Chapter Six
Sweat collected along my palms, and I wiped them nervously on my pants as I walked toward the empty dock. We’d told each other to come alone. Not that either of us would. My men littered the area, blending in with the general population, and I suspected Dante had his men doing the same.
What he wouldn’t suspect is the secret weapons I had. If he tried anything, he would be surprised where the attack came from. My capacity for trust was a thin thread, fraying in the middle as more tension was applied. It wouldn’t take much for the thread to break under pressure.
“Hello, Ava.” Dante’s low voice came up behind me. I turned to face him, the wind whipping at my hair.
“Hello, Dante.” I smiled up at him, but it didn’t reach my eyes. “Thank you for coming.”
He smirked. “I was surprised to get your call.”
“Now that I know,” I murmured, reaching my hand out slowly to trace my fingers along his face. “I can’t believe I ever missed their resemblance to you.”
Dante stiffened at my words, but he didn’t make any move to remove my curious fingers.
“Kenzi inherited your nose,” I told him with a small, authentic smile as I traced his furrowing features. “But Libby got your fire and that blazing look in your eyes.”
Removing my hand, I took a small step back, waiting for his next move. His throat worked, blue eyes brimming with tears he wouldn’t dare to let fall. There was more emotion playing across his face now than I had ever seen before. He was always so stoic and put together. Even when he smiled, but now, that carefully erected barrier shifted beneath the moving sands.
“How did you find out?”
I swallowed back my own lump of emotion. “Libby.”
Dante’s eyes widened at her name. “She knew?” he asked incredulously. Nodding sadly, I held out a large manilla envelope to him. He took it without question, peeling it open to reveal the contents. It was everything Libby had managed to acquire on Kenzi, my grandfather, and a few other shady deals that Mark managed to decrypt.
“She knew a lot more than just that,” I told him, watching his expression closely. The further he dug into the files, the redder his face became, until anger was all he seemed to know. Mark had added in some special footage of the ”fake” wedding as well.
“Motherfucker,” he growled dangerously, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the evidence tightly in front of him. The papers crinkled under his fierce grip, bending to his power. “You should have told me. The fucking traditore.”
“I told you to look closer to home,” I reminded him bitterly. “You just didn’t want to listen.”
Dante lifted his head and sneered at me. “I don’t like games, Avaleigh. You should have been straight with me.”
“Sure,” I scoffed, crossing my arms defensively. “Blame the kidnapped victim for not spilling her guts to you in the middle of a funeral where my enemies surrounded me. Makes sense. Christian ordered Eduardo to rape me as punishment for our discussion already. What do you think he would have done if he’d found out that I outed him to you?”
Confusion tilted his face, making him look older than his forty-five years.
“What do you mean, kidnapped you? Dashkov is the one who took you from Elias.”
Laughter spilled from my lips, tainted with disbelief at his naivety. He honestly believed that? Had Elias told him nothing?
“Elias sold me to Matthias to save Christian,” I told him, bitterness coating my tongue at the memory. “I helped them take down Elias’s shipping port. That was my idea. Then we staged the fake wedding to draw Elias out. Libby was shot by a sniper. One who worked for you, by the way. Paid off by Christian. It’s all outlined in the file I gave you.”
“You’re telling me Christian killed not only his sister, but his father?” he scoffed. “Come on, Ava. You really expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t need you to believe it when the proof is right before you,” I snapped. “I’ve outlined everything to a T. These are all records you can scrounge up yourself. You don’t have to take my word for it.”
“Why?” he pushed. “Why would Christian kill them?”
“Elias got in the way.” A heavy weight was lifting from my chest as I told him about the puppeteer Elias had been working with all these years. The man behind the curtain. I didn’t care if he believed me. That wasn’t what would cleanse the bitterness that had clung to me since childhood. No, all that mattered was I was finally able to tell him. The one man who had been kind to me when no one else but my sisters were.
“And Libby?”
“She betrayed him,” I admitted. “The fake wedding was her idea to draw them out. But he had plans to kill her long before that because he didn’t need her. Her final use to him was framing us for her murder.”
“Us,” Dante murmured. “Wedding wasn’t so fake, huh?”
I chuckled. “I married Matthias weeks before the fake wedding. It’s why I am Pakhan now.”
