Page 54 of Reckless Sinner

The surprised look in his eyes as my father fell to the floor was so fucking satisfying. I didn’t regret a thing.

Dante entered. He looked at the dead body for a moment, then nodded. “Good job.”

I felt a bit queasy, the adrenaline coming down and making me feel like I was floating. “Now what?”

“Now you let the lawyer do his work,” Dante told me. “Go into the kitchen, get yourself some water, maybe something to eat.”

Dante was a lawyer, a man who knew crime, and the son of a mob boss. He knew what paperwork to forge and file, what to leave for people to find, how to stage it. He didn’t need to touch my room or anything else—that was already working in our favor.

I went to the kitchen, took down a bottle of my father’s whiskey from a shelf, and poured me a drink. It was so odd. I felt no sadness or remorse over killing the man who raised me. The man who controlled and used me.

Perhaps I would’ve fit in more with the mafia than I’d thought.

But perhaps so would Dante, even if he didn’t realize it. And I thought… maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point wasn’t whether we fit in there or not, whether we had darkness in us or not. Maybe, the point was that we didn’twantto live that life. It was all down to our choice, and our choice was to say no and to flee.

Dante entered the kitchen just as I drank down the last of the whiskey in my glass. “Let’s clean up. And then we’ll make the phone call.”

To say that Agent Kaminsky of the FBI was shocked to get a call from Dante Russo was an understatement. He hadn’t really expected Dante to call. But as I made sure to sob loudly in the background, Dante made our story clear: his family had killed my father and come in through my window to try and kidnap me, I was all beat up, we needed help. We needed to disappear.

Dante was right—we never could have done this while my father was alive. He had contacts in law enforcement. He could have found us even in witness protection. But with my father dead, and with Vincent and Marco Russo willing to let leads go cold…

We could make it.

Agent Kaminsky picked us up. He took one look at me and shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Miss Weston,” he said. “You look like you’ve been through Hell.”

If only he knew who’d been the Devil in charge.

I nodded and sniffled, playing at grief. Dante put his arm around me. “We’d like to enter witness protection. Her father—tried to use me to destroy my family, and my family retaliated against him. Please, we just want to live our lives as normal people.”

He was a good actor, his voice filled with sincerity and earnest pleading. Maybe both of us had missed out on our true calling as actors.

He’s an FBI agent,Dante had told me as we’d planned.He’ll want to believe us. That’s the key to winning in court, you have to say things that the jury already wants to believe, whether it’s that someone is a good person or if they committed the crime. He’s going to want to believe us because it’ll be a big win for his career.

Sure enough, Agent Kaminsky found our story of forbidden love, my terrible ordeal, and the strange information in my father’s papers—carefully forged and edited legal documents by Dante—to add up to a believable story. We were two desperate people being toyed with by a man who had tried to take on the mafia, and the mafia itself, and we simply wanted help.

Agent Kaminsky was more than happy to provide it.

“I always thought there was something about your father,” he told me as he finished writing in his little notebook with his pencil. Very old-fashioned of him. “He seemed a littletooeager against the mafia, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I said honestly. “I do now.”

Once Agent Kaminsky turned away, I looked at Dante and smiled.

EPILOGUE

Dante

Iwas coming home from my last class of the day, and automatically fetched the mail from the mailbox.

That was when I saw it: the postcard.

It had been a year since Delaney and I were placed in witness protection. I now worked as a history professor at a small university on the West Coast. It only had about a thousand students, but we had to keep a low profile, and finally getting paid to talk about something I truly loved made up for the lousy salary.

Luckily, being a lawyer with a six-figure-a-month salary, not including bonuses, meant we had a very tidy nest egg. We couldn’t exactly show off our wealth or people would ask questions but… it did mean we were planning a lovely trip to Europe together this summer. Our honeymoon, although we couldn’t tell anyone else that. According to our new friends and neighbors, Delaney and I had been married for two years and already did the big wedding and everything.

Delaney wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do with her life just yet. But it had only been a year, as I kept reassuring her, and in the meantime she was working on finally finishing college. She’d spent nearly three decades under the shadow of her father. It was going to take more than a year to emerge out from under it.

In all this time, with our new names and jobs and lives, I hadn’t heard from anyone in my family. I had been tense for ages. I kept thinking I would see Toby, my brother’s faithful sidekick, watching me at the grocery store, or that a black car would follow me home. That I’d get a phone call in the middle of the night.

---