that’s the moment I understand what this is. Those couple of sentences from Wells when I asked what would happen if Gage couldn’t accept what I revealed hit me harder in this cage.
“… everyone gets to weigh in, even if things turn ugly. And you’re looking like family more every day, especially to the girls.”
It’s subtle, but the girls are crowded more toward me, the guys all surrounding Gage.
A room divided, which wrecks me and spurs me on in equal measure.
I have no doubt these women would show up for Gage in any way he needed, but they haven’t deemed me guilty yet. That’s about as close as I’ve come to not being alone in a long time, so I try to grip on to it. Although it also proves that I’m pleading my case here.
Are the guys contemplating turning me over like that threat suggested? I examine their various, rigid stances. They’re upset, but handing me over to be slaughtered? No. There’s no way.
Wells leans back in his chair, studying me as he swirls his scotch. “You need to tell us what happened that made you kill them, what you were working on with Glines, and what these photos are about. Start with some of that.”
I blow out a ragged breath, my gut knotting. This is going to demolish the small amount of progress Gage and I have made—that thin veneer of hope coating this past week. But I knew that would happen, so let the unraveling begin.
“Glines was looking for someone for me.”
“Who?” Gage barks, and Wells pins him with a side-eye glower. I’d venture that he was instructed to let Wells handle this.
“I gave Glines those pictures of Gage—Josh—because I wanted him to help me … I thought maybe that would help identify … It had been more than ten years, so reason would have it that he looked like …” God, I’m rambling. I pull myself together, stare at the floor, and spell it out. “I’m not a snitch. I hadn’t given him any intel, but I was willing to if …” I glance at Gage. “I wanted him to find our child.”
His jaw pulses as he stands, staying put when both Wells and Ty gesture to him. “You … we have a kid?”
“No.” I shake my head as tears prick my eyes. “This is why it was hard to know where to start. Please just let me find my way through this.”
He sets his drink on the edge of Wells’s desk and sits back down, elbows on his knees and so many emotions on his face. I’ve endured every one of those, but seeing them on him spears me far more.
“Up until the night I shot them, I’d thought we did. But …” I stroke my forehead, my head pounding and spinning with so many bits and pieces of this nightmare. “Let me start back then. During the pregnancy, I didn’t do so well. I was so depressed and anxious, and I … I tried to eat well and sleep and not be stressed, but my life was kind of imploding, so I didn’t succeed at any of that. My parents sent me away. That’s why I wrote to you that I was staying with my cousins for a while. I wasn’t—it was some secluded estate with a midwife. I didn’t start showing until late, but once I did, they didn’t want anyone to know, and …”
I flap my hand in the air, pushing those unnecessary details aside. “Anyway, eventually, I went into labor. Rapid labor. It all happened so fast. The little guy just—”
“A boy?” Gage’s rumbling tenor cracks through that question, and I nearly crumple to the floor.
“Yeah, a boy.” I nod, wiping the corners of my eyes. “I was so weak that by the time they pulled him out, I kind of just fell flat. I heard him cry—it wasn’t very strong, but it was there—and the midwife took him to clean him up. A little while later, fifteen minutes or so, I asked to hold him. They said I was in no condition, that I’d lost too much blood and needed a transfusion.”
I reach for my coffee, sipping it simply to garner another second to compose myself before continuing. “That took what seemed like forever. And then my father came in. He told me they took the baby and were going to put him somewhere safe. That it was already so much work for them to take care of me since I hadn’t been well. They couldn’t handle a baby too. And they didn’t believe I could properly mother him in my condition. But that when you came back … as long as I complied, they’d reunite us.”
“As long as you complied with what?” Gage asks, and I know he sees it all unfolding.
“He didn’t say at first. He just told me to get healthy. I knew that wouldn’t be all of it, but it was all we focused on for a while. A little over a year and a half later, he told me he wanted to put Nick in an admin position, that it was imperative to keep the peace with the Vittori family, so he needed me to marry him because that was the only way it would make sense to the Morellis. And as long as I did that, he’d let you finish your service with the Navy and tell me where our baby was when you got back. But if I didn’t, I’d never see either of you again.”
