Page 41 of Knocked Up by my Best Friend's Brothers

“Oh, so they were in cahoots with Perry-Sage, then?”

“Two of their shot-callers were prosecuted,” I reply. “Perry-Sage was laundering billions for that family, among other things. When I decided to cut ties with them, my only option was to remove myself from the story altogether.”

“Before you sicced the Feds on them,” Spike adds.

I offer a slight nod. “My conscience wouldn’t let me do otherwise. Besides, I wanted the people who had the power to kill me in prison.”

“And in prison they are, right? For life.”

“Well…”

Spike’s enthusiasm fades as he begins to put two and two together. “Oh, no. Christa.”

“I came back to Portland to start over, knowing I had erased every trace of myself. I figured nobody would be able to track me here,” I say, then take out the letter and show it to him. “Someone found me.”

“Shit.”

“That’s why I came to you. But don’t worry. Nobody followed me. I made sure of it.”

Spike paces around the room as he reads the note, his brows furrowed with genuine concern. “It’s handwritten. No address. No return address. Where did you get this?”

“At the Hawthorne offices.”

“The person who wrote this hand-delivered it to your offices,” he says. “Why not your home address?”

“That is a very good question, Spike.”

“And why are they doing this now? Why didn’t they just show up at your house? Why are you still alive?”

The possible answers to each of these queries rattle me to my bones. I’m thinking psychopaths, sociopaths, an entire campaign designed to terrify me, to mentally destroy me before they dump me in the river with a pair of cement overshoes.

“It has to be the Mancinis,” I say. “No one else would have a beef with me at this point.”

“Hence why you want me to check with my mob connections.”

“You’ve got family there,” I say, and give him an innocent smile.

Spike shudders and shakes his head. “Reaching out to my cousin Charlie isn’t the greatest idea, but I can do something better; hold on.” He sits at his desk and starts typing into one of his computers.

I recognize the commands, the strings of code along with the key search words, and all I can do is express awe at his exceptional hacking skills. “Dude, you’ve got spyware attached to secret chat groups within the Portland mafia’s upper echelon?”

“I’ve got spyware pretty much everywhere,” he replies. “It’s how I keep the Feds at bay, too, and my PO happy. Everyone pretends I’m not doing this stuff while they get discreet leads here and there to follow. I stay out of jail. Officially, I’m under house arrest. Yadda, yadda.”

“But if they find you—”

“If theyofficiallyfind me,” he corrects me with the appropriate nuance.

“Oh, okay. Eyes wide shut and all that.”

“Precisely.”

“I want to say congratulations, but I’m conflicted.”

He chuckles dryly. “I completely understand.” He pauses and looks through the search results pouring across three different screens. “Uh-oh. I think you’re right to worry that it might be the Mancinis.”

“How so?” I ask.

“There’s a lot of chatter, mostly in the enforcer circles. Someone came in from Los Angeles. A Mancini, to be specific. They’re asking questions about you. They don’t have your name, but they’ve been given a pretty accurate description of you. Physically and professionally.”

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