He chuckled. “Well. You’re not entirely off base. Her grandfather would have ‘put out a hit’ on my father.” He used his fingers to indicate quote marks when he said, “put out a hit.” “Then he would have dragged my mother back home where she belonged.”
“Okay, that’s only half as horrible as I thought.” I caught myself before I smiled back at him. But just barely.
“Or he might have killed her as well. My great-grandfather did have a reputation for being ruthless.”
I almost thought he was joking. Goose bumps shot down my arms when I realized he wasn’t. “Your parents protected her and didn’t tell great-granddaddy Vilanakis what happened to her.”
“Exactly. Her parents – my grandparents – were like most parents. They loved their daughter, and, even though it was against everything they believed in, they wanted her to be happy. And alive. So when my father proposed a believable scenario for an accidental death, they clung to that.”
“They cut off all ties?”
He nodded. “The night she slipped away with my father, her parents hugged her good-bye and that was the last they ever saw of her.” He sobered. “They kept tabs, distantly, though. They knew she’d had a son. And so they also knew to reach out to me after my parents were killed.”
“Which is how you ended up in Greece with your grandmother.” The puzzle pieces were sliding together easily now. It was so satisfying that I nearly missed what he’d said. “Did you say ‘killed’ on purpose?”
“I did.”
My heart tripped. I’d known his parents had died in a car accident when he was sixteen, but never once had he or any of the Internet sources I’d referred to suggest that it had been murder.
Much like Amber when she’d tried to comfort me about Chris, I didn’t know what to say so it took me several seconds to manage, “How?” and another few seconds to add, “Why?”
I assumed he was going to say his grandfather had found them, but instead he said, “Your television shows probably taught you about rival branches in organized crime rings.”
“Yes. They probably did.”
“We have a rival branch. Distant cousins. The Lasko family. One of them discovered my mother was still alive. I don’t know how they found out. Maybe my mother blabbed to a friend. Maybe one of the Laskos got wise and did some research. I’ll probably never know. What I do know was my mother was an easy target.” His voice was even, but his eyes spoke volumes of pain and grief.
“Oh, Reeve.” I wasn’t naturally very sympathetic, but the hurt I felt for him was genuine. All the time I wanted to be in his arms, it was the first time I longed to wrap him in mine.
He shook his head once, and I knew he was dismissing the memories rather than my compassion. “Anyway, I was vaguely aware of relatives on my mother’s side back in Greece so it wasn’t a complete surprise when my grandparents found me. I was sixteen. My parents were dead. My father had no family. I didn’t have a choice when they offered to take me in.”
“And you didn’t know about their business?” Whatever his answer was, where this was going was inevitable.
“I didn’t have any idea at all,” he confirmed. “But I learned quickly.” He leaned forward, emphasizing his next words. “Because that’s how the family works. There’s no tiptoeing along the edges of the life. It’s full immersion. For me, it was baptism by fire.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up as the truth sunk in, the truth I’d both suspected and denied since I’d first discovered his picture with Michelis. “You’re mob, too.”
“I was mob,” he clarified.
“You said there’s no leaving.”
“I guess I’m the exception.”
He was quiet while I sunk back in my chair and processed. One of the reasons I’d always been attracted to Reeve was because he’d seemed dangerous. He’d always suggested that I wouldn’t want to find out that he actually was. I wasn’t sure that he’d been correct. I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been.
“You aren’t part of the family business? Not at all?”
He leveled my stare. “What do you want the answer to be, Emily?”
No. Of course the answer was no.
I swallowed the ball in my throat. “You said you weren’t. You said you left.”
He nodded ever so slightly.
Propping his elbow on the armrest, he leaned his chin in his hand. “But I was in it. Really in it. I didn’t even realize it in the beginning. First, it was just running errands for my uncle Nikki with my cousins. Then it was accompanying him on what he called ‘negotiation visits.’ After a few of those, I retitled them ‘scare jobs.’ I’m sure you can guess the nature of what those entailed.”
If those TV shows I watched were at all based in reality, then, yes, I could. My dark side was curious, though. It wanted to hear the details. But more importantly, I wanted to know, “Were you a participant on these scare jobs or just an observer?”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you think?”
I think you don’t want me to know. “I think you like it when I think the worst.”
He laughed. “Touché.”
He considered for a minute, and it occurred to me that he was as torn about what he wanted me to believe about him as I was. Part of me wanted the truth, wanted him to tell me the truth no matter what it was. Another part of me wanted to never know that he was as dangerous as I thought him capable. Never wanted to know that he wasn’t.