My words hurt Luciano. I know it. He doesn’t show it, other than the slight twitch of his jaw. Deep down, I know if Luciano had been aware of how terrible her mom is, he would have done something about it. And the knowledge that he didn’t is going to sit with him for a long fucking time.
He turns to face me, his expression set firm. “Fine. But before you do that, I get time with her.”
I give a sharp nod, and then everything goes to hell.
“Hey! What are you doing over there?” a voice yells out.
Every single one of us draws a gun, but it’s still too dark to see, and then I hear Beckett.
“Put your gun down, motherfucker!” he shouts as three shots ring out, two from one gun and then one from another, before I hear two thuds and everything goes silent.
We all take off in the direction that Beckett went, screaming his name as we rush over to him. He’s on the ground, groaningas he holds the right side of his chest. Blood gushes through his fingers, thick and crimson.
“Fuck,” Caleb says as he rips off his shirt and uses it to apply pressure to Beckett’s wound.
“Who was that? Where’d he go?” I bark as several guys take off in different directions.
Xander, Cash, Caleb, and Luciano kneel beside my baby brother, pulling off pieces of their own clothing to use as towels as they give first aid to Beckett while he slips into shock.
“Here!” Cassian calls from a distance.
I run toward him, heart pounding, stopping short as Cassian wrestles with a man in a security uniform. Luciano runs up, taking in the guy on the ground.
“We need to get your brother to Seattle Med. I have a team who will meet us there,” Luciano says. “Cassian can deal with this asshole. His gunshot isn’t life-threatening.”
Beckett’s might be.
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. Beckett has passed out when I get back to them. Without words, the four of us lift him and move quickly to our SUV, while Luciano jogs ahead and opens the back door for us. None of us speaks as Cash tears out of the cemetery following Luciano’s SUV.
I sit in the back seat, with Beckett slumped between Caleb and me. When I meet his eyes, I see the same fear that I’m feeling right now. Caleb might not be related by blood, but he’s been Beckett’s best friend for years; he’s family to us.
Caleb keeps his fingers pressed to Beckett’s pulse point on his neck, while I quietly pray to whoever is listening that my baby brother will survive.
Because I can’t lose someone else that I love.
CHAPTER 41
Ace
I jerkawake as the same recurring nightmare I’ve had for the past year runs through my mind.
A woman walks into my hospital room. She looks familiar, but her hair is brown, and she has thick-rimmed black glasses on. I’m so out of it I can’t move or speak, but I see her. I hear her. She tells me I’m going to go to sleep for good, and it frightens me. Her voice is evil. I’ve heard it before. The woman pulls out a syringe and uncaps it before she slides the long needle into the secondary IV. Her ring flashes off one of the lights in the room as she does. But then I hear Luciano’s voice from a distance. The woman immediately pulls the syringe out and shoves it into her bag before she scurries from the room. Luciano yells, but I can’t make sense of it as I drift into darkness.
The thing I’ve tried to convince myself wasn’t possible is becoming reality.It was her. That woman was my mother. I can’t confirm it. My mind was so fuzzy in that hospital room, and I could barely stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time for weeks. My own mother killed my father and then paid to have me killed, but when it didn’t work, she tried to take care ofit herself. If it hadn’t been for Luciano showing up at exactly the right time, I might not be alive right now.
How am I supposed to obey Kian and close my eyes and turn off my brain, knowing the woman who emotionally tortured me for years also killed the only parent who loved me? And then tried to kill me. That fucking cunt of a woman was supposed to be one of the people I should trust the most, and she actually tried to kill me.
Why?
What did he ever do to her? Because the way I remember it, my father tried to do everything to make my mother happy. And she treated him like shit. She was never happy. Nothing was ever good enough, and I was always such a problem for her. My father came to my rescue so many times when she would shout at me for doing something wrong. If I used the wrong fork while we were dining at a fancy restaurant, she would lecture me the entire car ride home until my dad told her enough. So then she turned her venom toward him. She screamed at him all night while I lay in bed and cried.
The next morning, my father acted like nothing had happened as we ate blueberry pancakes before I went to school. He might have been one of the most dangerous men in the Italian mafia at that time, but to me, he was the man who loved me endlessly. And she took him away from me.
With the covers thrown back, I sit up and blink several times, my shoulders still tight. I would do anything to feel Kian’s warm hands on me right now. Touching me in the perfect way, only he knows how. It’s like he understands what I’m thinking without me even having to speak. And he doesn’t try to stop me from being the wild, eccentric woman I am, all while he watches me in the way that he does. Silent, intense, smoldering.
The man dug up a grave for me. He’s out digging up my father’s grave right now. He’s doing it because it’s importantto me. Because I need to know what happened. We may have only known each other for a short time, but Kian understands me, and I understand him. He enjoys taking care of the people around him. The ones he cares about. The ones he loves. And maybe it’s too soon for us to feel that way for each other, but I don’t care about what’s socially acceptable anymore. I had to live my life like a robot for so many years; from now on, I’m doing it my way.
And that means I am going to get the answers I deserve.
