Bennett Mafia

by Tijan

  “Hmmm.” He hugged me tighter before depositing me on the counter next to where he had the bread. Kissing me briefly, he stepped back, but kept a hand on my leg, pulling more bread slices out, then grabbing a bowl from the cupboard behind me.

  “What are you making?”

  “French toast.” He pulled eggs, milk, vanilla, sugar, and cinnamon from the fridge and cupboards. He began whisking the batter, moving back to stand between my legs and reaching over to turn the burner on.

  “You’re cooking?”

  He had never cooked. This was completely new.

  He smirked at me, putting oil into the pan. “Brooke’s not the only one who has some culinary tendencies.”

  I liked this look on him. I liked it a lot.

  I remained there, content, never moving more than a step or two away from me. He began piling the French toast he made onto a large plate. He was making more than enough, but then I realized he wasn’t cooking just for us. He was cooking for the guards, and with a lost and distracted look in his eyes.

  He was cooking to distract himself.

  I slid my fingers through his hair, enjoying how he closed his eyes and moved his head like a cat, savoring the caress from me.

  “You mentioned my father before.”

  He grimaced, stiffening. “Can we not talk about him?”

  We hadn’t been talking about him for four days. I frowned.

  “I think we should.”

  He was so tense now.

  “Kai,” I said gently.

  I touched his side just before he ripped away from me. Flicking the stove off, he took the platter of toast and carried it to the door. He opened it and offered the French toast to the two guards outside. “Here. Take these downstairs to the break room.”

  I didn’t hear what the response was, but Kai grabbed a bottle of maple syrup and passed it to them. He closed the door again and turned to regard me. His tortured expression was back, hitting a nerve in me and stirring me up.

  I hated whatever was bothering him.

  He raked a tired hand through his hair, reaching behind him to lock the door. He moved to the living room.

  I followed him, sitting on one end of the couch and pulling one of the blankets folded over the back to my lap.

  I waited. That’s all I could do.

  He started reluctantly. “Yes, I’m waiting for you to deal with your father. Yes, it’s the last thing I want to do here, but we have to. I just, haven’t been able to force it to happen.”

  A lump sat in the back of my throat. “You said you wanted to replace me at my father’s company. Do you need him alive to do that?”

  He stared at me a full long minute, his tortured look never wavering. “I’ve already started that process.”

  He didn’t answer my question.

  “Do you need him alive to do that?”

  He wrenched his gaze away, sitting in the chair next to me, but angling his body away. As he rested his arms on his legs, his back and shoulders grew rigid. “No. Your father is free to die whenever you want him killed.”

  I hadn’t expected that.

  “Hey.” I sat forward. “What’s going on here? What are you scared about?”

  He whipped his head to mine, his gaze searing me. “You hating me one more goddamn time.”

  “What?” I couldn’t have heard him correctly. I blinked, confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your father has to die.” He was cold now. “His body will be found. He’ll be declared dead. His company will call an emergency board meeting. In the interim, you’ll be declared alive. At that board meeting, you’ll share with them the news of your resurrection.” His tone was biting. “After that, we’ll declare a hostile takeover of your father’s company.”

  “Kai.”

  He kept on. “There will be resistance from four members on the board. The other three have already been turned. They will feign surprise, but joy at your appearance, and one of them will bring a motion to appoint you in your father’s place.”

  He looked away, his head down, his eyes closed. “I have everything in place, ready to move, but after this, after what you’ll have to do—there’s no going back.” His words were soft, making me ache. “You can’t go back in the shadows after this.”

  Oh.

  Understanding dawned.

  “And you’re worried about me?”

  “I’m worried you’ll hate it. I’m worried you’ll resent me because I fucking yanked you out of where you were content, and I’m not allowing you to go back there.” He shoved to his feet. “Me. I am destroying the safe world you had erected, and you’re letting me do it.” He stopped, breathing harshly. “I am fucking terrified that you will hate me at the end of all this.”

  I moved in a flash, going to him.

  He flinched, moving away.

  “Kai.” Pain wracked through me. I reached for him again.

  “No!” He moved farther away, glaring at me. “Stop it. Stop acting like you’re okay with all this. I am yanking you into this prison I live in. You’re letting me! Stop accepting everything I’m doing to you.”

  He paused, bit out a curse, and in a second was in front of me. His hands cupped my head, his fingers sliding through my hair, and he tilted me back to look at him as he gazed down. He closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to gather strength, and then he began to speak.

  “As soon as Brooke went to you, I started planning. I knew I would kill your father. I knew I would replace him with you. I knew I would wipe out half the council. I knew I would kill Barnes. I have moved on his family. This morning, the FBI will arrest half of his family. My men will kill the other half. In the chaos and sudden absence of the Barnes family, my men will move in and take hold of their assets. There is another mafia family in Milwaukee, and they will receive a bribe from the Bennett family. Tanner is here, heading everything up. Tanner will inform this other family that we’ve moved in, that we have holdings in the Bello Company—a company they have wanted to push in on for the last thirty years. They’ll also be offered a guest sitting position at the next council meeting. Do you know what that means?”

