Defiance Falls Boxed Set: The Complete Defiance Falls Trilogy

by Dean, Ali

  “It’s not the same as being with her though. You can know enough about her to decide you like her, Gramps, but the real thing is better.”

  Gramps chuckled then. “I’m sure it is, Cruz.”

  We let that settle between us for a beat before Gramps changed his tone. “That said, you know it’s in everyone’s best interest she doesn’t know anything.”

  My chest tightened at this. He wasn’t wrong. “Maybe, Gramps, but look at it this way -- if she’d known who the Malones were, what was at stake, she never would have ended up at their house last night.”

  Gramps continued looking straight ahead. “They still might have gotten to her. Only then, she would have had something of value to them. Information.”

  “They hurt her anyway, Gramps.”

  “I know, Cruz, and I’m sorry. No one wanted this life to touch her. Hell, you know we didn’t want it touching you the way it has either. Any of you. But we had a choice. We made it. We’re fighting.”

  Gramps often reminded me of this, as if I could ever forget.

  In my opinion, it hadn’t been a choice. At all. “We weren’t going to lie back and let them trample us. Not again. And especially not after Mom.”

  “You know she’d be proud of you, Cruz. I’m proud of you, and your father is too. We knew you were special, that your group of friends was something special, but we couldn’t have predicted just what you were capable of.”

  “I know you are, Gramps. Which is why you need to trust me when I tell you that we’re bringing in Hazel. I need her. We need her.”

  Gramps turned down the drive to the Lake, and his car bumped as it rolled over a pothole.

  “You know what position you’re putting her in if the Malones get to her again. You know what position she’ll be in if she’s brought in for questioning about your whereabouts the night of Flynn Malone’s murder. Do you think she wants to be in that position?”

  I swallowed. That was the problem, that had always been the problem. She couldn’t make a decision without knowing what it meant. But that ship had sailed. None of us wanted to keep her in the dark when it was hurting her in an entirely different way.

  “We’re her family, Gramps.”

  He pulled to a stop outside the cabin and gave me a single nod. “I trust you, Cruz. She’s in there with the others.” He tilted his head to the cabin. “You know where to find me.”

  “Thanks, Gramps.” I gave him a nod of my own before getting out of the car.

  I felt him watching me as I walked to the door of the cabin, but my mind had already shifted. Hazel was in there, waiting for me. Waiting for answers.

  The door opened before I reached it. Spike tilted his head up as he took a step outside. “Yo.”

  “How is she?”

  Spike shook his head. “Pissed.”

  Yeah, I figured as much. I wanted to know specifics, but I wanted to see her for myself more. I moved past Spike.

  The gang was sitting around the only table, a large circular one, and it looked like they were in the middle of a card game. Seriously? They’d been sitting around playing cards? I guess after soccer practice they had to do something to pass the time, to keep Hazel here. They’d waited to tell her anything, and I was grateful.

  Bodhi, Emmett, and Moody stood up when they saw me, but Hazel wouldn’t even look at me. She was staring at her cards, biting the inside of her cheek.

  Ignoring the guys, I went over and crouched so I was at her level. Her eyes were blazing, and I realized she was fighting tears. Shit.

  I wished they’d been at the Spot so I could take her upstairs and be alone for a minute. The cabin didn’t have much privacy, and I didn’t want to haul her outside. Thought about it, but this was going to have to happen here. Now, with the others with us.

  “Hazel, look at me.”

  She didn’t say anything right away and I put a hand on her knee, trying to demand attention.

  Her eyes snapped to me. “If you thought you’d get a welcome home kiss, think again. I’m furious with you right now.”

  I had to fight to keep my lips from twitching into a smile. This girl. My girl. She was predictably unpredictable. Fierce and fiery. I wanted to push her buttons and make her lash out at me, because I knew she needed to let it out, and I knew I’d probably like it. She did things to me. Yeah, nothing about my life, and especially not my relationship with Hazel Ross, was simple. We were volatile and messy, never straightforward. But we were us.

