How many people have kept my parent’s death a secret?
Because the answer to that question could be our undoing if we didn’t formulate this plan right.
2
Israel
I never understood why my father wanted such a massive place to call home.
As I stared out one of the many bullet-proof windows of his sprawling mansion, I gazed upon the impeccably-tailored front yard. The lawnmower lines all filtered in the directions they needed to. The diagonal zigzag pattern appealed to any eye that might whiz down the open backroads of the area just outside of the city.
I’d spent my childhood in this place, running down these hallways and almost knocking the very expensive paintings off the walls with my shenanigans. I’d been trained inside these walls. Read my rights inside these walls. Slapped around and wrestled to the ground and debriefed inside these walls.
And yet, as I stood there trying to pull answers out of my father, I felt like a stranger in this place.
I felt like another one of my father’s pawns.
“I’m not done talking to you, son.”
I sighed. “What now, Pa?”
“I know you don’t like what I have to say, especially when it concerns your business—”
I whipped around. “Because it’s my business. Just like you don’t enjoy me prying into yours.”
He pointed at me. “I sat in your seat not too long ago, son. You better remember exactly who it is you’re speaking with. I built the empire you now run. Never forget that.”
“Actually, it was Papa who—”
He glared at me. “You need to throw her out. She’s a liability to everything we’ve built.”
“She’s also my wife. What do you suggest I do about that? There’s honor in this family.”
He shook his head. “There’s no honor in hers.”
“Pava is her uncle.”
He snickered. “And if my memory serves correct, that still makes him family to the woman you’re entertaining at night.”
“I’m not entertaining her like you think I am.”
He chuckled. “Then, you’re even dumber than I thought.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Choose your next words very carefully.”
He nodded. “All right, I will. There’s a very good chance that woman is working for Pava. Her uncle, for crying out loud.”
“He tried to burn her down in my warehouse.”
His eyes narrowed. “And you know damn good and well what Pava Moretti’s expertise is. He thrives on double-crossing people. Just like he did that woman’s parents.”
I blinked. “I never told you about Bonnie’s parents.”
He paused. “So, we finally her name.”
I took a step toward him. “How did you know about her parents?”
“Israel, be mindful of—”
“Answer me,” I bellowed.
“Who the hell doesn’t know what happened that night in this town?”
I snickered. “Apparently me. And my wife.”
My father fell against the plastered wall with a disgruntled release of air. “That night is… memorable for all of us. That woman’s father—her mother—they were good people. Genuinely good people.”
“Then, why is it so hard to believe she has that goodness within her? That she really is on our side?”
“Because she wasn’t raised with it, son. She was only a child when her parents died. She was raised by Pava. Never forget that.”
I shook my head. “She’s not working with him. Those guards tried to kill us both in our sleep. He lured her into that damn warehouse and had her on a fucking cell phone while someone torched the place. She’d be dead if I hadn’t run in to get her. He’s trying to kill her off. Pick us off, one by one. I know that, and I know deep down you know it too.”
Rage slithered through my veins. The taste for revenge sat on the tip of my tongue, and I didn’t want to let it go to waste. Pava Moretti needed to pay for the sins he had enacted against my family. Even if it was a false family in the first place. Bonnie was under just as much fire as I was myself, and I needed to get my father to see that.
I needed this family working together. “Don’t you see? He’s trying to get us to destroy ourselves from the inside out.”
Pa sighed, as if I were some sort of petulant toddler he was tired of dealing with. “No, he’s not.”
“Then, what do you think he’s doing?”
His brooding brown eyes held mine. “I think he’s playing a psychological game to destroy you from the inside out.”
I hated that I didn’t have an argument against his point. I mean, I hated it whenever my father was in the right, in general. But, I really didn’t like the fact that he had the upper-hand on this topic when I was trying to resolve it in the first place. For a brief moment, I lost myself in my frustrations. I felt my mind gravitating back to the one thing I feared more than losing my own life. And that was disappointing Bonnie. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to see through on the promise I made, however silent it might have been. I feared that Pava would go unpunished for his actions against a harmless little girl just to obtain some family empire. However, It wasn’t until my father cupped my cheeks that I focused back on him.
“You’re my son, Israel. My first-born. And I’ll do anything it takes to protect you. But until I know for certain Brianna or Bonnie or whatever the hell her name is really isn’t working with her uncle, she’s a threat to me. And nothing more.”
I backed away from his grasp. “Then, I’m a threat to you. And nothing more.”
My father’s brow stitched together in great confusion, and I couldn’t blame him. This was a confusing time for everyone because we were playing with dominoes that had already fallen in a direction we didn’t need them to be falling in the first place. We were all scrambling to put the pieces back together in the order we all wanted them to be in, and that was where the issue sat. Because we all wanted those pieces
