“Ah. More secrets you’ve been keeping from your old man? She’s rubbed off on you, that con-woman.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m becoming a better person,” I retorted.
“So you think—” A series of loud bangs interrupted the conversation. “Yes?” The door blasted open so hard that I thought it was going to shatter. Callista came rushing in, and there was a stream of blood running down her face. My dad’s chair clattered to the ground as he jumped up. “What the hell happened!”
“Arturo!” Callista said. “I tried to stop him, but he said that he knew you didn’t kill Denise.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“He just left for the Costa’s estate.” She was panicked. “He said he’s going to finish the job.”
Chapter Nineteen:Denise
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the smile off of my face. As I drove, the sun would occasionally catch my ring, and it would double the grin on my face. My cheeks hurt so badly that I wasn’t convinced my face would ever not be sore. When I made the plan to drag Ashton up to Minnesota and marry him, it was more a means to an end. I just wanted to be able to perish with the thought that I had an attachment to someone who truly loved me. I didn’t plan on actually getting ahusbandor a future. The thought that maybe I would actually be able to create a new life with such an amazing man was making me the happiest I’d ever been in my entire life.
We’d have to backtrack, of course, in the event that things actually worked out. I wanted a first date, and I wanted our first weekend away. We’d remain married, but we’d go back to the typical way to do things. That thought excited me, too, though. I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering to what I might wear on my first date and where he’d take me if he could plan it. After a couple of years, we could get re-engaged and have a traditional wedding. Hopefully, we could keep our hands off of one another for me not to get knocked up by then.
I still didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was going to survive. At the end of the day, both Illiana Costa and Anthony Carducci wanted me dead. Illiana would make good on her promise to let Ashton go if she came out of it alive, and Anthony was Ashton’s father, so he’d spare him if he came out of it alive, but neither of them had any real reason to keep me. On top of that, both the Costa family and the Carducci family had an agent that had their own agenda. Callista and Carmine had spent a lot of time forwarding their own plans, and I was going to come in and ruin it all with a selfish desire to run off with my new husband.
Maybe running off wasn’t the best plan.
What if things went exactly as Ashton and I were hoping they would? What if Illiana and Anthony took one another out, thus freeing Ashton and me from their holds? Then what? If we ran off to California, it just left people like Callista and Carmine behind to helm the commands that their parents are leaving behind.
That didn’t sound like something that would be good for anyone involved.
Callista was working with the police, and I still had no idea what Carmine was up to. He wasn’t a Costa, and given the way he was behaving, he knew that he wasn’t. Was he just playing a double agent for the Skully family? Was there something specific that they were up to? Would they be relieved or enraged by Illiana’s death if she did die? Would I be creating an even bigger war than the one I thought I was ending before I planned to blow off in the wind?
By the time I was pulling up and parking at the Costa estate, my mind had gone from blissful to calculating. The California dream was a nice one to chase, and maybe, just maybe, if I could survive all of this, I could make a plan to actually end up there one day, but after spending so much time trying to save my family, could I just cut and run? If I’d learned anything, it was that things were so much more complicated than I thought at first. A war with the police. A war with the Skullys. Maybe even a full-fledged family war with so much territory up for grabs. By some odd chance, if things did turn out the way I wanted them to, I was almost giving myself a responsibility to stay and finish the job, to see to it that my siblings could live the happy lives that they wanted.
Ashton and I had another conversation to have, but maybe I wouldn’t count my chickens before they hatched. If I survived past Wednesday, then Ashton and I could talk about what responsibility we had to our families.
Finally, I took a deep breath and turned off my car, an all-black Maserati that I rented to keep myself out of Cherri’s car for the remainder of the time. If I ended up staying in Chicago past this week, I’d have to invest in a car of my own, but for now, this one would serve its purpose. There were a few things that I knew I needed to take care of before we got to the Wednesday ambush time, and the first of them was to talk to Illiana and make sure that things were still going as planned. I entered the house, walked right past the dining room where Bennett and Cherri were sitting, and climbed the stairs to head toward Illiana’s office.
“Welcome home.” Halfway between Illiana’s office and the stairs, a voice beckoned to me. It was dark but familiar. I turned and saw Carmine leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “Sister.”
My purse, an over-the-shoulder bag that hung around my waist, seemed to buzz with the DNA test results. “Thank you.”
“Were you withhim?” he hissed.
I recoiled at the harshness in his voice. “I was.”
“And?”
“I was just about to go and brief Illiana on what we discussed,” I said.
“Everything that needs to go to her is supposed to go through me first,” Carmine huffed.
There was a notable change in his demeanor. Not only did he have a certain darkness to him now, but he carried himself with a heightened regality, similar to how Illiana carried herself but also somehow different. His nose was pointing a little higher in the air, and his black hair was swept straight back across his head, unlike the left or right side that he’d had up to that point. Something had changed, but what, I wasn’t sure.
“I’ll speak directly with her,” I pushed back, “but I welcome your company.”
With that, I turned around and started down toward her office. Footsteps on the ground behind me let me know that Carmine was following me, and though it felt like a bad idea to keep my back turned to him, I didn’t want him to see me sweat, so I continued walking forward. He probably wasn’t dumb enough to kill me in the middle of Illiana Costa’s house.
Right?
Fortunately, I made it to the office without getting a bullet in the back. I didn’t knock. I opened the door and let myself in. It wasn’t like there was any favor left for me to sink with her, so why not get a little brazen in what time I had left?
“Hm,” she snickered when I entered. “Welcome back.”