  I wasn’t going to mess around now though, even if her fury made me hard. No, my girl was hurting, and she needed answers. The answers would hurt her too, but it was time to give her the truth.

  “You’ve heard of the Irish Mafia. The jokes and whispers about the Malone Mafia. Well, it’s not a joke, and it’s not idle gossip. It’s real.”

  Hazel’s bottom lip trembled when she stopped biting it. Her eyes were glassy when she turned her body, finally, to face me.

  “My dad, he does work for them.” Her voice shook.

  I nodded. “Yeah.” I swept a glance around the cabin to confirm Jeremy wasn’t here. “I thought he’d want to be here for this.”

  Moody spoke up. “He’s moving everything from the system as quickly as possible. Most of it was already done but he’ll be at it all night, cleaning up and covering his tracks.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I moved into a seat and looked at the others, who followed my lead.

  “So, my dad works for the Malone Mafia?” Hazel asked it like a challenge, daring us to break her heart.

  Emmett was the one to answer. “He didn’t have a choice. Uncle Jeremy was doing contract computer work after you were born, instead of finishing high school. But he was – is – also a hacker.”

  Hazel let out a little scoff. Emmett continued, “He was doing some contract work for a commercial real estate company in Boston when he came across sketchy stuff going on with Malone properties.”

  Bodhi interrupted, “It wasn’t sketchy, it was illegal.”

  “Yeah, illegal, whatever,” Emmett said. “Uncle Jeremy was nineteen, not much older than us, and thought he’d just fix it on his own. He’d heard the talk about the Malones being mafia and didn’t want to get the cops involved.”

  “What do you mean, fix it on his own?” Hazel asked.

  Moody answered, “Move the funds where they were supposed to be. Don’t worry about the details, Haze, this is seriously only the beginning of a really long story.”

  Hazel’s nostrils flared slightly at that and I rubbed my thumb back and forth, knowing it wasn’t much comfort.

  “Anyway, Uncle Jeremy got caught,” Emmett said. “Seamus Malone figured out what he was doing. So, he hired him. Said you can work for us or we’ll take your daughter.”

  Hazel’s body went rigid. It was only yesterday she had been taken by the Malones.

  “Take me?” she choked out. I tensed, wondering if she’d ask for clarification. Not that I had the answer. We all had our guesses, but I’m thinking Jeremy didn’t need them to spell it out to know the threat was real.

  Hazel shook her head, dismissing that train of thought. “But that was what? Fifteen or sixteen years ago.”

  Moody shifted forward on the other side of my girl, elbows on the table. “They only had him work on their legitimate businesses at first. Little by little they brought him in to help with the illegal stuff.”

  “What illegal stuff?” Hazel snapped out the question. “Am I allowed to ask that or is it ‘too much detail?’” She used air quotes to mock Moody’s earlier reassurances.

  Moody lifted the side of his mouth in a half-smile before answering. “You name it, Malones probably have a hand in it. It’s all tied together. Real estate, universities, hospitals, tech companies, pharma, law, the Malones run one seriously organized enterprise.”

  “All of it’s corrupt,” Spike added. “Sure they mask it with legitimate stuff, but the entire point is to exploit every loophole. Insider trading, fraud, ta
x evasion, gambling, arms dealing, extortion. It’s pathological and so deep-rooted I swear it’s like a genetic mutation now. Malone babies pop out wired for a corrupt life.”

  Bodhi added, “Born and bred for it.”

  I sensed the guys were into this, the opportunity to dump everything we’d kept from Hazel on her in one go. A weight was lifting for them, but for me, it was pressing down, growing heavier. I felt Hazel pulling away from me as they shared more about the dark world we’d been living in. My chest grew impossibly tighter.

  “Drugs?” Hazel asked.

  “Yeah,” Bodhi replied. “That’s where Braven comes in.”

  Everyone looked to me, Hazel included.

