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There’s even some crazy story involving Will Cates, the missing-presumed-dead bass player for the band Velvet Guillotine, stealing one of Luca’s girlfriends and taking her on tour, which resulted in Luca literally trying to storm Madison Square Garden with a small army of mob enforcers during a concert.
No wonder his son is an angry asshole with zero impulse control.
Then I find another story about Luca. This one details yet another mistress of his dying in a horrible car crash while allegedly trying to escape from Luca himself, who may or may not have orchestrated the actual crash.
I wince as I scan the pictures in the old news article, which show a horrifically twisted wreck of a car where it landed after being slammed off the West Side Highway and bouncing and rolling eleven times.
Obviously, the poor girl was killed. What makes it even more heartbreaking is that there were apparently two other passengers in the car that died—another adult, and…horribly…a child.
I look away, shaking my head. Then, slowly, I turn back. My eyes widen as I scroll back to the top of the article and read the publication date.
The crash was twenty-eight years ago.
Something starts whining in my head—a small noise I can’t quite ignore.
You’re insane.
Just the same, I go to the Crown and Black website and click on the “About the Partners” tab. My mind flashes to what feels like a hundred years ago, in the dark heat of an elevator during a blackout, when Alistair told me things he’d never told anyone before.
How he came to live with the Black family. How his parents had been killed in a horrendous car crash.
I click on his bio on the website, telling myself over and over how utterly insane this is, and that I’m connecting dots that aren’t there. But when I start to read, my face pales.
The bio mentions Knightsblood, and law school, and how he and his brother—sons of the much-loved Vaughn Black, attorney at law—befriended Taylor Crown and founded Crown and Black.
It’s a very standard, paint-by-numbers, LinkedIn-style bio.
But at the very end, almost as a footnote, it gratefully mentions his adoption by Vaughn and Marilyn. How he’d been involved in a near-fatal car crash that took the lives of his birth parents before his adoptive ones gave him a new chance at life.
My face goes numb.
A car crash that occurred when he was six, twenty-eight years ago.
On the West Side Highway, in New York.
The little whining noise in my head becomes a full-blown air raid siren.
Holy. Shit.
I grab the letter from my father with shaking hands, re-reading it again.
“I hope you know I grieved for you when your son died.”
The letter falls from my hands. In a daze, my head spinning, I slowly close the laptop, slip out of bed, and start to pace the room.
There’s no way.
There is no fucking way that?—
I gasp as my phone rings. My arm jerks out to grab it, my heart pounding as I look for Alistair’s name on the screen. But then my brows knit.
It’s not Alistair. It’s Rosa, my father’s caretaker.
The color drains from my face as I answer the call and cautiously bring the phone to my ear.
“Rosa…” I choke. “My father?—?”
“Ms. LeBlanc!” she gushes excitedly. “It’s okay! Your father… He’s waking up!”
