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“The Don had dirt on everybody. Mafia, remember?” He sits down next to me and leans in to see what I’m looking at.
“Had dirt?” I ask as I look at him. That was past tense.
“He’s dead.”
“Matteo—” I break off, staring at him in shock. “How? When?”
He shrugs. “He had cancer.”
I know nothing of the man in front of me. So little of his past, his relationship with his dad, his family.
“Were you there, this morning? While he…?” I take in a sharp breath. “Oh, God, you were there for his last minutes?” And here I was, scrolling mindlessly through my phone, channel-hopping through some random TV.
“Yes, you could say so.”
I want to say I’m sorry, but I’m not. Who knew what else the Don had in store for me. For Peter Armstrong. Another man I never knew.
Matteo seems unfazed about whatever happened this morning, so when he flips a page in the file, my attention is back on my dad’s undocumented criminal activity. Evidently undocumented anywhere except here, in the tight-knit Mafia circles. I keep on flipping through the file. Details of bribes my dad accepted from big businesses, votes he bought—bought—by arranging partnerships and money deals under the table. The higher he climbed politically, the bigger the deals became. I can hardly breathe with the shock of it.
By the time we get to the part where Dad got involved with the Scaleras, my hands are trembling. He was in business with them for five years. Five years of sly dealings, getting stolen cars out of the country, getting counterfeit goods into the country, clearing the paperwork trail through Boston Harbor. Like everywhere else, Dad got in one step at a time. Until he got in too deep.
“He knew,” I whisper. “There isn’t a chance in hell he didn’t know.” Tears are streaming down my cheeks. There is no chance that Dad did business like this with the Don, being in various political positions that gave him insight to everything that happened in the crime circles, and not understand that two-for-one was a rule, not a rumor. “He lied to me.”
“Of course he lied to you.”
“You were there, weren’t you? Just outside the door.”
“Yes, sweetheart. I waited until he pushed me too far.”
This man…
My whole life is a lie.
I’m not some great politician’s daughter. Dad is nothing but a white-collar criminal who has worked the system to get rich. He’s a total stranger, and I his puppet, playing along for all these years.
I never pretended to be a good man who sticks to the rules, kitten. You got to know me exactly as I am. Matteo’s words hit me hard. For the first time in my life, someone didn’t pretend.
I sob, a cry tearing straight from my soul. I turn into Matteo’s shoulder and his arms are there as I knew they’d be. He came in and wrecked my world, or so I thought. No, he came in and pulled the blinders away, making me see for the first time.
“It’s okay, kitten,” he says as he hugs me close, pressing sweet kisses to my hair. “Now you understand why I’m not keen for you to see him again.”
“Yes.” Eventually, when I have some grip on myself, I go back to the file and page through the last documents. Since Dad became a senator, he kept things clean, and not because he wanted to keep clean: he got burned by Il Consiglio.
I bite my lip as the realization dawns on me. “If your dad had so much dirt on my dad, why didn’t he use it to break him?” I push away from Matteo’s embrace so I can look him in the eye. “Clearly his career is his be-all and end-all. You only need to dump this file with the FBI, and he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Matteo gathers a strand of hair from my cheek and hooks it behind my ear. “Peter Armstrong is more useful to Il Consiglio outside of prison. And he wouldn’t last long inside. He knows we have dirt on him, and he toes the line.”
His careful, tender touch sends threads of longing down my spine. “I don’t understand,” I murmur. “How do I fit into any of this?”
“What do you mean?”
I take a shaky breath, not wanting to ask but having to know the truth. Am I a long-term revenge strategy or is there more? “Why did you marry me, Matteo? Everything here… you have him. You didn’t need to…” I taper off as he cups my cheek and seals my lips by running his thumb along them.
“Would it be very hard to believe I have a heart?” he says softly as he stares into my eyes. “And you sort of marched right in and claimed it?”
My whole body, which hung over the dark abyss of a marriage that’s a farce, pulls back from the ledge. “What?”
“Come here, sweetheart,” he says as he wraps an arm around my shoulders and urges me to sit on his lap.