  My chest squeezed and my heart pounded. Talking about the Malones, about Jeremy, that was easy compared to this. I didn’t even realize I was rubbing my chest until Hazel’s eyes dropped to look at my fist on my heart. When her eyes moved back to mine, they weren’t as fired up. She was still rigid, on the defensive, fighting the hurt that was brewing inside her from the truths she was getting hit with. But her eyes also glistened with an understanding that ripped me open. It was compassion, almost as if she knew how hard this was for me, without grasping the darkness of it.

  I somehow drew strength from those mesmerizing green eyes watching me. I wasn’t planning on giving her the worst of it off the bat. But as the words came out, a little portion of the weight pressing on me lifted, and I knew Hazel was carrying it now, sharing that burden.

  “The Malones murdered my mom and made it look like a suicide.”

  Chapter 2

  Hazel

  Cruz delivered the words and didn’t look away. I couldn’t process them at first. My head was still swimming from the revelations that the Malones were mafia and my dad worked for them. The air around us seemed to get hotter and I concentrated on breathing, my inhales and exhales the only sound that cut through the silence. As I listened to my breaths, I realized it was only getting harder to breathe, and Cruz’s face blurred a little in front of me.

  Laura Donovan was murdered. It hadn’t been a suicide.

  The words seemed like a cruel joke. A twisted prank someone was playing on me, maybe on all of us. But then I felt myself leaning forward, and my vision cleared again as Cruz placed his other hand on my back, between my shoulder blades. Cruz’s eyes searched mine, and I knew then this wasn’t some trick, that I hadn’t misheard him or misunderstood his words. No, Cruz had known the truth for a while now, and he’d been carrying it around with him.

  “Hazel?”

  “I –” I closed my eyes as a sharp pain hit me in the temple. “I’m sorry, Cruz. I didn’t know. I never met your mom.”

  Laura Donovan had died when Cruz was twelve years old. He didn’t join New England Elite, our club soccer team, until the following year. I may have seen her around town when I was a kid, but I never knew her. Cruz had gone to a different school from us until high school. Now, as his words settled in, something else snapped into place.

  Goosebumps rose over my arms and I shivered. Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I said, “Flynn Malone.” I couldn’t get the rest out. I just couldn’t. The air grew thicker, and Cruz wouldn’t break our stare. He kept one hand on my knee, the other on my back, steadying me in place.

  No one said a word. Flynn Malone’s death last week had been declared a suicide. But it had taken nearly two full days before it was announced to the public. I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs; the air was too dense, like syrup, and my vocal cords wouldn’t work. It was possible I’d been stunned into silence.

  It took effort, but I pulled my eyes away from Cruz to look at the others. Spike sat behind Cruz, arms folded over his chest. Bodhi and Emmett were across from me, and Moody was on my other side. Not one of them tried to hide their expression from me. I saw the truth there and shuddered again. There was no remorse. No words of additional explanation.

  Out of everything they possibly could have told me, this revelation might have been the only one that absolved them. A little laugh slipped out of me then at the irony. Murder. It had to be murder. Anything less extreme, and I wouldn’t have understood the secrecy. It wouldn’t have been enough. Nope, it took murder to get me to trust these guys again. To see why it had been this way. I still had questions, so many, but I got it now. All of it.

  I was full-out laughing now. It came from deep in my belly, rang through my chest. I couldn’t control it, and tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I pitched forward and rocked back.

  All this time, they’d been planning the murder of a mafia boss.

  My chest squeezed and my entire body shook. I felt Cruz’s hands move to wrap around my waist and then Moody on my other side reached to pat my back. I sensed the others standing up to come around and then all five of them had a hand on me, as if their touch could settle the sounds ripping out of me.

  Someone was making soothing noises too, and that made the laughter coming from me verge on sobs. I couldn’t control it.

  Cruz reached for me and pulled me out of my seat onto his lap. As Bodhi took my empty chair, my hysteria began to die down. Being in Cruz’s lap calmed me. I took deep breaths until I was settled enough to form words.

  “That night at the beach, you knew what you were going to do the whole time?” I could hear the disbelief in my voice. How could they act like normal high school seniors one minute and cold-blooded murderers the next?

