Chapter 26 #2
The distinct sound of the disengaging locks on the front door had me moving before I could even think. Instinct and years of training kicked in, and I rushed to Haz, pulled him off the counter, and used my body to shield his as I reached into a nearby cabinet for a gun I kept there.
I flipped the safety and spun. “When I say run, go shut yourself in the murder locker. And don’t come out until I come for you.”
“I—”
“Hazard.”
“Okay.”
The door swung open, and I leveled the gun with a steady arm while reaching around me to make sure Haz was safe.
Ghost strolled in without a care in the world as if he weren’t about to get a bullet in the brain. Feeling the tension, he stiffened and whipped around. “Jesus, Vaughn. Bullets are not breakfast.”
Shit! The French toast!
I rushed to the griddle to transfer it to a plate, relieved to see it was only slightly overdone on one side.
“Since when do you have a key to my apartment?” I barked, turning from the nearly ruined breakfast.
“Since when do I need a key to go anywhere?”
“You did that without a key?” Hazard asked, amazed.
“Hell yeah, half-pint. I’ll teach you.”
“No,” I declared.
“Why not?” Haz argued.
I should have burned the French toast. “You don’t need to know how to break and enter.”
“Skills are skills,” Ghost said, dragging out one of the stools to sit down.
“I said no.” I maintained, putting the warm breakfast on a plate, adding some butter, and getting the container of maple syrup. I measured it out in a small cup because Haz couldn’t be trusted with the entire bottle. He’d probably try and eat the entire thing.
Once that was done, I transferred it all to the island along with a low-sugar, high-protein yogurt and some juice.
“That for me?” Ghost asked, leaning over.
I smacked him in the back of the head.
Hazard leaped off the counter and slid between me and the granite to get into the seat. “I’ll share with you, Ghost.”
“My guy.”
“He’s not your anything, and don’t even think about eating off his plate,” I threatened.
“Kieran,” Hazard admonished.
I handed him a fork. “Eat.”
He pursed his lips, so I kissed the top of his head. “Please.”
Haz started shoveling it in, lips smacking. “Don’t worry, Ghost. Kieran will make you a plate.”
“I will not.”
Hazard, the little shit, stabbed a piece of his toast and held it out, syrup dripping onto the counter. “Okay, then I’ll share.”
“I didn’t even know you could cook,” Ghost told me and leaned in like he was going to eat off of a fork that was not his.
The sound of my gun cocking stopped him. His eyes rolled sideways. Clearing his throat, he sat back. “You know what. Thanks for the offer, half-pint, but I brought my own snacks.”
Reaching into the pocket of his black leather jacket, he pulled out a bag of nuts.
Haz turned back to me. “You’re a hitman, Kieran. Not a heathen.”
It happened before I could stop it. My eyebrow shot up. “You think I’m the heathen?”
“Oooh, so I see you two talked,” Ghost said above the crinkling of the wrapper as he tore it open.
I turned back to the stove, tossing three more slices of French toast onto the griddle. They didn’t have time to soak up as much egg, but it served him right.
“Yeah,” Haz said, speaking while he chewed. “He told me about what happened to you guys all those years ago.”
“Did he now?”
I glared at Ghost over my shoulder. His eyes glistened with mirth. I could practically hear his gloating. I told you he could handle it.
Just because Haz could handle this shit didn’t mean he should have to.
“Yeah, how he found you in a closet and you used grenades to get out and a couple found you and hid you for the night. Then how you separated a few years later. That must have been really lonely. And then how the government found you and sort of forced you to do their dirty work.” He paused before drinking some juice.
“The government found you like they did Kieran, right?”
I turned, about to correct him, but Ghost shot me a look, stopping me. Then to Haz, he said, “Mm, yeah something like that.”
I finished making his French toast and added some butter. I slid it in front of him with the entire bottle of maple syrup. If he wanted to eat all of it and go into sugar shock, that wasn’t my business.
“Hooty-hooo!” Ghost hollered and tucked in as if he hadn’t seen anything but a bag of nuts in weeks.
I poured him a cup of coffee only because I didn’t want to have to do the Heimlich if he started to choke.
“My mannnn,” he said by way of thanks.
“What about you, Kieran?” Haz asked, and his brows drew together. “You need to eat too.”
“I’ll make some eggs,” I said, going back to the stove to prepare an omelet. As it cooked, I put a slice of toast into the toaster and halved an avocado to put on top.
