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I dug my nails into my thigh to keep from crying out in anguish. Better physical pain than emotional.
“But Maddy got pregnant?” I asked as a question even though I was pretty sure it was a statement.
Leo nodded. There was a small look of admiration on his features. “Yes,” he said. “She got pregnant, and the child was Andrea Blanchi’s.”
My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “What!” Andrea had never mentioned that. He called her his sister, which in hindsight was absolutely disgusting.
“Maddy had grown up in the Blanchi’s home, and she did not want her son to end up like them. She wanted out.”
I shook my head. “If she was pregnant with a boy and Andrea knew…”
“That’s where I came in,” Leo said. “I had been planning my own escape for years. Isaac knew about it, but he was desperate to see the back of me, so he never said anything.” Leo released a small laugh. “Who knew that would come in handy.”
I was not in the mood for a chuckle. I was mentally and physically exhausted, and I was not sure how much more I could take. “Maddy needed to get away from Andrea, and your father needed to believe that she was dead…” Once more, I noticed a dark look overtake Leo’s face.
“So, you killed someone in her place?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Your mother did.”
I gasped audibly. Whatever I had been expecting, it had not been that.
Leo was on his feet pacing back and forth. “I knew that she was desperate. I knew it, but I didn’t think that she would kill an innocent girl just to save Maddy. I told her she didn’t need to. I had a plan, and it would have worked. Andrea was the wild card, but your father—” Leo brushed the air as though my father were nothing more than a gnat. “He wanted to believe that Maddy was dead. He really didn’t even care about your mother. He was happy allowing himself to believe that she was out there suffering because of him.”
My mother, the woman who had abandoned me, killed someone for her other daughter. I thought that being passed over as Pakhan stung, but this felt like Leo had lodged a knife in my ribs and was slowly twisting the blade to reach maximum pain.
“Then, my father gave you what he promised, and you were back in the life, more embroiled in it than ever.”
Fuck. In all of my twisted family drama, Leo was actually the good guy. He’d given up on his promise to his mother, to become Pakhan, to save an innocent child.
As much as I wanted to hate him for everything, I couldn’t. Hell, I couldn’t hate Maddy either. Even though I felt a burning desire to blame everything on her, she was no more in charge of what happened than I was.
No, I blamed my father for passing me up, and for not protecting my sister from the Blanchi family. I blamed the Blanchis for caring more about power than the right thing. And I blamed my mother for not fighting for the both of us.
“Hey,” Leo’s thumb pressed against my skin, and for the first time, I realized that I had been crying. Without conscious thought, the tears that I had been holding back were escaping. “Everything is going to be alright.”
I sniffled and tried to hide my face. He wouldn’t let me. His strong hands turned my cheeks so that I was looking right at him. “Don’t hide from me,” he said, his lips just a hair's breadth away from my own. “You never have to hide from me.”
“I hide from everyone,” I told him. “It’s how I’ve survived.”
“I’m not scared of who you truly are,” Leo said. “You’re the bravest person that I have ever met.”
His words should have made me feel warm and proud, but I didn’t. Instead, I felt drained and depleted.
“Why does the Bratva want my father to step down?” I asked. It was the question that began all of this, and while I was glad to no longer be in the dark, I still felt as though I had been put on a roller-coaster and whipped around at breakneck speed.
“The men don’t like that he killed a woman and her child. After all, there’s a code. They are all worried that because he had them ordered dead that he opened the floodgates for the Blanchi’s to do the same to us. They want him gone as a show of no-confidence.”
My eyes narrowed. I did not think that my father deserved to be Pakhan, and my reasons just became more and more numerous each day, but Leo was supposedly the one who committed the crime. How was it that no one was kicking up a fuss about the fact that he was the one who carried out the act.
“My father was well-respected in the organization,” Leo explained. “After your mother, he was ousted from his position. A lot of people felt that that was unfair—”
“So, they figured that they would right the wrongs of the past by making you head of the family?” I snorted. “Typical.” The move made no sense. I was the heir to the organization, and unlike Leo, I was not suspected of having killed a woman.
It didn’t matter to me that he hadn’t killed Maddy, and that he had in fact, protected her, it still pissed me off that he was being rewarded because his father got a raw deal in something that happened about twenty-years ago.
Hell, the man was no longer even alive. I was certain he was not in the great beyond dwelling on the past.
My head was pounding as I tried to process everything.
