Killer barked and leaned against me even more. I scratched him behind his ears and the groan he let out made everyone laugh. Then he shifted and farted so loud it startled Ollie enough that he stumbled backwards. I laughed, thankful to the giant dog for demanding a subject change because the marriage talk was terrifying me. The fact the guys were hyping it up was throwing me for a loop and it seemed like a good idea to get away from it for the moment.
“Okay, okay. As much fun as family poop pick up is, we need to go back inside and get ready for dinner.” I palmed the top of Charlie’s head and directed her towards the house. “Everyone’s sleeping in their own bed tonight and we’re getting back into our routine. So y’all need full bellies and baths. If I send you to Naomi stinky, she’ll tan my hide.”
“No one gets to tan your hide, Sullie.”
Leon grinned at Lee. “Well…”
I lightly slapped his arm. “Hush.”
Dinner was filled with light talk about the kids and what they all wanted to do before summer ended. I ignored the stab of pain at the thought of leaving and going back to work in the city. There was enough of an underlying tension just under the surface in the room that I couldn’t think of getting into anything serious. I knew it was coming, though. If the kids hadn’t been attached to their fathers all day, we would’ve already had to stop and talk about what had happened while they were gone. Since I wasn’t sure what they were going to say, I was kind of glad for the chance to pretend things were completely normal for a while.
Naomi gathered the kids after their baths and we all said goodnight before the guys led me downstairs to Dominic’s office. The strain in the room grew by the minute until I was ready to pull my hair out. Dominic poured us each a glass of whiskey and I stared into my glass, knowing whatever they were about to say was going to be big.
“Maybe we should start from the beginning.” Leon drained his glass and poured himself another. “We’re all from very different backgrounds, Angel. Theo was a soldier. I was the VP of a motorcycle gang. And—”
“And my family ran a large portion of the underground world in Texas.” Dominic sighed and rubbed his temples. “My grandfather and then my father and now…me.”
I giggled. “The underground world in Texas? That can’t be real. It’s…Texas. We’ve got cattle and farms but…the mafia? Or the mob? Or whatever you mean…”
“We’ve also got the cartel and plenty of other people trying to move billions of dollars over the border. The underworld in Texas is just as booming as anywhere else in the world, Angel.” He sat in his office chair and swirled the whiskey in his glass before downing it in one go. “I was born into it. As soon as I tookover from my father, I started moving our business into more legal territories.”
I put my glass down hard enough that the whiskey sloshed out of it and onto the desk.
“I’m sorry. I’m struggling here. Exactly which illegal activities were your family involved in?”
“It wasn’t Dominic, Angel. As soon as he came into power, he changed things.” Leon brushed hair out of my face. “His changes cost the family hundreds of millions in illegal gains and his wife.”
“His wife? W-what do you mean?”
Dominic leaned forward and rested his tattooed forearms on the desk.
“He means that my wife, Ollie’s biological mother and the bitch you knocked out today, saw the financial loss as a permanent ailment and left us. She was a money hungry ladder climber but I didn’t see it at first. I thought Ollie needed his mother and I went to get her.”
“Where’d she go?”
“To a man named Dimitri Stanovich. He broke apart from my family years earlier and went even darker than my family had ever been. He started a drug empire with a side of trafficking. Which is something my family never fucking touched. He pushed drugs that were made with synthetic Fentanyl and no batch was ever the same. As soon as he got any power people started dying all over the state from his shit. He had no qualms about where his men sold their shit, either, and he made a lot of money fast.” Dominic looked at Leon and there was so much grief on his face for a moment that I wanted to go to him and comfort him. “I should’ve crushed him like the fucking bug he was when I found out what he was doing but I was distracted and I sent someone I thought I could trust to handle him.”
Leon walked over and put his hand on Dominic’s shoulder.
“It’s not your fault. What happened to Grace had nothing to do with you.”
I looked between the two of them and watched as they silently communicated, silently comforted each other in whatever they were thinking of.
“Who’s Grace?”
“She was my sister,” Leon said, and the roughness in his words grated my already fragile heart.
CHAPTER 50
Leon
The same pain that always hit me when I thought of Grace hit and I rubbed at my chest.
“Lee’s mom.”
Sutton’s eyes went even wider and filled with tears.
“What happened? If you don’t mind telling me.”
