Chapter 14 Gabe #2
Feeding off her distraction, I palm the workbench and stare down at her evenly. “We’re in the middle of a fucking war, Rory. Your little friend’s a liability. If Dante or anyone else we’ve pissed off wanted to get to you, they’d do so by way of her.”
She chews her lip. “Fair point. Fine, I’ll tell her to be more careful.”
“No, you’ll tell her to stop walking home late at night. You’ll tell her to stop volunteering in Cove.” I dig my fingers into the wood top. “You’ll tell her to stop posting her fucking location on Instagram.”
Rory’s eyes find mine, her brows knitting. “You’re stalking her Instagram? How? You can barely use a phone.”
Ignoring the heat brewing under my collar at the word stalking, I double down. “I stalk all of your Instagram accounts. I vet everyone in our outer circle, and she’s a weak link.” Then, before I can stop myself, I add, “Tell me everything you know about her.”
The demand leaves my mouth with the taste of regret, but the longer it stews in the air, the easier it is to justify.
I’m the fucking consigliere. I was put on this bastard earth for one reason—to keep my family safe. Finding out more about her isn’t something I can avoid, it’s a job requirement.
“Um.” Rory scratches her nose in thought.
“She moved here from Seattle in sixth grade. Lives on Strawberry farm with her Uncle Finn, who used to be a lawyer. She’s going to be a lawyer too—eventually.
” She glances up at me. “She’s deferred college twice, but she can’t defer again, so she has to go next September. ”
Nothing she didn’t tell me herself on the night of the explosion, except the putting off college part.
I pick up a buffer and get to work polishing my latest contraption. “And her parents?”
“She never knew her father, but her mom is dead.”
My shoulders tighten. “How?”
“That’s all she’d ever say, and I’ve never pushed.” She purses her lips. “I’m not as nosy as you.”
I ignore her not-so-subtle dig, because now my brain is ticking over. Dead mom. I can work with that. “What’s her mom’s name?”
Rory shakes her head.
“Last name? Job? Fucking date of birth?”
She shrugs.
“Why doesn’t she drink?” I grit out.
She rolls her eyes and saunters over to the workbench. “I don’t know, but I’ve never known her to drink.”
“And why doesn’t she drive?”
Rory’s pause is brief, but it crackles on the nape of my neck. She lowers her gaze and traces a finger along the wood grain. “I don’t know.”
My sister-in-law is a psychopath. She’ll smile and swear she didn’t key your car, or serve you a coffee and not even flinch as she watches you drink her spit.
She’s a flawless liar. Until she’s not.
“Rory,” I warn.
“I don’t know!” she says with an impatient huff, her cheeks reddening. “One day she was driving, and then the next day she wasn’t, okay?”
A chill works its way through my veins. I swallow and force out my next question as calmly as I can muster.
Though I have a creeping suspicion I already know the answer.
“And when was this?”
She lifts her eyes to meet mine, guilt swirling in the brown. “Just after her eighteenth birthday.”
Her words crawl across the table, push into my chest, and hammer puzzle pieces into place.
She stopped driving just before she met me.
Just before her glossed lips brushed mine, her breath warmer than the wind.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
Though I’ve always obsessed over her secret, it’s always been to satisfy my own fucked-up addiction, not because I’ve ever thought it’d be anything worth uncovering. I’ve always been certain it’d be petty. Stealing a nail polish from the mall, or something equally as dumb.
But to suddenly stop driving?
I’ve given up the pretense of polishing now. Heart thudding and ears burning, I glare at Rory and wait for her to continue.
“It was all a bit strange. She’d gone out of town to celebrate her birthday with her Seattle friends, and when she came back a few days later, she no longer had a car.”
“So she had an accident.”
“She swore up and down she didn’t, and she didn’t look hurt or anything.” She glances up at me with a sheepish smile. “I didn’t believe her, but I googled car accidents in the whole of the Pacific Northwest, and nothing came up.”
I drag a knuckle over my jaw, my mind racing. “And now she doesn’t get into cars at all.”
“Nope. Sometimes, she’ll take the bus, but most of the time, she walks everywhere. But that’s not all. When she came back, she was … different. Not in a bad way,” she hastens to add. “She was just nicer.”
I run my tongue over my teeth. “Meaning?”
“She started volunteering in Cove, then at the hospital. At first, I thought it was just so she had something to put on her college application, but she’d already secured her place.
And then I thought, maybe she’s found God or something.
” She lets out a little laugh. “But that doesn’t explain why she suddenly started wearing so much pink. ”
My skin is fucking fizzing. The driving, the volunteering, the sudden niceness. There’s a linear story there, a secret, one more depraved than petty theft, and I’m so close to finding it out I can taste it on her strawberry lip gloss.
“Anyway, shouldn’t you know all of this already? Denis found Rafe’s banking login for me in ten seconds flat.”
My eyes narrow. “Why’d you need that?”
“He keeps beating me at blackjack, so I donated a million dollars to the Washington Bird Sanctuary on his behalf,” she says brightly, tugging her keys out of her pocket and jangling them at arm’s length. “And look, they sent me this cute keyring as a thank you!”
