My eyes skittered up Katie’s arms, but her sleeves hid any track marks I may have found. Had she fallen a victim to the temptations of the world, to what she’d been forced into so long ago in that foster home?
A jolt of realization shot through me—there were so many others like Katie, but I shoved those thoughts away.
I wondered how I’d protect those I loved, how I’d protect my own little thing now. My ex-fiancée, Sasha, had come to me just a few nights back. We’d fought again. Life of the mafia, I guess.
She didn’t see this side of things. She didn’t know about the drugs, the trafficking, the body counts.
Even when I’d told her, she’d held strong that she deserved more of my time. She didn’t understand—family was family. Or maybe that was the real problem: I didn’t see her as a part of that family.
That night she repeated it over and over, and then dropped a bomb.
She was pregnant.
My baby was in her belly.
And a baby changed everything. A baby made me reconsider what I was doing.
“You ask and you shall receive, Mario,” Jimmy sneered. He grabbed the girl’s elbow, and she went with him to sit down where he normally did.
Mario tsked at him. “You know you don’t sit there tonight, Jimmy. You sit in the hot seat.”
“I didn’t do anything outside of the family,” he countered.
“You didn’t traffic two hundred women in just this past week by sending your crew out to lure new foster kids? They may be your crew, Jimmy, but you work for me. Those are my men, my soldiers, and my name they work under. That’smi famiglia, no?” He emphasized that word. It meant something to us all, and it sliced through the room. The attitude toward Jimmy shifted. I could feel the ones that had been on his side turn their backs.
Jimmy stuttered, and two of Mario’s guys grabbed him to shove him into the chair. His feet dragged across the floor as he wriggled in their grip.
The metal clanked as they held him down in the chair like a jail cell closing. Jimmy sat alone in that cold, ominous chair. The blubbering erupted from deep in his gut immediately, an act for sympathy and a last-ditch effort that wouldn’t sway our jury.
His show was of no entertainment to me. Instead, I watched Katalina. No fear was in her eyes. No shudder ran through her body. She picked at a piece of lint on her jeans and crossed her legs, as if ready for the night’s events.
In her room the first night I met her, there had been so much more emotion in her. Marvin stole it away, and Jimmy hadn’t seemed to jog even a memory of an emotion either. She’d been emptied of feelings a long time ago.
Were her eyes as dead as mine when she stared through the room?
What have you been through, Cleo?
“Admit something, Jimmy,” Mario said with a sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Let me at least know you’re honest. Did you bring them in or not?”
“I swear I didn’t.” He wiped a meaty hand over his nose and sniffled.
Mario dragged a finger back and forth over one eye as if to clear away dust irritating it. The guy on the right punched Jimmy until blood splattered. “That’s enough. Admit something, Jimmy. Don’t you know I’m trying to set an example for my boys?” He motioned toward Cade, Bastian, and me, as if I were his boy too.
“Katie will tell you.” His pleading eyes shot to her. “I didn’t do it. I’ve been with her all week. I only left a few times.”
Mario turned to Katie, and my body tensed. Something in me instinctively wanted to tell her to run. The hot seat was dangerous, and sparks could fly from it to others very quickly.
I didn’t. It wasn’t my job to save her, at least not this time.
Those smoky eyes of hers scanned the room and fell on me like I could give her the answers. Maybe I should have tried.
Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up where we were if I had.
“Katalina, Douglass was a good man,” Mario said, and I reared back at him saying her father’s name. We all knew he’d died a while back, that she’d had to go into foster care. Yet I knew more. Her letters, her words, echoed through my head. “I always relied on your father to tell me the truth,” Mario said the words softly.
Her eyes narrowed; a phoenix of feeling rose in her. Suddenly, anger and fury whipped from her toward Mario. You could feel it in the air, the control she had over the room.
She nodded at our boss, and I thought I saw her chin quiver, yet the sound that rolled from her lips was steady. “Because he wasn’t a liar. He never uttered anything but the truth before he died. I’m not one either.”