“If that was true, it would mean that someone either was out to make me awfully miserable, or that Davis was someone other than the man he told me he was.”
“It would.”
“You think Davis was lying to me?”
“Pops checked him out, Stace. He didn’t even exist until three months before you met him.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it.
“I know it seems impossible—”
“It doesn’t just seem impossible. It is.”
“People lie, Stacy. What’s important now is that we find out why he lied to you. What was he after?”
He came over to me and pulled me against his chest. I tried to resist for a moment, but then moved into him, comforted by his touch. We stood like that for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Me, too.”
He lifted my chin and kissed me gently. How could he kiss me like that after what he’d just learned that I’d done? Why was he so good to me?
How stupid could I have been to think I loved Davis when I had this waiting for me?
Chapter 22
Killian
She didn’t want to come with me, but I talked her into it. We needed to put our cards on the table so that we could get as much help as we could from the family. She seemed to understand that.
I had to admit to a little wariness. Ian would understand, but I wasn’t sure Pops would. And Jack? I didn’t like the fact that Pops insisted that Jack sit in on this meeting. I understood that it was his people who were affected by our ability to provide protection, but this was a family matter.
I reached over and took Stacy’s hand.
“Are you okay?”
“I should be asking you that.” She brushed her hand over the bandage that covered the lower half of my arm. “It kills me, knowing you’re hurt because of me.”
I leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Don’t let it consume you, love. I can take care of myself.”
“I know, I just…”
“It’s okay. I’m okay.”
We kissed gently, lingering close to each other. I couldn’t blame her for what she’d done. If it’d been me, if someone had killed her, I would have done the same. I would have destroyed everyone and everything that stood in my way. She loved Davis. As much as that hurt me, I understood.
“We have to go inside.”
With a deep breath, she nodded. I got out of the car, walked around, took her hand, and pulled her out, holding her close against my side. Pops and Ian, Sean and Kyle, and Jack were all waiting for us in the living room of Pops’ house. It was the same house we’d all grown up in, the only house my brothers and Stacy knew. I had vague memories of the apartment my parents shared in Dorchester. I was seven or eight when we moved here. But it was home, and it seemed odd to have this conversation here. When Mom was alive, this never would have happened.
Ian smiled as we walked through the door. Sean glanced over at us from where he stood by the glass doors, isolated despite all the other people in the room. Sean always seemed sort of alone in a crowd these days. Pops was sitting on the edge of the couch, leaning forward, like a king surveying his kingdom. And Kyle was next to Ian, a similar smile on his boyish face.
Jack came forward, his hands extended.
“Stacy, it’s so wonderful to have you home again!” He took her hands and pulled her close, kissing her cheek warmly. “Marriage agrees with you.”
She smiled even as she shuffled her feet somewhat uncomfortably. “Thanks, Mr. McGuire.”
“Jack, you know you can call me Jack.”
She nodded, her eyes flashing to mine.
“I’d like to talk to you for a moment when this is over,” Jack told her. “A little gift, you might say.”
I touched her shoulder as Jack let her go. She immediately moved into my side, her confidence shaken by everything that had been happening. I kissed the top of her head and led the way to the loveseat.
Jack walked to the bar and poured himself a glass of water while the rest of us sort of stared each other down. I knew they all knew what was happening because I’d told Ian most of the story over the phone. His reaction had been mixed—incredulous and sympathetic. The look on Pops face suggested he was less sympathetic and more incredulous. And just plain mad.
“What were you thinking?” he suddenly demanded. “Why would you think that it would be okay to put a hit out on a member of the family?”
Stacy stiffened.
“Do you think this is all fun and games? That it would somehow be okay to do what you did?”
“Pops,” I said, slipping my arm around her waist, “she knows what she did.”
“Does she?”
He glared at her, his eyes narrowed the way he used to do when we were children and we did something bad enough that Mom told us to wait for Pops to get home. He would always stare at us that way and demand to know if we thought it was funny to make Mom so upset.
“I know what I did,” Stacy said, her voice low.
“Why would you hire a hitman? How did you even know how to do that?”
She stared at her hands. Everyone else just watched, aware that crossing Pops was never a good idea.
“You answer me, child,” Pops said.
She looked up. I felt a shiver run through her body. “I wanted to hurt you for what I thought you’d done to me.”
“Me?” Pops touched the center of his chest with one finger. “What did you think I’d done to you?”
“I thought you sent Killian to New York to kill Davis.”
Pops sat back, the color draining from his face. “You really think I’d be capable of such a thing?”
She shrugged. “You took Mom’s last month away from us. And you didn’t like Davis. What was I supposed to think?”
Pops surprised us all by falling to his knees between the couch and the loveseat. Stacy stiffened again, pressing back against me as she stared at him. Pops reached over and took her hands between both of his, tugging her hands so that she was forced to lean forward just a bit.