But I can barely register her obnoxiously large magpie keyring. Can barely fucking think.
She’s right. I could have found out her secret years ago, and in minutes. And if it was anyone else, I’d have ripped it open like a kid with their gifts on Christmas morning.
But it’s the Angel in Pink.
I made a vow to myself, for my own sanity, that I wouldn’t.
Self-loathing runs hot under my shirt. Why did I fucking ask?
Rory nods down to the Frankensteined gun between us. “What are you making?”
I bite on the change of subject and slide it over the table. “What you asked me to.”
Her demeanor flips one-eighty, and she lights up with a childlike wonder. “Oh, my Goose,” she breathes, holding it up to the light with cupped hands, like I’ve handed her the Holy Grail. “Does it work?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Her eyes meet mine with a spark of mischief, and despite the tightness at the base of my skull, a reluctant amusement bleeds through me.
This girl, honestly. There’s not much of me that’s soft, but there’s a tiny speck, somewhere between my top and bottom rib, that’s a little soft for Vicious’s wife.
I knew of her long before she sank her claws into my brother. Long before Uncle Alberto sank his into her, even. She’d been calling the hotline for years, confessing the pettiest shit with the weight of the whole world’s guilt in her voice.
If Mildred Black’s calls were my drug of choice, Rory’s were the sitcoms I’d watch to buffer the blow of the comedown.
I’d find amusement in her small acts of revenge—tampering with Alberto’s whiskey, cutting the brakes of Dante’s car.
Then as her wedding to Alberto grew closer, her calls changed genre, and suddenly, I was watching a limited series thriller I couldn’t turn off.
I listened to each call as if they were episodes. The show was slow in the beginning, picked up pace in the middle, and ended with the perfect plot twist: she was going to shove Fat Al off a cliff before he could force her to marry him.
Angelo went and spoiled the fucking ending, of course. Popped a cap in his head and wiped out any chance of a second season.
But now that she’s my sister-in-law, she entertains me in other ways. Like bringing me moodboards with her latest inventions, and in my spare time, I bring them to life.
“This is so cool,” she exclaims, cocking the gun to the ceiling and posing, like she’s one of Charlie’s Angels. “It’s like Russian Roulette but cuter, right? Instead of firing blanks, it shoots off confetti canons?”
I lunge over and snatch it off her when she turns it around and peers down the barrel. Jesus. I double-check the safety is on and make a mental note to go over the basic rules of gun safety, again, before we get to the range.
“Are we taking the Harley?” She jogs over to the wall and lifts her motorbike helmet from the hook.
Before I can reply, Emile pushes through the door with his shoulder. He smiles at Rory and glances at me before heading over to the sink.
I drag my front teeth over my bottom lip, sensing the air shift. “Yeah. I’ll meet you out front.”
“All right, but hurry up, we’ve got to get back before Angelo wonders where I am.”
She turns on her heel and hops, skips, and jumps over the destruction she caused moments earlier. As if the puddle of oil and upturned bucket suddenly reminded her of why she stormed in here in the first place, she pauses at the door and turns around, pinning me with a sober expression.
“I’ll talk to Wren, but you have to promise me you’ll leave her alone,” she says, swallowing hard. “She’s innocent. In fact, she’s the only wholesome person I have left. She doesn’t know about … us.”
I cock a brow. “Us?”
“The family. She doesn’t know what you guys do, and I need to keep it that way. So, no stalking, no vetting. And definitely no shoving her into cars. Just pretend she doesn’t exist, okay?”
It takes a beat before the realization hits. She means her little friend has no idea that she’s living, breathing, and roaming in Cosa Nostra territory.
Heat rushes up my spine. Christ, the girl must be more ignorant than I thought. It doesn’t take a genius to see the blacked-out cars and men in suits to realize they’re probably the reason this tiny coastline in the ass end of nowhere bleeds with wealth.
But I trap all my questions behind pursed lips. I’ve asked enough of them for one day.
Instead, I give her a curt nod, and when she leaves, I turn my attention to Emile.
“Denis just got back to me,” he mutters, turning on the tap with his elbow. “Blake is Griffin’s nephew.”
I glare at the water running from clear to red to clear again. “Does my brother know?”
“I doubt it.” He turns off the water and reaches for a hand towel. “He’s got nothing on record.”
I drag a knuckle through my beard, fighting the unease creeping up my back like graveyard fog.
Something stinks.
I’ve had my suspicions about Rafe’s head honcho, Griffin, for a while. No reason in particular, just a hunch. But now it’s come back that he’s got family ties to the new hire, I know I’m on to something bigger.
“Track the both of them,” I say through gritted teeth. “I want to know when they eat, piss, and shit.”
Emile nods and tosses the bloodied towel in the waste bin. “Anything else?”
The veins on my hand bulge as I curl it into a fist.
I told Rory I’d leave her alone.
Told myself many times too.
“You’re with me tonight. I’ve gotta pay someone a visit.”
Guess the only rules I’m good at sticking to are my father’s.