“Your son?” Pop demands.
“Yes. My son,” Claudia replies as the others in the room shuffle around, ready to pounce and kill her. But we don’t have all of the information from her yet. The energy in the room is electric, full of hatred and violence. But Claudia is as calm as ever, almost feeding off the attention, smiling at Benji like a proud mother at a high school graduation. “I suppose I really should start at the beginning, shouldn’t I? Vinnie was a piece of shit. We all know that. It’s not like the world lost a great man the day he died. I hope he’s rotting in hell, where he deserves to be. Mom and Daddy made me marry him because he had the right pedigree, but there was literally no attraction there. None at all. We couldn’t stand each other. We were married in name only.
“A few years after I married him, I met Francisco. Now that was the kind of man I wanted. He was kind and gentle. Not nearly as driven as me, but I was able to overlook that all in the name of love. I spent a great deal of time here in Dallas with him.”
“Even after you had Elena,” Carmine says.
“Elena.” Claudia sighs. “I didn’t want to have her. I wasn’t interested in having a child with Vinnie at all. The sex was appalling. Ugh, just the thought of it turns my stomach. But that asshole just kept pestering me, nagging me to produce an heir for him. Then Mom started in, too, and I got pregnant to shut them all up. I thought about getting an abortion, pretending that I’d lost the baby. But then I thought…I’ll just go through with it and hire a fucking nanny. Between the nanny and my family, I hardly ever had to see her.”
“Should have just aborted her,” Benji spouts off, and before anyone can react, Carmine raises his arm and shoots the other man right between the eyes.
Claudia jumps and stares in horror as her son falls to the floor, dead.
But she just keeps speaking as if nothing at all just happened. Like a cold robot.
“I had Vinnie killed in prison. Staged my death and got the fuck out of that rainy, godforsaken city. Ran to Dallas with Francisco. I had Benji about five years after Elena. Carlo, do you remember those two years or so that I was gone so much, and Mom kept calling you, wanting to know where I was?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Well, it’s not like I could go to Seattle to see the family while I was pregnant with another man’s child. Even I wouldn’t do anything so dramatic.”
“Because you know Vinnie would have killed you on the spot,” Shane says. “He beat the hell out of Elena, almost killed her, just because she wanted to marry her high school sweetheart, and he thought that was an embarrassment to the family. If you’d shown up pregnant, he would have killed you. And you know it.”
“Perhaps.” Claudia narrows her eyes and then glances at Benji on the floor. “My son was the true heir. The only heir. And when Francisco died, God rest his soul, I made it my mission to get rid of all of the other families so Benji could rule, and the Carlitos would be the only organized crime family left. He had Carlito and Martinelli blood running through him. Who else could be more ideal to run it all?”
“You killed Vinnie and put an innocent man on death row,” Pop says, staring at his sister as if she were a stranger.
“Who gives a shit about that?” Claudia demands. “He was a criminal. It was so easy to hire the right judge, a dirty one, and make sure he took the fall for it. All tidied up with a pretty little bow.”
“Everything you are, everything you stand for, is exactly against what we’re taught, Claudia,” Pop says in exasperation. “My God, you’re crazy.”
“I am not crazy. I’m strong. I’m driven. And I know what I want.”
“And would you have killed Elena if you’d known where she was?” Carmine asks.
“I looked for that little brat for years. Always slipped through my fingers. Then I found out that my mother was behind hiding my daughter from me.” She examines her nails. “So, I killed her.”
Pop’s hands ball into fists. All of us want to pounce on her.
“You killed my mother,” Pop says.
“I killed my mother,” Claudia shoots back, her eyes full of anger now. “A woman who cared more about you and your three little brats than she ever did about me. She loved my child more than me. It was sickening how she fawned over all of you. She didn’t even like me. She ignored me.”
“You were never around,” Pop points out. “You spent as much time as you could away.”
“You bet your ass, I did.”
“And who do you expect was supposed to love Elena? To care for her?”
“God, you’re slow, Carlo. Try to keep up here, okay? In case you haven’t heard a word I’ve said, I’ll say it again. I don’t fucking care about that little cunt,” Claudia says, leaning forward. “It was me who didn’t get any love from anyone in that damn house. So, I came here where I was loved. Appreciated. The Carlitos worshipped me.”
“So, all of this is because you didn’t get enough attention?” Annika asks and sets her hands on her hips. “Really? That’s really stupid.”
“You’ll watch your tone with me if you want to keep that tongue in your pretty little mouth,” Claudia replies, her voice full of venom.
“You just try to touch her,” I suggest. “I beg you.”
“You blamed my family for protecting Pavlov,” Mick Sergi says coldly, now that the Martinelli side of things has been explained. “Built an entire web of lies that my men believed and had dozens of them killed because they believed they were carrying out my orders.”
“You might want to hire men who aren’t so gullible,” Claudia says with a shrug. “It’s certainly not my fault that they believed a bunch of lies. Besides, it was for the greater good, Mick. Pavlov was a mess. And he was from your city. Why didn’t you take care of him when he lived there?”
“Because I had him under control,” Mick replies. “And then, suddenly, one day he was gone. I thought he was dead and forgot him. Until my men started disappearing and ended up dead, and it all came back to me.”
“Well, I had to blame someone for it, didn’t I?” Claudia asks. “I mean, I was building an empire for my son.”
“And you killed my father,” Maceo says.
“I told you. Benji was the only man who could be the boss. The Carlitos are the only family who matter.”
“You killed my father and other families who never had a beef with you,” Maceo continues. “My mother could still die.”
“You’re not listening to me.” Claudia’s frustrated now. “No one else matters except Benji.”
“But it was just you and Benji. There is no Carlito family,” I point out.
“He would have married within a few years and started a family. We would have built from the ground up. But now you’ve ruined that. You’ve ruined everything. I should have known you would. The people I came from never did anything good for me, not once in my life. Benji was going to do great things. He had his whole life ahead of him. I just had to get a few roadblocks out of the way, and the sky was the limit for him.”
“By killing off the other families,” Igor says, shaking his head.