“I gotta admit,” Ghost said. “I knew you’d be okay with Kieran’s job, but I wasn’t sure how you’d take being affiliated with the mob.”
Hazard let out a squeak.
I slammed my spatula onto the granite and spun. If looks could kill, Ghost would be an actual ghost.
Ghost grimaced and lifted the mug to his lips.
“What do you mean affiliated with the mob?” Hazard asked.
Ghost glanced at me. “I thought you told him everything.”
“He asks a lot of questions. I got tired.”
“You said you worked for the government. A sanctioned operative,” Haz said, eyes ping-ponging between me and Ghost. “Do you work for the mob too?”
“Hell no. The mob’s even worse than the people we work for,” Ghost supplied.
“So you aren’t affiliated with the mob?”
“They wish,” Ghost said.
I was starting to wish he would choke.
“But you said…” Hazard’s voice trailed off as I watched his mind spin.
I gave Ghost a deadly look, and he frowned.
“Maybe I should come back later.” He moved to stand.
“Don’t even think about it,” Hazard snapped.
Ghost sat.
I stepped forward. “Haz—”
His eyes shifted to mine. “If you aren’t affiliated with the mob… does that mean I am?” As if his conclusion were too unfathomable to even think, he shook his head. “But I’m not. I don’t have anyone.”
“You have me,” I said, rough.
“I’m beginning to think I should have listened last night when you said you had more to tell me,” he said, dropping his chin into his hand. “To be fair, I really didn’t think you could tell me anything that would beat out you being a hitman.”
“Valid,” Ghost put in.
I gave him a dirty look.
Haz straightened, his eyes widening as if a lightbulb went off above his head. “You said you found out who wanted me dead and why.”
Did that just now register? I glanced at Ghost. See? See how damn helpless he is?
Ghost frowned.
“Kieran.”
“Baby doll.”
“Do you know who wants me dead and why?” he asked point-blank.
“Yes.”
I braced myself for the can of worms about to pop wide open.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Have you ever heard of the Salvatore family? They—”
“Of course I have.” Haz interrupted. “I live in the worst part of Buffalo. Everyone knows the Salvatores are the most powerful mob in this region. Everyone is scared shitless of them.” A look crossed his face, shock and doubt twined into one.
“Wait, are you saying the Salvatores want me dead? The mob?”
“Yes, baby,” I replied, wishing I could sugarcoat it way better than with the word baby. But there was no sugarcoating that you were a target for the mob.
Hazard leaped up. The stool he was in went skittering back and then tipped over. “That’s impossible!” he exclaimed. “Why would they want me dead? I didn’t do anything. I’m no one!”
“But you are,” I said, but Haz started pacing, going all the way into the living room to wear a track in the floor in front of the windows.
I gave Ghost a look and followed.
“There has to be some mistake,” Haz reasoned.
He gasped so hard his entire body moved.
“Wait! Didn’t that Matteo guy just die a few weeks ago?
He was the head of everything, right? Oh my God, is that why they want me dead?
Do they somehow think I killed him?” He spun to face me, his wide eyes innocent and pleading. “Is that why, Kieran?”
“No,” I said, my heart constricting.
“Then why?” he asked. “What possible reason could the mob have for wanting me dead?”
“Because you’re Matteo Salvatore’s son.”
Haz froze. The room plunged into deafening silence, only to be shattered a moment later by laughter.
“He’s cracking up,” Ghost whispered out of the side of his mouth.
Haz continued laughing, bending at the waist, his forced humor pointed at the floor.
“Haz,” I called, stepping forward to wrap a hand around his arm and pull him up.
“No!” he shouted, jerking free of my grasp. “That’s not funny, Kieran. How could you even say such a thing? Take it back.”
I stayed silent because, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take it back.
“Take it back,” Haz said again, losing some of the humor in his tone.
My lips rolled in.
Haz shot forward, fists slamming into my chest. I caught the wrist of his injured hand, not wanting him to rip the stitches. But I let his other free, allowing him to hit me again and again.
“It’s a lie!” he said between punches. “There’s no way my father is—was—head of the most powerful mob in this town.”
“I wish I was wrong,” I told him, cradling his injured hand to my chest.
Haz sagged into me, and I wrapped my arm around him, accepting all his weight. “It’s a lie,” he said weakly.
I gestured, and Ghost came around, offering the folder. “It’s all here,” he said.
