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“What?” he’d asked, clearly confused. “No. There’s a gala. Robert Kline asked if you would attend with him.”
My word spun on its axis.
I don’t think I realized that in the next minute, it would crash down.
“Robert Kline?”
“Yes. Son to Kurt Kline. He got caught up in a scandal, and he needs a date for the gala. Some pretty thing to get the people talking in the right way.”
“He . . . needs a date to the gala.” I said the words slowly, unsure if I heard correctly.
“God, Lilah, yes. He needs a date.” He sighed like I was an idiot, and I realized then that I’d heard that sigh from him a lot. More than any daughter should from a man who allegedly loved her. Cherished her.
“The last time I heard from you was in Lola’s hospital room.” After we left, I drove home and started planning, contacting people to get some kind of insight, doing research—anything I could to find more about who I was and how I could get my revenge.
For my sister.
For my mother.
For my father—my real father.
Everything I had found in those journals . . . Now that I had a fuller picture, everything made so much sense. The whole situation, what I once thought was just my mother’s guilt spilled onto paper, was so much more. So much worse. My mother and father were real-life Romeo and Juliet, and I was their doomed love child.
While they were no longer here to make things right, to make people pay, I knew that I could. I could do that for them. Just like Arturo’s letter to me stated, I could take my rightful spot at the head of the Russo table. And if I played my cards right, I could take down the Carluccios in the process. Make them pay for what they did to my family.
“I don’t have time for this, Delilah. Gala is at five. I need you here at three.”
There was a time when I would drop everything and go. When I would think of my mother’s last few words to me and do as my father asked.
Words whispered to an impressionable 10-year-old girl by her dying mother.
Listen to your father, Lilah. And your sister. They have your best interest in mind. Don’t make waves; lie low. You’ll be safe, I promise.
Lie low.
Be safe.
Don’t make waves.
Shane Turner knew about my sister’s promise to our dying mother—to help keep our father out of trouble and me safe—and he used it against her to get what he wanted. He manipulated everything and everyone.
Did he also know what words she whispered to me in those final days? Had he been using them against me all this time as well?
Possibly.
Probably.
“I’m not going.”
The line had gone so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. I remember that part the most: the thick silence in the air. I’d pulled the phone from my face to make sure he was still there on the line, that it hadn't disconnected.
The time kept going up with each passing second.
“Hello?” I asked, putting the phone back to my ear.
“What do you mean you’re not going?” The words were low and ominous, a storm cloud waiting to ruin everything.
“After everything that happened, you think I would want to help you with this?” That backbone I had been hiding started to stiffen, and I felt my chin lift. As if, even though he couldn’t see me, every part of my body had to be a part of this rebellion.