  His nostrils flared on the last question.

  I could barely process everything he was telling me.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “That means they’ll have a chance at tripling their financial assets. I am creating one entire hold over Canada and over half the Midwest in the States, and I will keep expanding, because that’s how my mind works. In seven years, I will eliminate three of those council members and replace them with my siblings, giving us almost an entire monopoly over the council. I know my enemies. I know my obstacles, and I am already making moves to take on or move with the families in Chicago, then Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York. Once I have a firm hold on the East Coast, I will begin looking to the West Coast. Are you understanding what I’m telling you?”

  “Yes,” I grated out, feeling an inordinate amount of pressure building in my head and chest. My heartbeat was pounding. “You’re a calculating bastard. That’s nothing new to me.”

  “My plan was always to seduce you.”

  I—what?

  He said those words so softly and suddenly. Then he waited, stepping back, watching for my reaction.

  I…

  A second.

  Another.

  Five more.

  “What?” I choked out. He couldn’t have said those words.

  But he had, and he repeated them, a wall over his face. “My plan was to seduce you. Make you fall in love with me. Use you to insert my position in your father’s company. And it worked perfectly.”

  “What?!”

  I couldn’t process that. He was saying— “This was all a lie?”

  But no. It couldn’t have been.

  Was it?

  No, no, no. Panic rose up in me.

  How he’d been kind to me. How he held me. How he touched me.

  How he’d seduced me.

 
But…

  I couldn’t breathe.

  My chest constricted inside of me.

  My heart squeezed. I was having a heart attack.

  I crumbled, bending over and pressing my forehead to my knees. Breathe in. Breathe out. I kept trying to repeat to myself, but it wasn’t working. Everything swirled into a mess in my head. Pain laced through me, all the way to my fingertips and toes.

  “You can’t do this. I—was it all a lie?!”

  Fuck it. I shoved to my feet, advancing on him.

  He watched me come, not moving, not saying a word.

  “Tell me!”

  His jaw clenched. “You should hate me.”

  “That’s for me to decide. And anyway, I can change my mind. I can go back. I can hide, you fucking asshole!”

  “You can’t, actually.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve already sent paperwork and proof of life to the courts. In two hours, you will be declared alive. If you leave and try to hide again, I’ll declare an international manhunt for you. I will find you, no matter where you go.”

  He would. He could. He was the only one.

  A new feeling of helplessness and powerlessness flooded in, making the room spin around me.

  “I have to be there. I have to go to court for that…” Right?

  “You don’t. I have your double going to court in your place—the one we used when Blade tried to get you back. She’ll have an imprint of your prints on her fingers, and I’ve already had blood tests done.” A small hesitation. “I’m sorry for that. If you’d like, I can have her attend the Bello emergency board meeting, if you decide to fight me on this.”

  “Why?” I shook my head. “Why are you doing this? Saying this? Being like this?”

  He was so fucking cold. A stranger. He was the Kai he’d been when I first met him.

  He didn’t answer. I saw a flicker in his eyes, but it was gone. He hardened again. “Because it’s time this charade ends.”

  God.

  “I don’t want you anymore,” he added, finishing me.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Sliding to the ground, I gasped for air. My lungs had closed in on themselves, like my whole world.

  “You are free to leave here, but you cannot leave Milwaukee,” Kai said, his voice coming from farther away. “A car will be downstairs for you. It’ll take you to your father’s estate. There’s staff there waiting for you, a Claude, if memory serves me correctly.”

  The door opened. “If you try to defy me and disappear or return to the 411 Network, I will kill your previous two roommates. If you wish to speak to your father before he dies, you have the next hour to do that. The guards will show you the way.”

  And with that, the door shut, and I was left alone. Destroyed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  I don’t know how I got here.

  Thinking back, I don’t know how I did a lot of things after what Kai said to me. But somehow, I found myself in a room. My father was tied to a chair, waiting for me to come to him. He had a bandage wrapped around his waist, duct tape over his mouth. If his ass itched, he couldn’t have scratched it.

  Five days ago, I might’ve been scared of him. I could feel the loathing coming off him in waves. If he could’ve killed me, he would’ve. I knew that without a doubt. Tough luck for him, though, because he couldn’t touch me, scare me, or hurt me now. Kai had done all of that for him.

  I had a brief thought to turn and leave. He would die regardless. Kai had taken a spoon to my insides, gutting everything out of me until I was hollow. The experience had left me with nothing to say to my father, who was my biological father, despite what he said.

  Maybe it was that. Maybe that’s why I propelled myself across the room to pull the tape off of him. I grabbed the end and whipped it off. The faster the better. I wanted to get this over with, so I could leave.

  “AHHHH!” he screamed as I yanked it away, his mouth and surrounding skin reddening. He spat at me. “You fucking bitch.”

  I acted without thought. I wrapped my hand around his neck and squeezed.

  He started to make gargling sounds, rasping, wheezing.

  I kept squeezing, an ironclad grip.

  He began flailing around, as much as he could, bouncing the chair.