“I’m sorry,” he said so softly that I almost didn’t hear him. “I never meant to hurt you. If I’d known…”
There was pain in Pops’ voice.
Stacy just stared at him for a long moment. Tears began to run down her cheeks. She brushed them away and left the room. I started to get up and follow, but Jack grabbed my arm.
“Give her space, son. Let her figure things out for herself.”
Ian cleared his throat, moving forward.
“We need to find this guy. We need to know who paid him to keep going on Stacy’s contract.”
Jack pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “This is his contact information.”
I took the paper. “How do you know who he is?”
Jack shrugged, clearly not in much of a mood to elaborate. Then he left the room, following my wife. I wanted to go after him, but Pops was on his feet by then and he took my arm.
“We need to deal with this.”
“We find him and make him tell us the truth,” Ian said.
“How do we do that?”
Kyle smiled. “We use you as bait, obviously.”
“Did you injure him this morning?” Sean asked.
“Broke his nose,” I said with a little more pride than I intended.
“We’ll check the local hospitals. He’ll need help resetting it.”
“What if he goes to a vet like I did?”
“We check vet offices, too. And clinics. Anyone who might be capable of helping him.”
Ian nodded. “You’re a natural at this.”
Sean turned away, that distant, moody look that had been the norm since Mom’s death back on his face.
“You find him, you take him to one of the warehouses,” Pops said. “We need to find out who this other person is.”
“Do you think it’s all connected?” I asked, realizing how stupid a question it was as I said it.
&nbs
p; “I think that someone has a beef with the family and he’s doing all he can to get to us.” Pops glanced at Ian. “Have you been keeping up-to-date on everything?”
“Not everything.”
Pops crossed his arms and studied my face for a long second. “People are disappearing. People who were on the lists that Cassidy sent the kidnappers. People who work for Jack are getting caught by the police doing things they’ve done for years without problem. They’re getting shot down in the streets. Someone’s feeding information to the Italians. They show up places they have no business showing up, sometimes places only the people in this room are aware we’re going to be. The police are everywhere, suddenly watching warehouses and apartments they shouldn’t know about.” Pops shook his head. “Someone’s trying to take us down. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why, but we’ve got to start watching our backs a little closer.”
“And if this guy reveals who hired him—?”
“We could finally get an advantage in this game he’s playing with us.”
Chapter 23
Stacy
I couldn’t sit there and listen to his apology. How could he apologize to me like that? In front of all those people, he apologized to me. How could he do that? How could he even pretend that he was sorry for any of the things he’d done? How could he get on his knees like that, those tears in his eyes?
I was so angry, and I didn’t know why. I wanted to scream and I wanted to cry all at once. I stormed through the hallway that led to the back of house to where our playroom used to be. I needed to think. I needed a few minutes alone to figure out why my chest felt as though it was about to explode.
I burst into the old playroom and found myself surrounded by the game systems and pool tables my brothers used to use to keep themselves entertained in their high school years. It was a little surreal seeing that these things were still here. I imagined that Pops would have had them moved out in favor of something he could take advantage of, like…I don’t know. I just imagined he would have erased all evidence of us kids in this house.
I walked over to the pool table and picked up the eight ball, remembering all the times, I sat on a stool and watched Killian play Sean and Ian, listening to the jokes they told each other that I didn’t yet understand. That was back when I was still in middle school, when I thought I was grown-up, but I really wasn’t. Then Killian stopped coming around, and Ian and Sean went off to college. Kyle didn’t play, and Kevin preferred to hang out with Mom. The two of them were inseparable. Kevin was a year or two older than I was, but he came after me. He was the last to come into the house. Mom retired not long after, and the two of them…I was kind of jealous of how close they were.
“Some of these game systems are twenty years old. I bet they’d sell for a pretty penny.”
I turned, surprised to see that it was Jack who’d followed me here. I was sort of hoping that Killian would have come looking for me.
“I was hoping we’d get a moment or two alone, Stacy,” Jack said as he came toward me, his hands extended in a sort of gesture of peace. “I have some things I need to tell you.”
“You do?”
I didn’t know Jack well. He’d always been like a shadow lurking over the family. He was Pops’ business partner and the subject of many fights between Mom and Pops, but he was never really a guest at the house. He came to big events, but never at the house. Baptisms, confirmations, graduations…he was always in the audience and always provided a really nice gift, but he was never invited into the family. He was like that distant relative that Mom didn’t like, therefore he was more of a peripheral character in my childhood than an active participant.
Jack gestured to the couches that were arranged in front of one of the two televisions that adorned this room. I sat carefully, watching him as he took a seat on the coffee table in front of me.
He leaned forward and touched my knee lightly as if we had that sort of relationship.
