Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
O nce on a job, I’d been pinned down by a tactical team. My cell phone had been out of battery, but the SPA strike team wouldn’t have been able to get to me in time, even if I had been able to contact them. I had had one bullet left.
The weight of that moment, the decision I had to make, was nothing compared to this.
“Yeah,” I said.
Somewhere in the yard, a cricket began singing, the loud burst of noise startling Leonard. He jumped, spinning to search for the source of the sound.
My mother stared at me, her brown eyes searching my face. I wasn’t sure what she read on my expression, but her mouth softened, lips pulling down in the corners.
“Why?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know. My job shouldn’t have affected anything here.” I tried to be vague, unsure what Brad or Leonard knew. Betty would be able to suss out what was going on with just the vaguest hints, but the two men were relative strangers.
My mother leaned back in her chair, the metal squeaking as she adjusted her weight.
When her eyes locked on Leonard, I became suddenly aware that she was a great white shark, and Leonard was the surfer who had no idea he was about to become an extra on Jaws 8: The One Where The Shark Eats Everyone.
“Iris never treated you good. You deserve so much better. She even had you doing work that they should have had high school students doing,” my mother said, her tone softening, and Leonard leaned toward her like she was the sun and he was a flower starving for light. I had no idea how my mother so quickly picked up on the tack I had used earlier with him, plowing straight through all my hard work until Leonard was ready to spill every secret it had taken me half an hour to pull out of him.
“She did! When I worked for Silas Milner, he had me running notes to all of his different guys. Then Iris is in charge, and I’ve been working for them for twelve years, and what does she have me doing?” Aggrieved, Leonard spread his hands. “Running notes! Dropping off letters! Why didn’t I get a promotion when she did? Instead, I have to go to all of her different motorcycle clubs and gangs and pick up and drop off letters like I’m the f—” Leonard pulled to a stop when Candy crossed her arms, glaring at him, correcting mid-word. “—fudging postman!”
“So of course it made sense that you took a look at some of the notes.” My mother’s voice was so reasonable, as though it was the only response to being denied a promotion.
“Right? Of course. I should know what’s going on. I should know what I’m delivering. I mean, what if one of those notes was telling someone to f—” Leonard’s eyes locked on Candy, whose expression grew even darker. “—flipping kill me.”
“Of course.” My mother nodded. “And now, when you’re trying to get out, you know all the details of her operation. You’re the worst enemy she’s ever had.”
Leonard puffed his chest out, and I shot my mother a warning look. She would be the first to tell me that there was a difference between telling a mark what they wanted to hear, what they needed to hear, and giving them too much confidence so that they forgot why they needed you.
Leonard was just edging that way. If my mother kept it up much longer, pretty soon, he was going to try giving us orders.
“I am the worst enemy she’s ever had. I know where everyone is. I even know where she’s going to go tomorrow, now that she can’t use the pool hall.” Leonard leaned back in his chair, smirking.
My mother nodded, waiting. The silence around the table was only interrupted by crickets and the buzz of the bug zapper next door.
“The gym.” Leonard grinned, relief cascading off him. He hadn’t been able to stand the silence, to outwait my mother. “It’s her newest project. She plans to get one up and running in each of the cities where she has an MC. She says it’s the cleanest way to launder money she’s ever seen.”
“You are too smart for her.” My mother leaned forward, patting Leonard’s hand, and then she wrapped him up like a Christmas turkey, bundling him and Betty both off and waving goodbye from the front porch.
“What was that about, Mom?” I asked from the living room. “He had more he could’ve told you.”
“He’s a long-term investment,” my mother said. “As long as none of Iris’s men saw him, she might call him tomorrow, and we might be able to get more information on what she’s up to. She won’t attack us here, not outright. She doesn’t know how you did what you did, and that will keep her waiting until she’s sure she has the upper hand. We need to keep her on her back foot.”
“This isn’t your op.” I wet my lips, shaking my head. “I mean, this isn’t your con. Iris is after me. I don’t know why, but I’ll figure it out. You should take the kids, Candy, too, and get out of town.”
My mother shut the door, leaving us in the darkened living room, the sound of the kids and Candace and her husband outside. I could only see the outline of my mother, backlit by the streetlights coming in through the window.
She looked smaller than I had ever remembered her being.
“It might not have anything to do with you. It might have to do with your father.” My mother stepped forward until I could see her face, not hiding a single thing. Her brows were pulled together, the dim streetlights making every wrinkle deeper.
I took two steps back, raising my hand as though I could ward her off. “What do you mean, Mom?”
“Ay, mijo.” My mother sighed, crossing her arms in front of her. “I’ve let this go on for too long.”
“ What do you mean ?” I demanded.
“Your father wasn’t a handyman,” my mother said.
Around me, the world seemed to shift into slow motion, the noise from outside disappearing until all I heard was my mother’s voice and the tick of the freezer ice machine clicking on.
“He was . He did work around town. He fixed people’s electricity. He…” I trailed off, watching as she shook her head slowly.
“Your father worked for Silas Milner. For a long time, he was a fixer. Silas had a problem, your father came in and fixed it.” My mother spoke with absolute calm, putting one word right after the other, placing them as though she were placing chess pieces on the board.
But I was a chess player too, and I could see what she was leaving out. “And then what happened?” I asked.
“And then, your father moved up. Silas let him choose what he was going to do. And your dad decided he wanted to be a bookmaker.” My mother looked toward the couch, but I knew she wasn’t seeing the old upholstery, the rickety frame that was probably on its last legs. She was seeing my father, the picture of him on the coffee table, but also the way he would come home after a long week and laugh, wrapping me and Candy in a hug, swinging us around the living room and saying that he didn’t need dinner, all he needed was our love, our hugs.