The rest of the room is mute, but Gage cusses under his breath before searing me with his anger. “Why didn’t you tell me? You were still writing to me then. And you knew how to contact me aside from that. We went over countless ways for you to tell me things undetected. And George—”
“George was gone.”
“Gone?” he echoes in disbelief. He loved George nearly as much as I did.
And that’s what makes me lose it. The anguish drips so furiously that I can’t fight it. “Yeah. The last letter I sent you that was truly written by me was mid-pregnancy. All the ones after that were composed under force, based on bits and pieces from the ones you were sending to George. My father gave me details from them so I could respond appropriately, but he never let me see them. He had burned all the letters and keepsakes you’d sent me. The only picture of you left was the one of us that I gave to Glines because it hung on the volunteer wall at the senior rec center.”
I clear my throat, realizing I got off track there. “In the last one I wrote on my own, I tried to tell you about the baby, but my father found out. He killed George for trying to send it.”
His fists ball so tight, along with the rest of him, that his veins protrude, to the point of nearly exploding. “He killed George?”
“In front of me,” I tack on, wishing I could unsee it, but it’s always there. “And then he put my fingerprints on the gun as insurance that I wouldn’t tell. That was my warning to follow orders or the same would happen to you.”
Gage scrubs his hands over his face, obviously struggling with digesting all of this. “Why would he have you keep writing to me after all that?”
“He said you were working on something important, which I assumed was the Cabrini lead you’d told me about. He insisted that you needed to have a clear head, so my job was to keep you appeased. Right before he made me marry Nick, he had me send the letter informing you we were under heavy surveillance and that he’d gotten paranoid so I needed to stop writing.”
He reaches for his glass, downing the remainder of his bourbon in one gulp, and turns to Wells as he slams the empty down. “That was a few months after I told him that you had no intel or interest in your Cabrini relations.”
I don’t know the specifics he’s talking about, but I gather that my father assumed Josh wasn’t going to have anything of use to offer him. Josh feeding my father’s plight for power was the only way I would have ever been permitted to marry him. So, when that didn’t pan out, my father used me to bridge relations with the Vittoris, regardless of the horror that meant.
“Anyway,” I go on, “the night I shot them, I’d overheard my father order a hit on me.”
“The fuck?” Gage spits as the rest of the room suddenly chimes in with some gasps and groans.
“It wasn’t unexpected really. I guess they’d been aware I was in contact with Glines. That part didn’t even make me angry.” I stop there because he’s scowling at me, like he has something to add. I’m not sure what.
He grew up in that same world. If you talk to the Feds, you die.
“I didn’t really care about that,” I explain when he doesn’t add anything. “Glines promised he’d look for our son even if something happened to me. That’s all I wanted. I mean, I would’ve tried to get away, but …”
“What did make you angry enough to shoot them?” Ty asks, perplexed, and though he’s clearly on the other side of the room, he can’t hide his compassion, which bolsters me to forge ahead.
Flashes of the conversation hit me, the rage I felt that night, how untethered I was. “They started chuckling about how they couldn’t believe they’d kept me in line all those years with the promise of being reunited with a dead baby. Marco piped up, asking if my mother knew. She died from a heart attack last year. Anyway, my father said she didn’t know, that the baby died nine minutes after birth, and he handled it without her.”
A lump forms in my throat, but I know if I stop, I’ll never get this out, so I push through it, clutching my cup like it can fuel me. “My father said the baby died because I couldn’t take care of myself during the pregnancy. Then he grumbled, complaining about how disappointed he was that I’d bought his lie all these years. That I’d turned on my own blood, wasn’t very bright, and never had any fight in me. I trashed my whole life to get my child back. Played right into their hands. And I don’t really know my exact thoughts, but at that moment, I didn’t care what happened to me. I just wanted them to die. It was the one choice I could still make for the baby I’d never even gotten to hold.”
My eyes sail over to Gage, and I can’t read him like I once could. Maybe he blames me for the loss, like they did. Like I do. Or for everything else that followed. I essentially gave him up, married another man, betrayed him to save a baby that I’d lost. All of it would have been different if I’d believed in him more, run like he’d wanted, which is surely the conclusion he’s drawing.
He says nothing though. I wish I knew what was going through his mind. Maybe he’s more complex than he used to be.