“Good?” Her response surprised me. I’d expected a healthy amount of contempt, especially from a member of the military.
“Yes. Good. That you slaughtered them, I mean.” Bending, she peeked into the oven. “How much longer on this stuff?”
“Five, ten minutes.” I couldn’t let it go. “It doesn’t bother you?”
“Why should it?” Her eyes, when they met mine, were clear and forthright. Guileless. She meant it. My chest tightened at the idea of her easy acceptance.
“Because I killed people, Em. And you…” I gestured at her.Look at you.“You were in the army. Don’t you have this elevated sense of right and wrong?”
She ran a hand from her jaw to the back of her neck. “The army was all about authority. Duty. Discipline, more than right and wrong.” She paused, chewing the corner of her mouth as she considered. “I think what I have is an elevated sense of justice. Vigilantism or not, that’s what you dispensed to those monsters. Justice.”
I tipped my head back in acknowledgement.Justicetrembled on her lips with something more than a simplistic theoretical conviction. There was a reason she felt as she did. “Why do you feel this sense of justice?”
Turning, she set her tea on the counter with a click. “What about your uncle?”
The subject change was less than graceful but I went with it. “What about him?”
“What did he do to help your sister?”
Rubbing a spot over my chest, I straightened from where I was leaning. She had a way of arrowing directly to the crux of an issue. How had she known how deeply I had struggled with that very issue? I had been so angry for so long, until I finally accepted the way of things. Or at least, I told myself I had accepted it. “There was nothing he could do. What they wanted was impossible.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
She didn’t believe me. “There wasn’t. They wanted exclusive rights to the city’s imports and exports, and King wasn’t going to give them that.”
“Not for a niece.”
Her murmur sliced through me, opening to the light ideas I’d kept hidden for years. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t. Not really. It just strikes me as odd that you’re working for him now—killing for him—when you, a twelve year old boy, was able to take care of the problem all on your own and he hadn’t lifted a finger.”
I opened the oven door and used a dish towel to pull the shepherd’s pie out.
“What happened after that?”
“He brought me over to Philadelphia. And then Boston. Taught me the way of family, had me trained.”
“But you were only twelve.”
“I was man enough.”
“What about your parents?” She was looking at me as though she couldn’t understand how I had ended up owing my life and loyalty to the mob. And I guess it was a fairly foreign concept.
“My parents were dead. My father years before and my mother a year earlier. My sister was the only one left.”
“My God. She was raising you? How old was she?”
I poked the top of the casserole, letting some of the steam out. “She was nineteen when she died. Eighteen when our mother died and she took me in.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “I guess the idea of family, especially a big crime family, was a lure.”
“A necessity,” I corrected. “I was an orphan. I had no other family.”
“No other options. They offered safety, security, a sense of belonging.” She defined my choices with disturbing accuracy.
“Loyalty.” I tapped the tattoo over my heart.
“Without his protection, you’d have been vulnerable.”