“A bookie. How did he…” I trailed off, the question lingering in the air between us.
My mother shook her head. “I don’t know. Silas came, told me your father was dead, gave us a payout, and asked me if I wanted to take up your father’s work. When I said no, he told me that I should be working for him anyway.”
My mouth went dry because it made sense. My mother was a con, my mother was a criminal, and Silas Milner liked running everything in this town and in the county around it. He wouldn’t like that my mother might be running her own business, might be running her own games.
“Ma, do you work for the Milners too?”
There were terrible things, and then there was finding out that the father you worshiped had been working for a crime boss who ran drugs up from South America using motorcycle clubs and drug mules. Which had nothing on the shit sandwich with a side dressing of childhood trauma of finding out your mother had made a deal with the same man that had probably had your father killed just so that you and your sister could grow up with one of their parents still alive.
Because there was no way that Silas Milner, he of broken bones and torched houses, was asking when he told my mother she should come work for him under the same terms as my father.
“No.” My mother looked at me, her eyes sharp. “No one tells me what to do. Not in my own house, not with my own business. The only things you own in this world?—”
“—are the things you can hold on to.” Like the rest of the things Mamá Reyes said to me, this one was etched in my brain, ingrained by years of repetition, a stream that had carved itself through the rock that was my brain by the simple fact that my mother had said it over and over.
“And I was going to hold on to my business, my line. And I was going to hold on to you and Candace.” She looked at me hard before glancing away. “Either way, someone killed your father. Probably Silas. And if that’s true, then you might not be the reason Iris has a hit out on you.”
I started to nod before shaking my head. “Except that I didn’t know any of that history.”
“Whether you knew it or not, Iris might assume that your father told you something or I told you something. When I turned down Silas, it was very touch and go for a while. We came to a balance. I kept my cons small. I kept them on people who were above Silas’s touch. Maybe with you back in town, Iris worries that I’m expanding.” My mother turned to look at me, and her eyes were so hard they could cut diamonds. “Because your work, the covert work that our government had you doing, that wouldn’t have anything to do with some local criminal like Silas Milner, would it?”
Now she was reading me, and I kept my expression open, uncertain, hiding everything I could until she looked away, convinced I knew nothing I hadn’t already told her.
“No,” I said finally.
Because if Silas Milner was dealing in magical artifacts, someone would have told me. At some point in my background check or my qualification to be a special agent, someone would have asked me a question about the person in my own town who knew the secrets we were trying to keep.
“No.” But my mother sounded as uncertain as I felt, her expression cloudy when she looked back toward the couch at the ghost of my father. “We need a plan. We can run, but Iris Milner has us in her sights now. How did you bring down the building? The Click and Clack is a distraction, not… whatever that was.”
“The explosion was more intense than I expected. The guitar case acted like an IED. And it must have been right next to one of the posts that held up the whole structure.” I repeated the line I had already said, trying to believe it, even as I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.
My mother nodded, lips moving as she considered our options.
“Did Iris really know I was here from someone at Betty’s bar? Or someone else?” I looked at the back door, where I could still hear Riley’s loud voice stepping all over her brother’s version of the story, Candace’s laughter cutting through like gold filigree.
“You think your sister told on you?” my mother asked. “I know you’ve been out for a while?—”
I shook my head. “Family is blood. But I don’t know her husband.”
“Bradley is good for her. You think I would let your sister marry anyone who wasn’t good for her?” The question was a blade, honed enough that I could slice my palm open on the words. It was as good as a slap across the cheek, warning me I was too close to something.
“What do you know?” I asked.
“I know that Bradley has as much a reason to not want the Milners in his business as we do.” My mother’s face was cold. “He’s proven himself to be family. What about the man you’re traveling with?”
“He is…” Because I had nothing there. I knew Cassander, but did I really know him? I knew the way his skin felt against mine, how much I wanted to see how far we could go together, but did I trust him? Did I have a reason to trust him?
“You met him on a job,” my mother said shortly. “What was he doing?”
Running from his brother, running from a coup attempt that had left him nearly dead.
“He was?—”
“He was desperate.” My mother’s eyes were reading too much, how did she know so much? “And now you’re keeping him around because he’s a trump card for you. You think that he’ll be able to get you back in good once the CIA is talking to you.” My mother pursed her lips, considering. Finally, she nodded. “Good. Good idea.”
My stomach twisted, every part of me wanting to protest because this was the calculation I had spent twelve years trying to run away from. This was the sort of math my mother taught. She never explained one plus one equals two; her math was always along the lines of this man is worth enough good grace to get you your job back .
Or, this mark has enough money that when you drain him dry, you won’t need to work for another three months.
“It’s not like that.” I stared at her hard, hearing the truth in my words even as I said them. “ We are not like that.”
“Then you’re a fool,” my mother said. “Because it is like that for him. You can see it every time he smiles at you, every time he looks at you and sees nothing but something he wants.”
“That’s not true.” I crossed my arms, every soft feeling I had developed for my mother fading away. “He helped save the kids, and he could have just walked away. He saved my life when he could have let Iris kill me.”
“No.” It was my mother’s turn to look cold, dispassionate, almost annoyed at my pathetic clinging to Cassander’s innocence. She flicked something up, held between her two fingers, on display for me to see. The coin. Even in the dim light from the street, it gleamed gold, everything about it screaming expensive and valuable , even if you didn’t know exactly what it was. “Because he doesn’t have what he wants yet. Isn’t that right, Cassander, Prince of Shadows, Heir to the Throne of Moonlight and Whispers?”
I turned to see Cassander framed in the door, the laughter and sounds of family behind him warping around him, as his expression went absolutely frigid.