Chapter 15 #2
Before I can even get another word out, Damien’s on the phone.
“Yeah, Vincent? Have some guys sent over to put bars on the windows. We need to close access to the balcony, too. There,” he adds, turning off his phone.
“Problem solved. We’ll lock her in the entrance hall in the meantime.
No windows there. Unless you think your stepdaughter would try to bash her head against the mirrors and use the shards to—”
“Come on, Damien, be serious for a second,” protests Logan, as I listen to Damien, my eyes wide. “She’s been through a lot. Maybe I should give my therapist a call.”
“I’m not suicidal!” I cry out hastily. “I’m fine! But you can’t just fucking tell someone that everything they’ve ever known is a lie, and then go waltz away as if it’s nothing!”
“She has a point,” concedes Damien. “Well, what do you want to know? I’ll let you ask one question.”
“What the fuck?”
“Was that your question?” he asks, reaching behind me to put his hand on the doorknob.
“No! Wait! Uhm…”
I frown, trying to think of something to ask.
The crazy thing is, even though this entire mystery feels even more confusing than ever, I can’t think of a single thing that would clear it up.
There’s no string I could tug on to even begin to unravel it.
The whole thing is a knot and my thoughts are so jumbled I barely remember what the mystery is.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask more about my apparent birth mother, Lia. What did she look like? What were her hobbies? Did she treat me well? What the hell does Damien mean, she was a mafia princess?
But at the same time, I know that should not be my main concern. And as I look at Damien, I realize his patience is all but worn out. He’s waiting, his jaw ticking, and he clearly isn’t going to allow me to ask anything but the one question he’s promised me.
Meanwhile, Logan is hanging back, apparently happy to let Damien take the lead once more, now that I’m no longer in danger.
In danger.
Why the fuck am I in danger if Damien doesn’t want to kill me anymore?
Am I in danger? Yes, Logan said I am. I believe him, though I’m not sure why.
No, I really shouldn’t fucking believe him. What the hell is wrong with me?
But that’s not the mystery. That’s not what I’ve been trying to solve since the very beginning. Until my thoughts became so focused on Quill and myself I forgot what really mattered.
My parents. My real ones.
Even if Lia was my birth mother, the only parents I have are Laura and William Day. That hasn’t changed, and it never will.
My stomach twists with guilt as I realize that lately, their deaths have been pushed to the background, what with everything that has happened.
I’m betraying their memory, I think with a lump in my throat. I always told myself that even if I didn’t come first with my parents, they came first for me.
Suddenly I wonder if I did once come first for Lia.
Maybe, in some weird, distorted way, I could come first for Logan, too. Didn’t he go behind his best friend’s back to save me?
No.
What kind of a daughter am I?
Quill pretty much confirmed their death was a soldier kill. Devil soldiers carry out Devil orders. Which means Damien Wells and Logan Colt are responsible for everything.
All my anger and self-hatred come surging back as I realize I’ve been playing nice with the people who ordered my parents’ death.
I clench my jaw and resolutely face the two men who seem to be getting more impatient by the minute. Well, at least Damien is. Logan, meanwhile, is typing away on his phone, apparently no longer caring about a thing now that I’m safely trapped in an apartment in Devil Tower.
In a strangled voice, I ask, “Why did you kill my parents? My real parents? Why did you kill them?”
That question seems to take them both by surprise. Logan looks up from his phone, raising an eyebrow while Damien turns a cold gaze on me that makes me shiver.
For a moment, neither of them say a word. Then Damien speaks.
“We didn’t kill them, Piper.”
“You didn’t.” I repeat the words in a disbelieving snort. I may be lacking in brain cells, as Damien says, but I’m definitely not that dumb. “I don’t believe that for one second. It was a Devil kill.”
“It was a soldier kill,” corrects Damien, as if that makes any difference. “Neither Logan nor I ordered it. And we have no idea who did.” He looks at me intently. “I was expecting you to ask why I wanted to kill you.”
“Well, you said only one question, and I asked the most important one.”
