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“She’s been staying with Dante Romano, according to our sources.”
I cursed under my breath.
“Why?”
“Christian may have been responsible for Libby’s death directly.” I stood up, pushing the chair back behind me, the legs scraping noisily on the floor. “But Kendra failed to protect her, just like she failed to protect Kenzi.”
“You think she’ll make a play for her?” he asked, following me out of the dining room. I nodded. “Christ. I’ll call Matthias. He’s with Dante, meeting Augustu La Rosa.” Nodding, I grabbed a pair of my old shoes by the elevator and pressed the button for the parking garage.
“What are you planning to do once we get there?” my father asked as we stepped into the elevator. It jolted before moving. “She’s got a considerable head start. Kendra might be dead already.”
“Who said I was going to stop her from killing Kendra?” I winked at him and walked off the elevator. “I was going to hold her down while she pulled her hair.”
“That sounds oddly specific.” He looked at me askance.
“Lara Mesgrove was a bitch.” I shrugged nonchalantly. “She had it coming.”
My father shook his head, holding the door to his Porsche for me and closing it when I settled in my seat. During the girls’ freshman year of high school, Libby tried out for the cheerleading squad, which Lara had been the captain of. After tryouts, Lara and her friends had cornered Libby and uttered every bad thing they could think of about her. Shoving at her and trying to tear at her clothes and her hair.
When Kenzi got word of what was happening, she took off like a shot. I’m pretty sure she got an offer from the football coach; that was how hard she had tackled Lara to the ground by her hair. I’d held her down while Kenzi wrote down every insult she had hurled at Libby on Lara’s face in permanent marker.
The girls had been grounded, and I’d gotten a beating and two days in the shed, but it had been worth it. We protected each other, but I wondered briefly if I had protected them too much from the horrors of their own family.
Kenzi hadn’t been as blind as Libby had been growing up. She’d always been sharp, and I knew she saw more than she let on. Just like after I left. She’d grown curious at Elias’s behavior.
Maybe if I had spoken up about how I was truly treated, she would have had a better chance at surviving.
But that was a lot of what-ifs, and it was too late for that now.
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
Ihated leaving my wife’s side this morning. Her body was warm and snuggled up to mine. She’d thrown a leg over one of my own, one hand splayed over my heart possessively. This was what I wanted to wake up to every morning.
The sight of my wife lying beside me stirred something primal in my chest. We were nowhere close to being all right. Even though she clung to me during sex and sought out my embrace in the night as she slept, knowing I would keep her safe, there was still a long journey ahead of us.
My plan had been to take her with me to this meeting, but an unexpected visitor had shown up on Kavanaugh’s doorstep. Kenzi looked worn and beaten down. For all her stoicism, she was still yet a child whose life had been taken from her too early. She had never gotten to experience what it was like to truly grow into an adult. Instead, she had been shoved into the deep end without a life jacket and expected to come out alive.
Currently, I was seated between Vas and Dante Romano at Augustu La Rosa’s estate in West Seattle. I was fond of the estate. The house was large and modern, with big open windows and state-of-the-art appliances. I’d been searching for a place myself, but everything had come up lacking. This house fit my fancy and matched the modern design of the penthouse that had been blown to hell, but it wasn’t Ava’s style, and I wanted something that could fit both our personalities. A modern sort of bohemian vibe.
Bohemian. My skin crawled at the word, but the eclectic, soft tones and open décor made her happy, and that was all that mattered. There was a Queen Anne Victorian that had caught my eye. It was built in 2008 and had an old-world charm and modern subset that spoke to my soul and that I knew would speak to Ava’s.
I personally knew the architect who had designed it and had already scheduled a tour. It was just on the edge of Columbia City, so the drive to the office wouldn’t be terrible, and there were plenty of back roads to take. I was still waiting on the zoning commission to approve my proposal for rebuilding Dashkov Enterprises. No one other than the fire marshal was aware of what really caused the building to collapse.
The leading story the fire marshal had given the media was a gas explosion, and the secondary investigators all concurred. Still, they were dragging their feet for some reason, and I didn’t like it. Arctic Security had plenty of room for me to work out of, but it didn’t have the same capacity as the other building, which served multiple purposes.
“I don’t care about what you want, you ungratefulmanello,” Augustu spat at his son. “There will be no treaty between us unless my conditions are met.”
Here we go.
Augustu La Rosa was after more territory than he could handle. His initial thought was to build an alliance through marriage, but as his last wife—and the three before that—had all mysteriously died, I wasn’t willing to set that up. Neither was Dante Romano.
The man was a fool, which was why Leon had left. Well, he’d been kicked out when he was seventeen, but that wasn’t how Augustu saw it. He’d given his son a choice, and according to him, he had chosen wrong.
I was inclined to disagree.
When I had heard through the underground that Leon La Rosa had forsaken his father and his right to be heir to the La Rosa name, I was intrigued. La Cosa Nostra was a lot of things, but I never imagined that someone like Leon existed within them.
Augustu had been best friends with Benedito Romano, Dante’s father. The two had carved a bloody name for themselves in the city. They owned half of it and greedily sought to stretch their grasp beyond their borders. It led to an all-out war with the Irish, which is why Kavanaugh had not been invited to this meeting.