  Bodhi was only a foot away from me, his knee touching mine. “Not exactly. We’d been waiting for an opening for weeks at that point. But this was something we’d been planning for years, Haze. We had to wait until we had everything else in place, or close enough.”

  “Everything else?”

  “Uncle Jeremy’s been pulling info about the Malones’ businesses for years now, getting all the evidence in place to bring them down. We had to wait until that was ready before we started a war.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “It was revenge. They already started a war.”

  Cruz shifted underneath me before he spoke. “It’s all semantics, Haze. At this point, it doesn’t matter who started it, or who has the next move. It’s a matter of survival.”

  I let out a long shaky breath.

  “So your mom, that wasn’t the beginning of it?”

  Sadness dripped from Cruz’s voice when he answered, “No, Haze, the Malones and the Bravens have been at this for generations. Back to the 1800s even.” The melancholy I felt from him wasn’t only because of his mother. Cruz had been born into this war, and he didn’t have a choice about it.

  My eyes lifted to the others. They’d had a choice.

  Spike was sitting on the table on our other side now, legs on his chair. When my eyes met his, he said, “The Bravens aren’t as big or far-reaching as the Malones. After Cruz’s mom, they needed reinforcements if they had a shot at fighting back.”

  Cruz added, “We also weren’t as corrupt. We weren’t always willing to get our hands dirty to fight back.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to cut through the shock and sadness saturating the air. “Can we start at the beginning? Maybe skim over the last century or so, but I’m still lost here, guys.”

  Cruz’s chest rose as he took a breath. “The Bravens were never involved in illegal enterprises like the Malones, but they’ve always been powerful, had connections in a lot of places like the Malones.”

  I shifted so I was able to see everyone, and Cruz tensed. He only relaxed when he realized I wasn’t going anywhere.

  He continued, “The Malones would try to take over Braven companies or worm their way in. They’d try to merge, manipulate, blackmail, intimidate, whatever they could to get a piece of the Braven pie. They didn’t want to have that kind of competition.”

  “For money? Didn’t they have plenty of that?”

  “It wasn’t just money though,” Emmett answered. He’d pulled up a chair on the other side of us. “The Bravens not only stopped them from gaining business advant
ages, but they also tried to expose the Malones’ criminal enterprises at times.”

  My hands started to sweat and I rubbed them over my jeans. Is that what the guys and my dad were attempting to do now?

  Cruz placed one of his hands over mine, the other remaining on my lower back. “My grandparents tried to end it. They came to an agreement of sorts that they’d stay out of Malone activity if the Malones kept their dirty business away from Braven. At that point Braven Pharmaceuticals was the main priority. We have family in medicine, law, academics, a lot of the same places as the Malones, but we aren’t organized like them. We’re just a family with a lot of wealth and connections built up over the years. We’ve never had ulterior purposes like the Malones.”

  “Until now,” Spike said quietly.

  I tried to ignore Spike’s comment and stay focused on getting up to speed on what got us to this point in the first place. “So, your grandparents on your mom’s side, your mom’s parents,” I started to clarify.

  Cruz interrupted to give me their names. “Margaret and Russel Braven.”

  “Right, Margaret and Russel Braven, they tried to end it with this agreement, but then what happened?” I couldn’t bring myself to ask, why did the Malones murder your mom? It was too harsh, too real. This wasn’t some ancestor or distant relative we were talking about. It might have felt like I was getting some sort of history lesson – no, scratch that, this was more like a Game of Thrones synopsis – but the truth was, this was Cruz’s family, his life, his past, present, and future.

  “To symbolize the goodwill or whatever, Flynn Malone joined Braven as Chief Operating Officer.”

  “What?” Even without all this new information, I’d never heard of a Malone working at Braven Pharmaceuticals. Why would they when they already owned half the state?

  “I know. They never should have trusted it. But that’s the thing, they couldn’t say no when he asked. They were told it would be a temporary thing, a way to solidify the truce.”