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So, I cleared my throat and turned around.
“Dad?” I asked.
The fighting ceased and he turned to face me. “Yes, princess? What is it?”
I clasped my hands behind my back. “When did you first enter the WITSEC program?”
He balked. “You can’t possibly believe that man over me.”
I shrugged. “It’s not a matter of believing one word over another. It’s all behind me. All of it is right there, taped up to that window. So, you can either start talking, or I can hand this over to the police.”
His face fell flat. “And how do you know I haven’t already told the police everything I know?”
“Because if you had, you’d be in handcuffs.”
“Eden,” Mom gasped.
I ignored her. “We were almost killed.”
Dominik stood beside me. “I’ve got mysterious voices calling me on numbers no one should have telling me to back off of my research.”
I peeked up at him. “Really? Since when?”
He looked down at me. “It’s why we left early.”
I nodded and turned my focus back to my father. “So, you’re going to stop whatever charade it is you’ve been playing our entire lives and you’re going to tell me what happened, or as God as my witness I’ll be the one to throw you in prison myself.”
“Eden!” Em exclaimed breathlessly.
Dad’s face reddened with anger. “And what about him?”
He gestured to Dominik and I drew in a deep breath. “What about him?”
“Clearly, he’s been sitting on all of this information and he hasn’t told you anything. So, why are you upset with me when he’s withheld just as much from you?”
“I’ll deal with him in time. But right now, he doesn’t have all the dots connected. Just theories. Which means, in a court of law? He’s just as much of a victim as I am. So, you can continue blaming the people you’ve wrapped up in your shit, or you can start talking and save yourself. Your choice.”
In truth, I was irate with Dominik. If he had a sense that shit with my family was this bad, and this big, then he needed to tell me. I had a fucking right to know, and all he’d been doing was sitting on this shit while fucking me sideways and not giving a care in the world as to how anything made me feel. For all I knew, he would’ve sat on all of this until he had a chance to ambush me. A chance to get more out of me than I had already agreed to give him. After all, it was the kind of person he was. The kind of man he had chosen to be. And it made me want to rake my nails across his face and dig his god damn eyeballs out with my thumbs. But I simply kept breathing through my nose in order to keep my cool. I kept the upper hand and waited for the right time to strike.
Because once I found it, I’d use all of this as leverage to get out of the contract I had signed with Satan himself.
Before raking him through the god damn mud in the press.
“Daddy?” Em asked as she pulled away from Jackson’s embrace. “Just talk to us. We’re your family, and these are our lives. Our livelihoods. Our homes. We don’t care what you’ve done. We don’t care what you did when you were younger. You’re our father, and we love you. But we have to know what’s going on so that we can protect ourselves. So that we know what we’re looking for and we know which way to step next. Please, just talk to us. Just tell us what the hell’s going on.”
And as he brushed Em’s tears off her cheeks, he had his own creep down his face. “The government was supposed to protect us. That was the agreement.”
“Protect us from what?” I asked.
“The mafia,” Dominik said.
My father shot him a look before his solemn gaze returned to mine. “The mafia, sweetheart.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“What?” Em asked? “But how did you get—?”
Dad closed his eyes. “I witnessed something that I shouldn’t have, and I testified against the mafia in a closed court case in exchange for WITSEC protection for me and your mother.”
The mafia. WITSEC. Government protection. Out of all the criminal cases I’d ever taken on in court, only one of them had ever resulted in a deal like that. They were extensive, and grueling. They were painful, and no one ever came out winners. I thought back to that case. To the little boy that had gotten up on that stand with such courage and testified against Stanis “Big Boy” Lombardi back near the beginning of my career.
And as those little boy’s lifeless eyes popped up into my head, having been gunned down only days after putting that mafioso in prison, I felt my knees cave beneath me.
Before I plummeted toward the floor.
