Page 17 of Assassin's Heart
I fisted the paper in my hand, satisfaction filling me as it crumpled beneath the pressure. “Start from the beginning and tell us everything.”
Leah stood. I tensed, but she only began to pace the length of the room. Trying to get her thoughts together? I forced myself to watch her expression, searching for any hint of a lie, rather than watching the easy grace of her body as she moved. How could I notice something like that and be as angry as I was? It made no sense, but then my feelings for this woman had never made sense.
“Angelo, Brooke’s father, and I met when I was seventeen.” She glanced at Abby, and from the look on Abby’s face, they’d discussed this already. “He was much older. We fell in love immediately.”
The knife in my heart was harder to ignore than her body.
She shrugged, a self-deprecating smile curving her lips. “I had no idea what he did for a living; I didn’t care. There were so much more important things to think about.”
Like sex. I didn’t want to go there. Unfortunately my brain seemed intent on torturing me.
“We’d been together for a few months when he told me he was an enforcer for the Fiori family. By then I was pregnant.” Leah’s chuckle came out strained. “The police commissioner’s daughter, raised to excellence, to service, to justice, pregnant by a mob enforcer.”
“Your family didn’t suspect?” Abby asked quietly.
“No. God, no.”
“But your brother is in on this,” I pointed out. There were a lot of ways a cop could be turned, but a commissioner’s son…
“That came later.” Leah turned to the window, and I noticed her palm smoothing over her belly. “We hadn’t meant to get pregnant, but Angelo… He wanted the baby so much, wanted us to get married, be a family, but I refused to put my child in danger.” Up and down, over and over, her hand stroked her belly, right where her baby had been. “He could get out, he said.”
Levi and I exchanged a look. With the mob there was no getting out, except in a pine box.
“He kept telling me I just needed to be patient,” Leah was saying. “So I tried to be. I wanted to believe him.” Her eyes sparkled, unshed tears catching the artificial light as it filtered through the window.
“What did he do?” I asked, the sight of her pain and my own lingering anger roughening the words.
She turned to lean a shoulder against the wall. “He’d made recordings, apparently.”
Curses rang through the air. My brothers knew as well as I did that this wouldn’t end well.
Leah ignored our response. “He told his boss he was leaving, that the recordings would never see the light of day if they just left him alone. And that’s what they seemed to do.” She shrugged. “I realized later they were just biding their time, watching, waiting. They wanted the tapes, and they’d use anything they could to get them.
“One night they broke into Angelo’s apartment.” A shudder rocked her body. I wanted to go to her, make the memory stop, soothe the turmoil ravaging her—but I couldn’t. That intimacy wasn’t mine to take. That closeness would only lead to more mistakes. I wouldn’t risk my family again.
“They…” Leah brought her fingers to her mouth, covering their trembling as she visibly pulled herself together. “They tortured him. In front of me. And when that didn’t work, they started on me.” Leah’s eyes went blank, her focus somewhere in the past. “Angelo managed to break free. He fought them so that I could get away. And they killed him.”
“But they knew you were involved,” Eli said where he sat on the end of the bed. “They would come after you.”
“They did. So I went to the only person I thought I could trust to help me.”
The weight on my chest shifted from anger to dread. “Your brother.”
Leah looked down, her hair sliding forward to conceal her expression. To hide her innermost thoughts from me. “My brother.”
“He was recognized for his work on a national drug task force,” Levi pointed out. “That’s how the mob found him?”
“Yes.” Leah raised her head, squared her shoulders. “They found him and they flipped him.”
He’d been working both sides. What better way to control what the local police knew, to learn of possible actions against them, than to own the commissioner’s son?
“He kept telling me if I would just hand over the recordings, everything would be fine. That’s what he said, fine.” A laugh escaped her. “What he meant was, he would protect me if I would just cooperate.” Her eyes met mine for the first time since I’d walked into the room, allowing me to see the burn of determination flaring there. “I saw what they did to Angelo. I refused to trust my child’s future to a traitor. So I ran.”
Successfully, too. She’d hid herself well enough that a well-connected cop and a dangerous mob hadn’t found her. On top of that, she’d had all the struggles of a more typical single mom—caring for a child, educating herself, finding work and supporting them both.
Christ, Leah. Who held your hand when you delivered Brooke? Was there ever anyone there for you?
“Ross said an informant told him about you being on the news,” I reminded her, as much for my brothers’ benefit as anything else. “We are the ones who exposed you.” It was important that everyone knew that, our role in this problem.
