Page 26 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

Shit. Now I was crying even harder.

It was cathartic.

Cleansing.

Exactly what I had been needing. To know that someone who’d known me as a child cared. That it wasn’t all a carefully placed façade.

“What do you need from me?” He pulled back, his thumbs wiping at the tears along my cheeks. Fuck, had any of my men seen me crying? My gaze darted around the docks. “No one but Vas saw anything,” he assured me.

Oops.

Dante smiled proudly. “I knew you didn’t come alone, Ava,” he said. “It was expected. I am not alone either.” I let out a nervous laugh that was wobbly and wet from crying.

“So,” he started again. “What do you need? I am at your service.”

“This man,” I pulled out a picture of my grandfather from the stack of papers I gave him. “His name is Seamus McDonough, he’s—”

“Your biological grandfather,” he finished for me.

Nodding, I kept going. “In her journal, Libby mentioned Elias talking to a man about me. She identified him as the man with the silver cane.”

“What does that have to do with Seamus McDonough?” he queried, looking at the picture again.

“At the gala, I saw him and my grandmother.” I took out another picture that Mark had managed to obtain from the gala’s security cameras. “Look at what he’s using.”

“Okay…” Skepticism colored his voice. “There are plenty of canes out there that have a silver cross on them.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “But look at the emblem just beneath it carved into the wood.”

Dante still didn’t look convinced, and I hadn’t expected him to be.

Not yet, anyway.

“Now,” I flipped to the photograph of Madam Therese, “look at this cane.”

His forehead puckered, his eyes darting between the pages as he took in every detail he could.

“Do you recognize her?” I asked him. “Or the symbol?”

Dante shook his head. “No.” He sighed. “But I’ve met Seamus McDonough before, and he never had a cane. Certainly never needed one, but shit, it’s been nearly twenty-five years since I last saw him.”

That got my attention.

“Where was this?”

Dante thought about it for a moment, his eyes flicking up as he recalled the memory. “In Boston. My father was still alive and runningla familgiaat the time. He wanted to show me the ropes and help to secure a new merger.”

Merger?

“What year was this?”

“It was 1996, I think.”

The year my mother went missing.

“Was your father looking at merging with McDonough Shipping Corp?” Part of me already knew the answer.

“Yes,” he answered slowly, curious to see where my train of thought was going. “Elias never found out, but my father had been underbidding him for years. Taking his clients and spreading rumors and planting evidence for the FBI to find.”

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