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“You don’t understand,” I reply, crossing my arms as I try to keep my composure. “You can’t receive or make any calls. I made sure of it.”
“What?” He stills, giving me a troubled look. “Ariana, I’ve missed you; I’ve been worried sick about you. I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“No, you’ve been crying all over the news about me while also flirting with the idea of a state senate run, banking on your voters’ sympathy,” I shoot back. “I told you. The jig is up. I know everything.”
“And what is it that you know, exactly? Did those Steel Knights goons brainwash you? Is that what this is about?”
“Oh, no, I saw for myself,” I reply. “I saw you at that diner with Thierry and Masterson. Tell me, did you already know that he’d tried to kill me when you sat down with him? Or did he lay it out right then and there over dessert?”
My father finally understands. I can see the shift in his expression. It’s anything but subtle. It’s the mask cracking open and falling apart, revealing his true nature. The man he’s always been. The man I didn’t have enough sense to see from the beginning.
“Ariana, it’s incredibly complicated, but I bear no fault for what those biker thugs did. Had they stuck to their own business, had they left you alone, we wouldn’t be here now,” my father says. “Blame them, not me. Everything I ever did, I did it for you, honey.”
“You did it for me?” I can’t help but laugh. It’s a mocking laughter, the kind that shakes me to the core and makes my lungs hurt. It’s anger bubbling up to the surface and making a vein in my temple throb furiously. “What exactly did you do for me, Dad? I would have never been put in this situation if you hadn’t gone after the Steel Knights in the first place, demonizing them in the media while kissing the cabal’s ass for whatever favors they did for you.”
“Cabal? Ariana, what are you talking about?”
“The Black Hand.”
He’s quiet. Glowering at me. I can hear the wheels in his head, spinning, screeching, jumping out of their grooves because he wasn’t prepared for that.
24
Ariana
“The Black Hand,” I say it again. “The people to whom you owe your entire career, I’m guessing. Otherwise, I can’t explain why you’re standing here so chill, knowing that one of them tried to fucking kill me. A federal agent, I might add. Quantico will have their hands full when I blow the lid off the whole thing; you realize that, right?”
“I had no dealings nor any agreement with Masterson—”
“But you sent him out to find me,” I cut him off. “He said that much before he put a gun to my head. How did you think this was going to turn out, Dad? That I’d be brought back home, safe and sound, and we’d do a teary-eyed photo op for the press? Did you think I’d happily volunteer for your state senate campaign out of daughterly love and gratitude? The minute you shook hands with those people, your life and your career were over!”
“Do not talk about things you clearly don’t understand!” my father finally bursts. “The Black Hand is powerful and dangerous, Ariana. You have no idea who you’re dealing with, and neither do those biker assholes. Had they just left Everton like I repeatedly asked them to, you wouldn’t be in this situation!”
“They didn’t leave because this is their city, too. They’re helping people. They’re doing more for this community than you ever did, and what bothers me the most is that they believed you; they fucking voted for you, Dad, and you went around and stabbed them in the back. I see right through you now. I see the real you.”
“Ariana, the Steel Knights are criminals.”
“The only criminal I see here is you,” I reply. “Mom was getting closer to the truth, wasn’t she? Is that why the Black Hand silenced her?”
This hits him right in the gut. He exhales sharply, struggling to feign outrage, but I see the slump in his shoulders. The liberation he feels now that the truth is out in the open. There’s no way of putting this behind us, no way of scrubbing it off the board, and he knows it.
I am looking at a stranger yet we share the same blood.
I have to distance myself from him now. There is no room and no time left for second chances.
“Your mother’s death was a tragic accident,” my father says, his voice low and cold.
“I spoke to Detective Amstaff.”
“That man is bitter. He is a disgraced officer of the law, nothing else!”
“I saw the case file,” I reply. “Dad, the only thing you can do right now is convince me that you didn’t order the hit on Mom. That’s it. Tell me. Tell me you didn’t arrange for the Black Hand to kill her.”
“I did not!” my father snarls, his face red with fury and emotional impotence. I just held a mirror up to him, and he didn’t like what he saw. “I didn’t order the hit. They did it on their own.”
“And you said nothing.”
He scoffs and runs a hand through his hair, a muscle ticking in his square jaw. “What could I say, Ariana? I warned Rose, I begged her to pick another story, to focus on something else. But your mother … you remember her; you know how determined she could be. Once she caught the scent of blood, there was no stopping her.”
