“Yes. You and Nadia were next, but I couldn’t pin you down. I was just going to blow you all up.”
“And us?” Pop asks.
“I was saving you for last.” She taps her lips thoughtfully. “I planned to put the bullets into your heads personally.”
“Are you finished with your story?” Pop asks.
Claudia lets out a loud, gusty sigh. “Boy, it feels good to get it all off my chest, you know? Keeping secrets is tough. Yeah, I think that’s it for now.”
Without another word, Pop raises his gun.
“It’s my bullet going in your head.” He squeezes the trigger and kills her instantly with a bullet right between the eyes.
“Is more security on the way?” I ask Curt, who stayed on the perimeter, keeping an eye out.
“No, we got them all. She may have had more men in different locations, but I disabled the communication systems before we got here.”
“We make a pact, here and now,” Mick says, his eyes hard and on Claudia as she bleeds from the forehead in her fancy chair. “Nothing like this happens again. We don’t let it get this far just because we’re too proud to speak to each other. No matter what our issues are.”
“Agreed,” Igor says with a tired sigh as he looks at Nadia and then the rest of us. “You young people remember this. Let it be a lesson to you. When Mick, Carlo, and I are long gone, and you’re the ones in charge, don’t let anything like this happen again.”
“We won’t,” Carmine says. “It won’t be repeated.”
“All because she didn’t get enough attention,” Annika says again. “I’m no psychiatrist, but I’d say that’s psychotic behavior.”
“Claudia always had mental health issues,” Pop says. “But it sounds like it festered as she got older. I don’t know that woman. And now that my family, all the families, are safe from her, I’m ready to go home and forget her.”
“We have to tell Elena,” I remind him. “She deserves to know.”
“You’re right.” Pop pats me on the shoulder as we file out of the Carlito house. “We’ll tell her together. She’ll need all of us with her.”
“I have a question,” Maceo says, catching all of our attention. “Does this mean we’re…friends?”
“Think of it like this,” Mick says thoughtfully. “We’ve been through a war together. We fought for the same side. We won’t always agree and will likely lose touch after this, but in this matter, we’re comrades. I’m sorry you lost your father. I liked him very much.”
“He didn’t die,” Maceo says, surprising all of us. “He’s also in the ICU. We told everyone he died, so the heat was off him, and I could take care of this.”
“Smart.” Carmine nods, his face full of admiration for the other underboss. “You’re damn smart.”
“And we are not your enemy,” Maceo says. “None of you. If you ever need us, you know how to find us. Now, I need to get back to my family.”
“Let’s go home,” Annika says, taking my hand in hers.
Chapter 19
~Rafe~
We went to her.
Pop would usually ask us to come to him. To meet at his home or his office. But for this, he insisted that we go to Elena’s house on the coast of Oregon where she’s been staying with her husband, Archer Montgomery.
Carmine called her this morning to let her know we’d be here today, but he didn’t give her any other information.
What we have to tell her needs to be done in person. We left the girls in Seattle at Gram’s house.
Just as the four of us climb out of the SUV in Elena’s driveway, the front door opens, and Archer and Elena come out to greet us.
Elena immediately hugs Pop and then each of us.
“It’s really good to see you,” she says. “It’s been too long.”
“You’re right,” Pop says. “We need to get together more often. We’ll start making that happen. Now, let’s get in out of this wet.”
“Come on in,” Archer says with a smile and leads us into a beautiful home set on the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean. “Can I get you anything?”
“Coffee would be great,” Pop says. “I take it black.”
“Coming right up.”
Pop wanders to the windows to watch the storm rage over the water. It’s been a harrowing twenty-four hours for him. My father can be a ruthless, cold man. But he loves family more than anything.
He loved his sister.
The woman he remembered her to be all those years ago anyway.
And despite all of the hard things he’s done in his life, I know that killing her will be the thing that haunts him for the rest of his days.
“Here we go,” Elena says as she and Archer bring trays of coffee with cream and sweetener for anyone who wants it. Once we’re all seated in the living room, Elena smiles at all of us, takes a deep breath, and grabs Archer’s hand. “You must have news for me. You didn’t come all this way just to tell me there’s nothing new.”
“We do have some things to say,” Pop says and takes a sip of coffee, then sets the mug down. “First, I need to apologize to you.”
We all look over at him in surprise.
“For what?” Elena asks.
“I knew where you were hiding all of these years. I didn’t question your grandmother about her motives. I didn’t dig into the situation. I knew you were safe, so I let you live your life. But I did you a disservice. I hurt my entire family.”
He shakes his head and stands to pace the room. Pop always did think better when he was on the move.
“Uncle Carlo, you did what you thought was right.”
“I did what was easy,” he disagrees with an impatient swipe of his arm. “I had three sons to see to and a family to take over. My sister and her husband were dead. But none of that is an excuse.”
He turns to Elena and cups her face in his hand. “You very well might hate me after I tell you what I have to tell you.”
“I won’t hate you,” she promises and presses her hand against his. “You can tell me.”
I can count on two fingers the number of times I’ve seen my father look so sad. One was the day my grandmother died.
The other is right now.
“Until yesterday, your mother was very much alive.”
Elena gasps and listens intently as Pop relays the entire story from start to finish. He doesn’t leave anything out. He doesn’t try to spare her from any of the details.
Except for the part when Claudia called Elena a cunt. He keeps that to himself.
“She would have killed me,” Elena says as Archer rubs circles over her back. “I always knew that she didn’t like me. She didn’t care enough about me to be mean to me. She just ignored me. And I was so used to it, I didn’t really care. I had good nannies, and I always had all of you.”
She stands to pace the room. She always did remind me of my father.
“Should I have known, somewhere deep down, that she was still alive?”