I stare at him. “How?”
“Remember how I told you your mother was a mafia princess?”
I wince at the wordmother, but this description ofmafia princessreally confuses me. “Uhm, yeah. But what mafia are you even talking about? I didn’t know there was any mafia in the state.”
“There isn’t,” confirms Damien, “but there certainly was. Lia was the daughter of a made man. She was raped by the capo’s son, and then forced into marriage with him. His name was Carmelo Moretti.”
My eyes widen with horror. My mother… raped? Then forced to marry her rapist?
My heart cripples at those words. I can’t imagine how much worse my own rape would have been had I been forced to marry Liam after.
Logan is back to paying attention, gazing at me with a pained expression that tells me how difficult those distant memories must be for him to hear spoken so plainly.
Then my stomach plummets when I realize the fullsignificance of what Damien has said.
“Lia was pregnant… with me. I’m the daughter of a rape.”
Neither Logan nor Damien contradicts my words. I sway slightly, before sagging against the front door.
“Lia was so young when she had you,” adds Damien, and my heart cripples even more at those words. “But Logan got her out of that situation. He helped her, and took care of you. But it was the catalyst to an all-out war that pitted us against the mafia, a mafia we were initially a part of. We came out on top, though in the battle, your mother lost her life.”
Logan’s face tenses like he’s trying hard to keep his emotions under control.
“Now Devil has taken the mafia’s place,” continues Damien. He pauses as I try to assimilate all of this information. “We defeated the mafia, but we didn’t kill every single member of it.” He glowers back at Logan, who’s back to listening with a neutral expression on his face. “I always said we needed to find every last one of those fuckers, line them up, and shoot them execution-style. That will always be my biggest regret.”
A shudder runs through me at realizing that Damien’s biggest regret is that he didn’t… kill dozens of people. Or hundreds. How many people exactly made up that mafia? How many people does he wish he had killed?
“There’s still time,” cuts in Logan, and I shiver even harder.
“It’s a lot harder to go after people who’ve been in hiding for years,” objects Damien. “But we have no choice, if we want to save Devil. The threat will remain until the last members of the mafia have been wiped off the face of this Earth.”
I swallow nervously. “Okay. But… what does that have to do with me? With my parents?” I stand straighter, trying to circle back to my initial question and push away the rest of this information.
“What does all of this have to do with myrealparents’ death?”I insist. “Why are they dead?”
“For the same reason that you’re in danger,” Damien says again.
“Okay.” My nostrils flare and it’s all I can do again to not stomp my foot. I’m so fucking frustrated with Damien speaking in riddles. “And why isthat?”
“Because you’re the loose end to this case,” he answers maddeningly. But then after a beat, he adds, “Whoever gets to you first has a clear advantage in the war that is brewing once more. You are at the very heart of this conflict. The daughter of the rightful heir to the mafia, and a symbol of betrayal and cruelty on both sides. Your parents were merely inconveniently in the way.”
My heart thuds painfully as I take in the significance of those words. It’s a sickening, crippling blow to realize thatI’mthe reason for their deaths.
“You killed them,” I lash out, as if that accusation can possibly relieve some of the guilt that’s making me nauseous.
“We didn’t.”
“So who did?” I cry out, giving way to the intense frustration seething in me.
The silence that follows my words is so long I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever get the answer I so desperately need.
At last, Damien says, in a very slow, quiet voice, “That’s just the problem, Piper. We don’t know.”
Chapter 16
Quill
Islam the door shut, taking in the decrepit box that Josh calls his car.