“So, is this why you asked me here?” He gave the file a slight shake. “To air out all of Christian and Elias’s dirty laundry to me?”
“Part of the reason,” I admitted with a shrug. “You deserved to know what happened to your daughters. You’ll find one marked Kenzi as well.”
“Kendra told me she is doing well at college.” He seemed puzzled that I would have anything to hand over when it came to the daughter he believed was on the other side of the pond living a normal college student life.
“Kenzi never made it to college.”
Dante swore.
“Kendra either has her head buried in the sand or was complicit in her own daughter’s sale.”
“Sale?”
“Elias sold her to the Chameleon Agency.”
Dante’s face paled beneath his Italian coloring. It was apparent he knew who they were or had at least heard the name.
“You’re wrong,” he jeered. “He would never do that. Elias knew their reputation. Why would he...?”
“Get rid of the one daughter who was of no use to him?” I mocked. “Did you bother to even contemplate whether your brother suspected an affair? That maybe he knew that Kenzi and Libby weren’t his? He kept Libby because she was useful. Kenzi wasn’t, and Elias only kept around things that were useful.”
“So why did he keep you around, then?”
Well, that stung like a bitch. Rage thundered through me at his callousness. I almost walked away. Almost.
A new wave of anger swept over me as I thought back to all the times he knew about my predicament and never once thought to help.
Nope. This useless bitch was gone. Sayonara, fucker.
“Wait,” Dante called out as I turned on my heel to begin walking back toward the shore. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
Turning, I raised a brow at him, incredulity written on my face easier to read than a neon stripper sign.
“You think?”
“I’m trying to wrap my head around all of this, Ava,” he fumed. Dante ran his hand angrily through his hair, stressing the roots, his jaw clenched. “You’re telling me my own nephew not only murdered his sister but also committed patricide, and my brother sold off one of my daughters. That’s a lot for anyone to take in.”
My lips curled into a snarl, gaze hardening as I thought back to all the information I had been slammed with in the last few months. “Oh?” I bared my teeth at him and let the bottled-up rage unleash itself. “You mean like finding out the man who had called himself my father since I was eleven, who beat me and tortured me, was in fact, not my father but the one who abducted, sold, and then bought my mother? That he raped her and used her. The man who sold me so that his precious son could live?”
Dante stood stunned before me, unable to form any words, his lips pressed into a thin line.
“How about how the man I thought was my brother would brush up against me time after time when I was growing up? How he threatened to rape me? You want to know what he did to me when he told you he had ‘rescued’ me?”
That fucking word got air quotes and everything.
“He would wake me up with a stun gun. Or a cattle prod. Sometimes with a whip. Hell, one day I woke up to him trying to drown me.” My voice had risen, silent tears tracking down my cheeks. The look of horror on his face didn’t help. He honestly had no clue what Christian had done to me. “After the funeral, he told Eduardo to rape me so I would learn my place. You want to know what I did?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “I smashed his skull in with a rock. I killed him, Dante. Ended him. And it wasn’t enough. Because every person involved is going to bleed.”
Might have left out that one of those people was going to be Kenzi.
I doubted Dante would take well to me wanting to kill his only remaining daughter.
“Is your mind scrambled yet, Dante?” I mocked. “Heard enough? Because I’ve got more where that came from.”
Dozens of possible things he might do were running through my head in that moment. Scoffing and brushing me off were among them. Attempting to kill me was another. Maybe he would simply nod his head in acceptance and take it all in stride.
Stumbling into his chest as his arms wrapped tightly around me, the soft scent of leather and smoke ensconcing me was not what I expected. One hand cradled the back of my head while another rubbed soothingly down my back.
“I should have done more,” he croaked. Guilt and regret were choking him. Something wet hit the top of my head, and I belatedly realized he was crying. Dante Romano, head of the Italian Mafia, was crying. “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry, piccolina.”
Shit. Now I was crying even harder.
It was cathartic.
Cleansing.
Exactly what I had been needing. To know that someone who’d known me as a child cared. That it wasn’t all a carefully placed fa?ade.
“What do you need from me?” He pulled back, his thumbs wiping at the tears along my cheeks. Fuck, had any of my men seen me crying? My gaze darted around the docks. “No one but Vas saw anything,” he assured me.
