Dante just straightened one of his black gloves. “Answer the question, Sergio. I don’t want to call the cleanup again today.”
“Look, I only set up her foster care. Mario wanted her somewhere she wouldn’t last, okay?”
My stomach turned at his words.
Marvin.
Mario had known that man was a pedophile. He’d known just where to get Katalina placed so that she’d go running straight into his arms.
“I thought he’d spare Jimmy, you know?” he wheezed. “Jimmy was supposed to be good to her, but he got too close to her. It all worked out, though, huh?”
I pulled the trigger. The sawn-off shotgun blew most of his jaw clean off.
“God damn it, Rome.” Dante sighed and wiped a splatter of blood from his cheek. Teeth were scattered across the floor. “Couldn’t you have at least warned me? I would have stepped back.”
“I’m sick of playing games. He didn’t want to talk. Now he doesn’t have a mouth to do so.”
“Or a life, for that matter,” Dante grumbled and started to type out a text that was surely about cleanup.
“We got what we needed from him.” I undid the latch of my chain and removed it from around his hands, then rolled it up my arm to tuck back under my jacket sleeve. “We should just let the cops handle this one. He didn’t struggle enough to have marks on his wrists, and it’s his own gun.”
Dante waved me off. “You’re right, not that it matters. The chief of police called this morning. He knows we’re on a killing spree, and the squad is capable of keeping it under wraps.”
Dante and the chief went way back. Their friendship—along with the security of having the family on your side—was enough for most of the cops in the city to cover up what we wanted. “Then, I’m not messing with cleaning today.”
“I don’t want to be near the fucker, anyway. Damn, man. They all twisted her life. She was a pawn.” He pulled at his hair and then swiped a hand down his face. “I don’t know if she’ll ever come back. Not after we tell her this.”
“We clean out everyone involved. We make her see we’re family.” I pointed at the dead man, his head hanging sideways as blood dripped from the top of his mouth. “He wasn’t.”
Dante nodded and grabbed the gun, shoving it into the corpse’s hand.
I pulled open the front door. “On to the next.”
One foot in front of the other. One kill after another.
Each body was a testament to my love for her. This family had been hiding things for too long. Now, I would bury myself in their darkness and clean up. I was the one who was supposed to live in the shadows and listen to the whispers. I was the one Mario was supposed to trust with his secrets. He’d kept this from me—his biggest secret of all. He’d prepped me all these years to rip apart those who disobeyed, who omitted the truth, who threw their bones in a closet where we couldn’t find them.
Didn’t he know that I lived in that grim closet now? That I collected those bones and hunted down the ones who’d hidden them?
The monster in me had eyes that saw better in the dark, saw the secrets more clearly than anyone.
I was ready to pull down the whole family. This was about trust, now. Our family had a new ruler. Bastian had given us the go-ahead, and it started with transparency. The ones who couldn’t clean up and be open about their past would be wiped out.
“I’m picking up Mario alone,” I told Dante as we got back into my vehicle. I steered us toward the highway that led to Dante’s place.
“I don’t like the sound of that, man.” He pulled his gloves off and shoved them into his leather jacket. “Do Bastian and Cade know?”
“What’s there to know?” My hands gripped the steering wheel, and the leather creaked underneath my grip. I squeezed it harder, like I was squeezing a neck. Turmoil waged a war in all of us. We’d been putting Katalina in the line of fire for far too long. This family had taken advantage of her, of others, even of me.
Dante shook his head. “We should all be there. He’s the man we need to stop if it’s true.”
“If he killed her mother and only took her in for her bloodline, for the union of the bratva and the family, he’s as good as dead today.”
“Then, let him sit in the chair. Let us make that decision together.”
“I’m still going to pick him up alone. Get the unit to the facility. We do it as soon as he lands.” I drove in silence as we passed over a bridge where the river drew a line between upper and lower class for most of Chicago society. I dropped off Dante and headed straight to the airport.
I dialed Mario’s number and listened to him greet me like we were still family.