“I want you to know, first of all, that your father had nothing to do with what happened to Davis.”
I cocked my head slightly. “How could you know that?”
“Because I didn’t want to involve him.”
“You?”
He straightened up, watching me as though he expected me to explode. I might have a moment earlier, but now I was in a sort of shock.
“Davis Grant isn’t his name. He’s really Chandler Collins. He worked for the Italians.”
“No.” I shook my head. “He was a math teacher at the community college.”
Jack took his phone out of his back pocket and played with the screen until he found what he wanted. Then he handed it to me.
There were pictures. Davis with a dark woman; Davis with the same woman and two children; Davis in a suit speaking to a man I didn’t know; Davis sitting in a car outside of a restaurant here in Boston that I knew well, a restaurant owned by the Italian mob. Davis on his wedding day. Davis with his parents. Davis. Davis. Davis.
But it wasn’t Davis.
“He’s married and had three children. He was working undercover, gathering information for the Italians. Somehow he found out about you and thought he could get close to you to get information on me and my people.”
I shook my head. “Why me? I wasn’t even speaking to my father at the time.”
“But you’re related to him. You have information you don’t even know you have.”
“No. He never…I…he never asked about my family. We never talked about…”
I shook my head, my thumb moving over the phone screen again, moving through the pictures again.
“He was undercover, Stacy. He lied to you, and he was good at it.”
“We were getting married.”
Jack looked at the floor for a long moment. “I have reason to believe that he would have disappeared before the wedding. He would have left you standing at the altar alone.”
“Then why did you kill him?”
Jack crossed his arms over his chest. “My sources suggested that he was about to report to his superiors. And that report would have ripped my organization wide open.”
“What did he have? I didn’t—”
“It wasn’t you, Stacy. He put a bug on Brian’s phone when you were having dinner. He was listening to every call coming in on his phone, saw every text message, read every email. He knew about Brianna’s kidnapping and knew what was discussed in meetings between Brian and me. He knew things about my organization that I couldn’t allow the DEA to learn about. I had to stop him.”
“So you killed him.”
“I killed him.”
I stood up and began to pace. It was all a lie. Davis was never Davis. He wasn’t the mild-mannered college professor I thought he was. He was married. He had children. No wonder he never wanted to go to bed with me, why he always walked away. We made all these plans, but none of it was real. None of it. It was all a lie.
Secrets. Killian was right. Secrets only ruined things.
“This man you hired to kill Davis, is he the same man who’s after Killian?”
“Yes.”
“What do you know about him?”
Jack was silent for a long moment. He slowly stood, turning off his phone and sliding it back into his pocket.
“Brian knows what he’s doing. That’s why I trust him with protecting me and my men.”
“What do you know?”
“That this man will not stop until he’s completed the assignment.”
“Then we’ll have to stop him ourselves.”
Chapter 24
Killian
I took a long swallow from the thermos of coffee Stacy packed for me.
“Want some?”
Sean shook his head.
“Why are you here?”
He shook his head again.
“You were always such a chatterbox.”
“How could I be a chatterbox when you were always chattering?”
“Oh, he talks!”
S
ean reached into the console and picked up the bottle of water sitting there.
“I came because Pops asked me to. He didn’t want any of us alone. Ian’s with Kyle and Pops is driving Kevin back to Florida. He doesn’t want him up here because he’s the last one of us still not knee deep in this stuff.”
“You were, too, once upon a time.”
“I don’t mind helping out. Mom would want this.”
“No, she wouldn’t. She’d want you to go to New York or Chicago and join some respectable law firm. She’d want you to have a happy, healthy life.”
Sean’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know. I think she accepted that this was our way of life. I think she knew we would all end up working for Jack someday.”
“What makes you say that?”
Sean shrugged. “I talked to her a few times before she died. She said things…I think she wanted us to rally around Pops and keep him safe.”
“She was sick, Sean. She wasn’t always clear in her thinking.”
“She was clear enough.”
Now I was the one shaking my head. “You were her baby. She wouldn’t want you involved.”
“I’m a grown man. I can make my own choices.”
I dragged my fingers through my hair, turning my attention back to the street. We were watching the address Jack had given us for the hitman. A search of local hospitals, vet offices, and clinics didn’t turn up anything. The guy must have managed to get his nose back into place on his own.
But he’d have to come home eventually.
“Why did Stacy think you killed her fiancé?”
“Because I wasn’t there watching over her that night like I should have been.”
“Why not?”
“Does it matter?”
Sean shrugged. “At least you were finally smart enough to tell her how you felt.”
“You knew?”
I stared at him, a little surprised. But I shouldn’t have been. Sean was always aware of what was going on around him, more so than everyone else in the family was. He wasn’t always this quiet and pensive, but he was always a people watcher, observant.
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