Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“It’s fine. Just a couple stitches.”
“And a re-broken wrist,” Gav added.
“You’re not helping,” I told him.
“He deserves to know.”
“Wait, are we leaving?” I asked when Gav turned over the SUV and started to back up.
“Yeah. We are heading back to the city so your father and Zaro can go to Salvatore.”
That was maybe the only thing he could have said to make me agree to leaving before I had all the answers I wanted.
“Dad, I can do that,” I objected when my father reached across me to grab my belt and fasten it.
He ignored that as he fastened his own belt.
“Gav?”
“Yeah?”
“Did I kill Ira?”
He took his foot off the gas and turned over the seat to look back at me. “No, Cait. I promise. You didn’t kill him.”
I expected to feel a wave of relief to learn I hadn’t taken another life. I was oddly numb about it, though. He’d been taunting me, trying to get me to screw up in my grief. So he could get closer, could grab me, could torture the information he wanted out of me.
“Where’s Mona?”
“In the other car. Didn’t think you’d want to ride with her.”
“What happens to her?” I asked. “She shot my dad.”
“She had no choice,” my father insisted.
“She had a choice. She made a choice. She had the gun. She could have shot Ira. She chose to shoot you.”
My father winced at that but shook his head.
“You don’t understand, Nugget. Not everyone is as strong as you are.”
Strong.
That might have been the first time I’d ever heard someone use that adjective to describe me.
“Dad, she was working with Ira,” I reminded him. “She stood by while he beat me.”
His gaze slid away at that.
“He was threatening her daughter.”
“And I’m sure he was threatening me too. But you didn’t do what he wanted.”
“He wouldn’t let her go. She was at his side the whole time.”
“She wasn’t by his side in those woods. She raised her arm and she pulled the trigger and she shot you.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s not. It’s not complicated. You just want to believe that because you loved her.”
“Love. Present tense.”
“Fuck,” Zaro hissed when the car hit a particularly deep hole.
“Sorry,” Gav said. “You good?”
“Yeah.” Zaro was breathing hard, his hand pressed to his side.
He was hurting.
I hoped that Ira was hurting just as bad. If not worse.
“You sure you can make it all the way back to the city?” Gav asked.
“Once we’re off these rural-ass back-county roads I should be fine.”
The car fell into silence then. The air in the backseat was thick enough to slice until my father finally spoke.
“I want you to be able to forgive her.”
“He could have killed me, Dad. Twice. And she could have stopped it both times. I don’t know if I can forgive her for that. I don’t know how you can.”
“You don’t know what we’ve shared.”
“You’re right. You kept it from me. Maybe if I’d been given a chance to know her, I would understand this better. But I wasn’t. So I don’t.”
I glanced up, catching Gav’s gaze in the rearview and watching him mouth, “Good for you.”
My father and I fell back into silence for the rest of the drive. The only sounds we heard were the rush of the air around the car and the low thrum of classical music on the radio.
It wasn’t until my father and Zaro were led into the clinic that I spoke again.
“Do you think I was too harsh with my father?” I asked as Gav led me into the waiting room of the clinic.
“That’s not really my place to say. But if I were beaten as a woman stood by, then watched that same woman shoot my father, I think I’d be pretty unforgiving. But I’m a dick. You’re not.”
“I don’t know if it is even all about Mona. I’m just… angry in general.”
“Fucking look at you, babe. You have a right to be angry. You’ve been through the wringer these past few weeks.”
“Was it just Ira?” I asked. “Or was he involved with other people?”
“From what I heard so far, it was just Ira. Ira found out your father was working with us. He made your father start skimming merchandise so he could sell it.”
“For how long?”
“Seems like a couple of years.”
“Why did it go sideways now then?”
“Because your father was getting squirrelly about us finding out he was stiffing us. So he did the last four hauls without cutting Ira in.”
“Is that why the money was stashed?”
“Yeah. I think your father was going to try to pay us back out of his cut for what Ira forced him into skimming. But when Ira found out, he threatened your father.”
“So he disappeared.”
“Yeah.”
“But he… he didn’t warn me.”
Gav’s jaw ticked. “Yeah, that was fucked up. Of course, Ira would come for you eventually. I wish I could have satisfying answers for you, babe. But people just do stupid shit. They don’t think straight when they’re scared.
And that lizard brain kicks in and all some people can think about is protecting themselves. ”
I guess that was fair.
Even if it didn’t sit right with me that he would value his life more than mine. When I was the one who was innocent in all this.
“What happens now?”
“We wait until your father gets treated. Then you decide if you want to talk to him more or not.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then we go home. He’s a grown-ass man. He can figure out where he’s going.
” He wrapped an arm around my hips and pulled me closer.
“You don’t have to try to repair your relationship tonight.
Your father is out of danger now. You can take some time to heal and sort through everything.
Then you can deal with the aftermath of all this shit. ”
I liked that idea.
I liked it enough that I chickened out of even seeing my father again. I sent Gav in to talk to him, to tell him that I wasn’t feeling well and needed to go home, and that I would be in touch with him in the morning.
“How’d he take it?”
“He understood. He told me to take care of you.”
That was the dad I knew.
The one who thought of me.
Who wanted me to be okay.
“Let’s go home,” he said, reaching for me.
Home.
I liked how he said that.
Like it was where we both belonged.
And as he led me through the doors and pulled me with him into the bedroom, to pull me into his arms, I had a feeling that was exactly right.
I belonged.
There.
With him.
“What now?” I asked sometime later.
“Leftover Italian?” he asked, giving me a knowing smile.
“You know the way to a girl’s heart.”
The look he shot me then was soft.
“I hope so.”