Page 38 of Consumed By the Mafia

“C’mon,” he said, “you know how I got hooked into a life of crime. I’m only curious what pulled you the other direction. That’s not a conviction most kids have that early.” He shrugged. “Was it a family thing for you, too? Your parents work for the government? Or maybe they were cops, soldiers, something like that?”

Her blue eyes dulled and she dropped her gaze to the floor. “No,” she said, quieter. “My parents were just two good, hard-working people who minded their own business.” Shelicked her lips. “And then one Sunday, when I was eight, they became two completely innocent victims of senseless violence.”

Abigail saw Ryoma shift his stance in her peripheral vision, but it was like a backdrop to the memory suddenly playing through her mind.

The gunfire she hadn’t understood blared in her ears. The fear that had frozen her in place in her room that morning whispered through her veins once more. The squealing tires she hadn’t even consciously heard until a deep hypnotherapy session two years later that she hadn’t been able to unhear since reverberated through her bones. All of it merely a terrifying build-up to the moment she finally walked herself out of her room, down the short hall, to find her loving parents slumped over and still bleeding—one of them still dying—in the tatters of the living room.

No child should ever see a sight so horrible.

“Abby,” Ryoma said, his voice a strange combination of muddled and distant yet closer than before. One of his hands settled on her shoulder, and he used the other to tip her chin up with a gentle touch. His brow creased. “Shit. Abby, I’m sorry.”

She swallowed hard against the turbulent emotions and visualized shoving them down with as much strength as shecould muster. “It was a drive-by,” she said, hearing the crack in her own voice. “Mom died instantly, one of the bullets went through her face and into her brain. Dad held on for three minutes and sixteen seconds. I only survived because it was the one day I was allowed to sleep in.”

He muttered a curse and swept both thumbs up, over her cheeks, deftly avoiding the area of her makeup covered bruise. Then he pressed a kiss to the crown of her head and asked gruffly, “Did they get the fucker?”

Abigail let out a harsh laugh. “That’s the actual answer to your question,” she said. “I put all my faith in the detectives. I was a kid, and when the adults said they would catch the bad guys, I trusted them. But … they didn’t. Not for years, and ultimately not because they weretrying.”

Ryoma eased back, still scowling.

She dragged in a shaky breath. “About three years after the shooting, two men confessed. They’d been arrested and charged in unrelated crimes and were looking to reduce their sentence by rolling on some other people they used to run with, which I didn’t understand back then. As a result, they were sentenced to five years, including time served.” She paused, needing to steady herself as the weight of that unforgettable disappointment threatened yet again.

Her grandparents hadn’t allowed her to go to the trial, insisting there was no reason she needed to relive that horrible day or hear anyone else talk about it. Probably they had been right, though she’d been angry about it for a long time. But she had been glad they had relented, at least, to take her with them on the day of the verdict. And again to hear the sentencing.When the verdict had come out as guilty for both men, Abigail had taken for granted that would mean they would do real time. Her grandparents had, too.

Instead, the men who’daccidentallymurdered her parents and sped away for three years after were handed a five year—minus eight months—slap on the wrist.

Old, familiar outrage threatened to overtake her, and it was the out-of-place sound of buzzing from Ryoma’s pocket that drew Abigail back to the moment. She pulled in another deep, semi-cleansing breath, and when he made no move to extract his phone, she continued her story. “I thought it was a slap in the face. I wrote letters to a bunch of people, demanding ‘real justice’, and eventually I was told to ‘stop harassing the department and the hardworking detectives.’ No one seemed to give a damn that the little girl whose parents had died—by admitted mistaken identity, no less—was still a goddamnminorwhen the murderers were let free again. That was considered acceptable, because another killer—one other man—was put away.”

Ryoma’s nostrils flared and his chest heaved as he drew a deep breath of his own. Anger darkened his eyes.

Abigail rested her fingers on his chest. Her heart ached, sadness blending with the rage as it always did, with that series of devastating memories. “At first, I had thought I wanted to be a cop, so I could be a hero to little kids like me. So I could bring them justice, maybe even save them. But when time started passing and I realized the detectives I knew weren’t my heroes, I realized I needed to be something else if I wanted to be those things. I still thought I did, so I started searching. And when I heard the men responsible worked for some cartel orsomething, that it wasn’t just random crime but a criminal group, I looked into what organization deals with those. That’s how I decided to become an FBI agent.”

She had buried herself in so many books. Books about law, books about crime and the mindset of criminals, books about addicts, books about victims. Her grandparents had tried to get her to go out and play in the sun, to make friends she actually spent time with. Her teachers had expressed concern on numerous occasions. Any friends she’d had in grade school had long abandoned her by high school. She’d even once thought about becoming a lawyer, but her limited experience with those turned her off the notion. Even the so-called good ones had been supportive of the idea that had set her parents’ murderers free by the time she was sixteen.

It had been a difficult, emotional, and indisputably obsessive childhood. Abigail knew the life she’d lived hadn’t exactly been the one her parents would have wanted. But for her there had been no going back. Those men hadn’t just killed her innocent parents, they’d killed her in a sense, too.

Ryoma pulled her into his chest in a startling, tight embrace. “I wish I’d been there for you back then, baby girl.”

Her lips lifted at his ridiculous words. “You were, what, twelve when I lost my parents? You had your own things going on I imagine.” She pressed her face into the groove of his throat. “And I hear the group you were running with was throwing people in front of trains. Scary.”

He rumbled with a chuckle. “I probably could’ve asked some guys to scoop those assholes up and dump ‘em on a track.”

Shedefinitelyshould not have smiled at that. Even if it was an abstract conversation. “I bet you could.” Abigail took a beat to try and lock up the wild emotions that always inside her when she let herself reflect on her childhood and her loss. Her grandparents had put her in therapy almost immediately, and kept her in until she’d graduated high school, but that only did so much. She eased back. “For what it’s worth, one of them’s dead now, anyway. The trigger man murdered again four years later, go figure, and forthathe was sentenced to life. He got himself shanked maybe five years into his time. Didn’t survive.” She was hard-pressed to feel bad about that.

Ryoma arched a brow. “Sweet, good-girl Abby, did you stalk them?”

“I did.” She wasn’t even ashamed of it. “The courts refused to allow me a restraining order after they were released, even though I was sixteen and they knew I had pushed for life for both of them. That I had kept pushing after their trial. So I figured cyberstalking and self-awareness was just proactive self-defense.”

He grinned, pride shining down at her.

She poked him in the chest. “You should really check your phone.”

He blinked. “Oh, fuck.” He dug his phone out, glanced at the screen, then dropped it back into the pocket. “Ride’s out front. Let’s walk and talk. So trigger man’s dead. Good riddance. Where’s the driver?”

Abigail let him lead the way outside and tried to keep the shock off her face when he took her hand as they started up the drive toward the property’s main gate. He hadn’t lockedup, but there really was no need considering they were using a guest house. She cleared her throat and thought over what she knew of the surviving murderer, Corey Wells. The man responsible for having messed up the identity of their intended targets that fateful morning. “I lost track of him after I was transferred to Arkansas. Work kept me too busy.”

Ryoma gave her hand a squeeze. “But he was still free?”

“He had a tendency to bounce in and out, so he could be rotting in a cell or a ditch right now for all I know,” she said.

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