AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
“My mother passed away when I was little,” Leo started. His eyes had taken a faraway look as though he were being thrust back into the past, and I wondered if it was because he was thinking about his mother.
“Because of the Blanchi family?” I asked, before I could stop myself. I vowed to remain quiet during the story, but it was not really in my nature to keep a vow.
He chuckled softly as though the question was amusing. I did not understand how it could be. My own mother abandoned me, but I liked to think that I would be sad if she were dead.
“No,” he said. “Cancer.”
“Cancer?” I repeated, as though the words were new. I had never known of anyone to die of natural causes. I’d been to a lot of funerals growing up, but normally, it was for men and women who’d been caught in the fighting.
Cancer felt…worse in some ways. Less predictable.
“Ironic, isn’t it? I think that sometimes we live in a world where there’s such a chance of ending up dead early that we forget that there’s more threatening things out there than a Blanchi boy with a gun.”
I bit my lip, unsure of what to say.
“When she died, she made me promise her that I would find a way out. I think on her deathbed she feared my own demise more than hers. It was a silly thing for her to make me promise. I was only four at the time, and it’s a miracle that I even remember her last days. By the end of the six months of mourning, my father moved on. He remarried, and Isaac was born not too long after. Laura, my stepmother, is a wonderful woman. She raised me, and she made sure that I always had a mother’s presence in my life.”
I nodded as I tried to do the math. Something wasn’t adding up.
“Sometimes, I think she doted on me so much because she felt guilty. There’s no way that the two of them were not having an affair.”
Leo’s eyes darkened. “It’s why my father and I could never find common ground. I knew that while my mother was wasting away, he was busy finding someone new. That was never something I could get over.”
“But you forgave Laura,” I said.
He nodded. “I did,” he told me. “I never held what happened against her.”
“Why?” If I felt that someone had wronged my mother on her deathbed, I would have made that woman’s life a living hell. Shit, sometimes I punished my father because if he was not Pakhan, I was sure that my mother would have stuck around.
Leo fixed me with a deep stare. I tried not to squirm in my seat because it felt as though Leo could see the parts of me that I was not proud of.
“You and I both know that women in the organization have few rights. My mother was dying, and I was sure that my father promised her marriage. I can’t blame her for taking what was offered.”
“So, what happened next?” I asked, and I wondered what any of this had to do with why my father was being ousted from his position.
“Nothing,” he said. “Isaac was born, and life continued onwards, but I wanted out of the life, or rather, I did not want to end up part of it. I don’t have the stomach for murder. I watched my mother die slowly, and I would never want to snuff the life out of some else’s eyes.”
“So, you’ve never killed anyone?”
Now, a look of sadness overtook Leo’s face, and I knew that he had not been able to escape the one thing that he desired. Personally, I did not have the same thoughts he did around life, but my heart went out to him, especially as I thought about those pictures, I had found of him.
Would I learn what he did to erase the easy smile that he used to have? Did he kill someone or was it a lot worse than that? Knowing the thing that the Bratva got up to, it honestly, could have been anything.
“I have done a lot worse than that,” he told me.
There was a darkness in his face, and I knew that he was thinking about those things.
“Your father wanted me to go to Harvard for law school. I got good grades in high school, and your father has always been very involved.”
This made me snort. “Nice to know that he has been involved in someone’s life,” I muttered under my breath. My father had passed me off to my grandmother for most of my life. I was sure if he could have sent me away, he would have. When I was younger, I prayed that he might send me to boarding school, but he never did. I was sure that my grandmother had a hand in all of that. She might hate me, but she wanted me under her control.
“I did not fight too hard. I wanted to go to college. Boston wasn’t that far, but it was far enough that I could escape the family, and I did.”
“And you met Maddy Stephens?”
I expected Leo to appear surprised, but he did not.