“Good girl,” says Logan, and I snort again loudly. “Snorting is not very elegant, Piper.”
I roll my eyes so hard that it makes me wonder if my eyeballs are going to get stuck like that. Or at least, if Logan is going to make a comment to that effect. Luckily, he turns his attention back to his phone screen.
“Okay, I won’t snort anymore,” I say facetiously to the bloodthirsty killer who’s back to typing away. Then I turn to Damien expectantly.
“I wanted to kill you,” he continues, somewhat dramatically, “because you’re a loose end to a problem that I really did not want to deal with.”
“A problem?”
“Yeah. One of those little, annoying problems that could bring all of Devil down.”
I stare at him. “How?”
“Remember how I told you your mother was a mafia princess?”
I wince at the word mother, but this description of mafia princess really confuses me. “Uhm, yeah. But what mafia are you even talking about? I didn’t know there was any mafia in the state.”
“There isn’t,” confirms Damien, “but there certainly was. Lia was the daughter of a made man. She was raped by the capo’s son, and then forced into marriage with him. His name was Carmelo Moretti.”
My eyes widen with horror. My mother… raped? Then forced to marry her rapist?
My heart cripples at those words. I can’t imagine how much worse my own rape would have been had I been forced to marry Liam after.
Logan is back to paying attention, gazing at me with a pained expression that tells me how difficult those distant memories must be for him to hear spoken so plainly.
Then my stomach plummets when I realize the full significance of what Damien has said.
“Lia was pregnant… with me. I’m the daughter of a rape.”
Neither Logan nor Damien contradicts my words. I sway slightly, before sagging against the front door.
“Lia was so young when she had you,” adds Damien, and my heart cripples even more at those words.
“But Logan got her out of that situation. He helped her, and took care of you. But it was the catalyst to an all-out war that pitted us against the mafia, a mafia we were initially a part of. We came out on top, though in the battle, your mother lost her life.”
Logan’s face tenses like he’s trying hard to keep his emotions under control.
“Now Devil has taken the mafia’s place,” continues Damien.
He pauses as I try to assimilate all of this information.
“We defeated the mafia, but we didn’t kill every single member of it.
” He glowers back at Logan, who’s back to listening with a neutral expression on his face.
“I always said we needed to find every last one of those fuckers, line them up, and shoot them execution-style. That will always be my biggest regret.”
A shudder runs through me at realizing that Damien’s biggest regret is that he didn’t… kill dozens of people. Or hundreds. How many people exactly made up that mafia? How many people does he wish he had killed?
“There’s still time,” cuts in Logan, and I shiver even harder.
“It’s a lot harder to go after people who’ve been in hiding for years,” objects Damien. “But we have no choice, if we want to save Devil. The threat will remain until the last members of the mafia have been wiped off the face of this Earth.”
I swallow nervously. “Okay. But… what does that have to do with me? With my parents?” I stand straighter, trying to circle back to my initial question and push away the rest of this information.
“What does all of this have to do with my real parents’ death?” I insist. “Why are they dead?”
“For the same reason that you’re in danger,” Damien says again.
“Okay.” My nostrils flare and it’s all I can do again to not stomp my foot. I’m so fucking frustrated with Damien speaking in riddles. “And why is that?”
“Because you’re the loose end to this case,” he answers maddeningly.
But then after a beat, he adds, “Whoever gets to you first has a clear advantage in the war that is brewing once more. You are at the very heart of this conflict. The daughter of the rightful heir to the mafia, and a symbol of betrayal and cruelty on both sides. Your parents were merely inconveniently in the way.”
My heart thuds painfully as I take in the significance of those words. It’s a sickening, crippling blow to realize that I’m the reason for their deaths.
“You killed them,” I lash out, as if that accusation can possibly relieve some of the guilt that’s making me nauseous.
“We didn’t.”
“So who did?” I cry out, giving way to the intense frustration seething in me.
The silence that follows my words is so long I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever get the answer I so desperately need.
At last, Damien says, in a very slow, quiet voice, “That’s just the problem, Piper. We don’t know.”