Oops.
Dante smiled proudly. “I knew you didn’t come alone, Ava,” he said. “It was expected. I am not alone either.” I let out a nervous laugh that was wobbly and wet from crying.
“So,” he started again. “What do you need? I am at your service.”
“This man,” I pulled out a picture of my grandfather from the stack of papers I gave him. “His name is Seamus McDonough, he’s—”
“Your biological grandfather,” he finished for me.
Nodding, I kept going. “In her journal, Libby mentioned Elias talking to a man about me. She identified him as the man with the silver cane.”
“What does that have to do with Seamus McDonough?” he queried, looking at the picture again.
“At the gala, I saw him and my grandmother.” I took out another picture that Mark had managed to obtain from the gala’s security cameras. “Look at what he’s using.”
“Okay…” Skepticism colored his voice. “There are plenty of canes out there that have a silver cross on them.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “But look at the emblem just beneath it carved into the wood.”
Dante still didn’t look convinced, and I hadn’t expected him to be.
Not yet, anyway.
“Now,” I flipped to the photograph of Madam Therese, “look at this cane.”
His forehead puckered, his eyes darting between the pages as he took in every detail he could.
“Do you recognize her?” I asked him. “Or the symbol?”
Dante shook his head. “No.” He sighed. “But I’ve met Seamus McDonough before, and he never had a cane. Certainly never needed one, but shit, it’s been nearly twenty-five years since I last saw him.”
That got my attention.
“Where was this?”
Dante thought about it for a moment, his eyes flicking up as he recalled the memory. “In Boston. My father was still alive and running la familgia at the time. He wanted to show me the ropes and help to secure a new merger.”
Merger?
“What year was this?”
“It was 1996, I think.”
The year my mother went missing.
“Was your father looking at merging with McDonough Shipping Corp?” Part of me already knew the answer.
“Yes,” he answered slowly, curious to see where my train of thought was going. “Elias never found out, but my father had been underbidding him for years. Taking his clients and spreading rumors and planting evidence for the FBI to find.”
“And then you killed him.”
There was no regret on Dante’s face. Nothing. Not that I would judge him for that. Dante’s father was a horrible man.
“Did Seamus McDonough want the merger?”
“It was his idea.”
“I sense a but coming…”
Dante clicked his tongue and let out a breath. “But when we arrived in Boston to negotiate with him, he had no clue what we were talking about. Told my father he would never align himself with anyone whose shipment involved human cargo.”
“Is that how the war started?”
He gave me a grim nod.
The Italian-Irish war was carved into Seattle’s history as the bloodiest gang war on the West Coast. There were so many lives lost on both sides as hails of gunfire littered the streets day after day. Nowhere was safe. The police were at a loss, and gang violence rose until the day Dante had put an end to it.
By putting a bullet through his father’s skull.
“Here’s the thing.” Dante rolled his shoulders back to ease the tension that was no doubt gathering there. “The initial conversation took place here in Seattle. In person.”
“Wait…” I blinked rapidly several times, trying to process what he just told me. “But you said…”
“That’s why my father was so upset,” Dante told me with a small shake of his head. “He had a face-to-face encounter with him. Sat down and had coffee. Fucked a few whores.”
Well, I could have lived without that information.
Wait.
“No, it couldn’t have been him.”
“Trust me, Ava,” he assured me. “It was. I saw him myself several times over the two days he was here in June 1996.”
“You don’t understand,” I argued as I combed through my phone. One of the crime scene pictures Libby had of my mother’s trashed dorm room held a photo. It hadn’t meant anything before, but now that I was putting dates together, it couldn’t have been him.
“What were the exact dates?” I asked frantically as I pulled up the photo.
“June fifteenth was the day he arrived. He left two days later.” He frowned. “Why is that important?”
“Because—” I turned the phone around to show him the photo. “This is my mother’s graduation photo, taken with my grandmother and grandfather.” I zoomed the phone in so he could see the date on the bottom of the picture.
“It’s dated June fifteenth, 1996.”
Dante checked and rechecked, as if what he was seeing might disappear if he kept looking away and back again. “That’s impossible,” he whispered. “If that’s him…who the fuck met with my father all those years ago?”
“That’s what I need you to find out.”