I’d had that look before.
I shrugged. “If you say so.” I set the photo down and let it sit between us. The silence stretched, a good indicator that blood didn’t mean instant closeness.
Ivan’s phone buzzed, and from his raised eyebrows, I could only imagine that Dimitri had texted him about Boris. “Dimitri is on his way,” he said.
My blood should have run cold, or my heart should have sped up. Was this really where I was supposed to be? Instead of with Rome, Bastian, Cade, and Dante?
No.
That family wasn’t really mine. They’d made that very clear.
“I guess more Russian blood will be spilled tonight,” I said. Dimitri wanted me dead, and now he had good reason to kill me.
“Your loyalty lies with another family. I didn’t ever want that for you.”
“But my mother left me to my father. What did you expect?”
“She’d run around with Douglass forever.” He waved off the notion of my mother loving my father. “Those two thought love could conquer everything.”
“It didn’t,” I finished for him. “It never does.”
“Your mom came to terms with that before your father. She didn’t tell anyone about you when she was pregnant. I thought she was just hiding away with your father for a time. Then she came to me in the middle of the night, determination in her eyes. She wanted to learn from me, be in Russia with me, and leave for there immediately. I was so happy, thought she and your father had broken up, so I took the opportunity. I trained her and Dimitri for years. Until they turned on each other. The night she died, Dimitri admitted it all to me. He wanted to prove his power and desire to take over the mob, so he made a deal with the Armanelli family.”
My hands shook, and my heart turned cold and black. “Mario was—”
“—always making deals, Katalina. But your father worked closely with Mario so that Mario wouldn’t do much else to you. I found that out much later. It’s only been a few years that I’ve known I have a granddaughter. Had I got to you before your father died, you’d never have been embedded in the Italian family.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
“Mario didn’t pay your father to take care of lightbulbs. He threatened him into staying nearby so he could keep an eye on you, make sure we didn’t come for you instead. I would have too if I’d known you’d been born. Mario swore he wouldn’t take your life, because you’d be a part of his family instead. Your father said no. And then he died, or so I’m told.”
“He didn’t want me to be a part of any of it.” I shook my head, everything starting to click into place.
“Mario always had a soft spot for children. And what better child to hold over my head than my own grandchild.”
When the body is given too much to handle, too much to bear, it looks for outlets. I found mine by snapping up from the table, by pacing the floor in denial. “My father, he would have told me at the end, he would have . . .”
His letter, crinkled now in a little box I kept, with words so straightforward but cryptic at the same time, made all the more sense.
* * *
“You’re beautiful.I choose death so you can live. I won’t tell you to stop working with them. I know you’re in too deep. Make me proud, Katalina. Show them you were meant to stand out or get out from under them.”
* * *
My grandfather didn’t lookat all anxious like me. He sat there, hands folded on the table, blue eyes bright and full of too much life for someone who was supposed to have dementia as he retold the story. “Dimitri’s not good at much, but he’s good at being a snake, at bringing everyone to his level. He devolved and got angry when he found he couldn’t have children, that he couldn’t carry on the Russian Family. He was furious when I told him he wasn’t worthy of much if he couldn’t do that. So he slithered around this city, trying to ruin your mother just as he’d been ruined. He found you. You were his golden ticket, a baby she’d hidden from the family. He ordered you both killed. By then, Mario had other plans for you, but not your mother. He’s steered you his way from the beginning.”
I shook my head, closed my eyes, and breathed in deep, trying to calm the quaking. They’d delivered blow after blow as if I were empty inside, as if I couldn’t feel the pain. “He’s not steering now.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Ivan narrowed his eyes. “I think that’s up to you.”
The front door clicked and then swung open. Two seconds passed. I listened closely to the footfalls of the man who’d ordered my mother to be killed.
They called Rome a monster, but now I knew the feeling, the stirring deep in my bones and the wild shaking of the cage where I kept my emotions locked up. The war in me had begun. I wanted vengeance, and I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to tame the beast of that desire.
“Dimitri, you made it,” said Ivan.
“I texted you that I would, that this niece of mine already brought down a man in our family. We end her now.”