  When he began to shake like he was having a seizure, I let go.

  He gasped for breath, coughing frantically. He couldn’t stop coughing, and all the while, I stood immobile. I just watched the handprint I’d left on his neck, the way the color seemed to take forever to return to normal. When the whiteness was gone, I flicked my eyes back to his.

  Finally.

  A small satisfaction bloomed in my chest. The first flicker of life post Kai’s devastation.

  My father seemed cautious now, watching me warily.

  I smiled. “I get it. I get why you love being cruel and a monster.” I turned away from his eyes. “I see why you wanted to kill me.”

  The power. It was dark and addictive.

  Then my stomach rolled over on itself, threatening to spew. I felt sick. That part of me was from him. I did have his darkness in me, and as I stood there, I felt it pooling, moving inside of me, growing.

  My father. My mother. Kai. Having a front-row seat to this world. It had probably even started when I was seeing it through the lens of a Hider operative. I was changed. No, that wasn’t right. I was broken. There was a part of me beyond repair now. I could never have a normal life again. Kai had cemented what had been happening to me since Brooke found me.

  This darkness wasn’t going anywhere. It slithered in me, like a snake, and I knew then that I’d never be able to get it out of me. It was there because of my father, Kai had brought the flame to life, and then it had burst into a bonfire at his betrayal.

  And now here I was, standing in front of the man I used to fantasize about hurting, and it all clicked into place.

  This was the moment all of it had been leading to, this moment when I decided my fate. Because I was the only one who could, no one else. Me. My decision.

  He was frothing at the bit again, wanting to scare me.

  I sighed. “You can’t intimidate me. You should give up. It’s time, don’t you think?”

  His eyes widened. Surprise fluttered there before it settled into reluctant resignation.

  “You thought my mother cheated on you, because that’s what you did to her. It’s how you make sense of the world. You cheat so you think everyone cheats. That’s how you think, but you’re wrong. She never cheated. It wasn’t in her. Not once.”

  He scoffed in disbelief.

  “She was too broken by you to even try.”

  Not like Kai’s mother. I winced at the thought of her. Brooke’s mom. She cheated on their father. She must have done it to rebel. She had to. Why would the wife of a murderer cheat on that man? It couldn’t have been a careless mistake, a decision made out of passion. Not if it’d produced two sons—or three with Tanner. Maybe she fell in love after all, but to start? Perhaps it was loneliness? Misery?

  She couldn’t physically leave him, so she did the next thing she could. She sexually escaped him, emotionally gave herself to others.

  “Just kill me. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” A hard glint returned to my father’s gaze. A small spark of impatience. “I know I’m a dead man. So just do it. Why are you drawing this out?”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. Pulling it out, I didn’t recognize the number, but I knew Kai sent it. If not him directly, at his order.

  Sender: Hit play on the projector behind him.

  Projector?

  I looked, and there it was, sitting on a table. I moved around my father and did as Kai instructed, unsure if I wanted to see what he had lined up.

  As soon as the screen lit up, silent tears began rolling down my cheeks.

  It was my mother. She was at a beach, and as the video kept rolling, a dog ran into focus. My mother reached back and clasped hands with the man who was
now her husband, who joined her on screen. They were talking, laughing, smiling. Then, my chest held suspended as my two half-siblings darted around them. They were kicking up sand in their bathing suits.

  They looked nine and ten in the video, so this was a few years old.

  Still. My heart ached. This wasn’t real-time or recent, but it didn’t matter.

  I knew what Kai was trying to tell me, though if he was done with me, as he’d said he was, I didn’t know why he’d bothered. Even if he was an asshole, he was giving me the chance to say the one thing I’d always wanted to say to this man. I would’ve forgotten otherwise, and later I would’ve wished I had done it.

  I turned to my father. “You messed up. Did you know that?”

  He swore, his voice cracking. “Why are you torturing me? Just fucking pull the trigger. There’s a gun in here, isn’t there? Where is it?” He tried looking, making the chair jump around as he did. His voice rose. “Are you sure your man isn’t feeding you a pile of bullshit? You’re pathetic. You’re weak. You’re soft. You ain’t no kid of mine. You’re not—”

  I grabbed the side of his chair and moved, yanking it with me so he was pivoted around. I stopped, and his eyes were glued to the screen on the wall.

  Blood drained from his face.

  His mouth fell open.

  He was speechless. For once.

  His eyes almost bulged out of their sockets.

  I waited, expecting curses, or for him to say it was a lie, but he didn’t.

  For a full minute, I watched him as he watched her, and a tear formed at the corner of his eye. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

  “Damn,” he breathed.

  I didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say, so I said my piece instead.

  “You failed. In all your miserable, piece-of-shit life, you failed the best thing that happened to you. Her. Me. You didn’t kill either of us, and to further give you the middle finger, she’s happy. Those kids are older now, thirteen and fourteen. That man is everything you never were. He’s kind, loving, supportive, and you might look at him as weak, but he is three times the man you ever could’ve been.”

  I leaned down and whispered one last time in his ear, “She beat you. She won.”