Haz sniffled and turned his face. “What is that?”
“It’s all there. Proof that you are the illegitimate and only child of Matteo Salvatore,” I told him.
Haz pushed out of my hold and took the folder, opening it immediately. As we all stood there, the only sound in the entire apartment was the rustling of papers. I kept my eyes trained on Haz, taking in every expression and the slight tremble in his hands.
He turned another page and jolted. A small card fell from the folder and fluttered to his feet.
“These are mine,” he said, glancing up at me before quickly turning back to lift a sheet of paper.
“This is my birth certificate. My papers from the state when I turned eighteen.” He bent down. “My social security card.”
Walking over to the coffee table, he lowered to his knees and then gingerly lined it all up across the surface. “This is the stuff those men took from my apartment,” he said. Then, in a whisper, he added, “My identity.”
“There’s a letter in there,” I said, wanting to hurry this along. Not for me but him. The sooner he had all the information, the sooner he could start to process it. “It’s from your birth mother.”
He made a sound and started scouring through the papers he’d yet to see. Before getting to the handwritten letter, he saw the DNA test. Grabbing it, he shot to his feet. “There’s a DNA test?”
“When Salvatore found you, he had a test run to see if it was true. Probably wanted to confirm before introducing himself.”
“This isn’t mine.” Haz was sure, glancing at the paper. “I never consented to a DNA test. I never gave a DNA sample.”
“There are ways to get samples without a person’s knowledge,” I explained.
“How?” Haz asked.
I couldn’t help but think back to earlier when he’d told me about his lost hairbrush. “For example, hair.”
His head snapped up. “You mean I didn’t lose my brush. Matteo Salvatore stole it?”
“Easiest way to see if you matched without causing a scene.”
Hazard stared at the paper. “It says it’s a match.”
I nodded.
“We don’t know if it was mine,” he argued.
“The letter.” I reminded him. “Apparently, your mother wrote him a letter about a year ago, telling him that she gave birth to his son but was too afraid to come forward. I guess your father wasn’t very nice to her, and when she found out she was pregnant, she hid it from everyone.
And when she had her baby, she abandoned it at a hospital and left town. ”
Haz’s breathing was heavy and uneven. The way his chest rose and fell made me want to both hit something and wrap him up and comfort him.
The handwritten letter was the last thing in the folder, and when he lifted it out, the yellow file fell to the floor.
He scanned the letter, which didn’t even fill the entire length of the front of the page.
He couldn’t have read it all before looking up, eyes so overfull with tears that I wondered if he could see.
The paper crinkled in his hand when he made a fist. “They stole my DNA, then came back later to steal my identity, all because of a letter some woman wrote on her deathbed?”
The letter did say she was dying.
“Matteo planned to reach out to you. He, ah, wanted a relationship. It appears that he made changes to his will that made you a direct heir to everything he had,” I explained, eyes going to the other documents on the tabletop.
“No.” He denied it. “No way.”
“Nicholas Grimaldi must have learned about it, or maybe Matteo told him. It made him angry, and he murdered your father before he could tell anyone else about his heir. And now he wants to kill you too so you have no claim to the Salvatore dynasty and Grimaldi can take over like he always wanted.”
Haz tossed the crumpled letter onto the coffee table and shook his head. “This isn’t the kind of gossip I wanted, Kieran.”
“This isn’t gossip.”
“Well, it sure as hell isn’t true,” Haz yelled, throwing his arms wide. “Look at me! There’s no way I’m the son of some iconic mob boss. I can barely walk straight.”
“Superman’s son had asthma.”
I glanced at Ghost as though he’d lost his mind. “What the fuck?”
“Just saying,” Ghost mumbled.
“Say less,” I demanded and turned back to Haz, whose steady gaze was startling. “Haz?”
“How did you get all this?” He wanted to know.
“We found it last night.”
Haz glanced at Ghost. “You went with him?”
Ghost nodded.
Haz turned back to me. “Where did you go?”
“Grimaldi’s place.”
“Why?”
I blinked. “I told you. Because I was trying to protect you.”
“But how did you know he was who was trying to kill me? You didn’t get any of this”—he gestured to all the papers—“until you found it at his place.”
“I had my suspicions.” I hedged.
“Why?” he pressed.
I said nothing.
“How did you know it was Grimaldi that wanted me dead, Kieran?”
Fuck.
“Because he hired me to kill you.”