“Did I do something wrong?” Cynthia asked.
He didn’t answer his mother.
He didn’t know how to.
Mac was halfway home when his phone buzzed with a call. Hitting the button on the steering wheel to answer, the call went through to Bluetooth and he picked it up.
“Mac here,” he said.
“I hear you wanted a sit down, Maccari.”
The voice of Enzo only faintly registered to Mac’s ears. He was more concerned about getting home to his wife, and then dealing with his fuck up of a father as soon as possible. Now that he knew for sure that his father had at least one hand in the attacks, he had every single right to do what needed to be done to prevent James Sr. from causing Mac any more problems.
There were benefits to being a made man, after all.
This was one of those.
“Depends on what you’re going to tell me,” Mac finally said.
Enzo’s heavy sigh echoed throughout the speakers of the vehicle. “I’ve been working on a new project—tinkering, really.”
“Bomb timers, you mean?”
“Let’s keep the conversation clean, okay.”
Mac resisted the urge to hang up on Enzo. “What kind of tinkering?”
“MIT was a breeze for me—that engineering degree was nothing. So tinkering is nothing more than child’s play. My son, he’s always so interested in what I was doing, and I thought … where’s the harm, right?”
Now they were getting somewhere.
“Keep going,” Mac said.
Enzo coughed, a sign of his stress about what he was getting ready to say. “I started having issues with my son a few months ago. He’s young, seventeen. I thought it was a phase, that maybe I could smack or work it out of him. I had nobody to blame but myself, or that’s what my wife kept telling me. Look at everything I’d exposed him to, right? I let him learn the streets and play with guns, so who was really at fault?”
“Is there a point to this?” Mac asked. “Because I would really like to hear you get to it.”
Mac was toeing the line of what could be considered disrespectful to a man who held a great deal more power than he did, but he figured given the situation, his attitude was warranted.
“I let him fuck around in the Audino crew, thinking he’d settle down and learn something. Chill out with the drugs, maybe, and earn some money that didn’t come from him draining his fucking trust fund.”
Jesus Christ.
“That never really happened,” Enzo continued sadly. “The night of your wedding was the first time Luca really noticed something was wrong with my boy, that I was letting shit slide. We argued about it and Matthew jumped in.”
Mac remembered seeing the scene of that fight, and wondering what it was about.
Now he supposed he knew.
Or partly, anyway.
“So I kept him closer, still letting him do his thing and hoping he was getting his shit straight.”
“But he wasn’t,” Mac assumed.
“No,” Enzo admitted. “But he was hanging around me more often, picking up things that I was working on, seeming interested.”
“Your son planted that bomb on my wife’s car, didn’t he?”
“He did it for someone else, because he felt he owed him.”
“My father?” Mac guessed.
“How did you know?”
“James is in the Audino crew and he’s got a taste for drugs and liquor. I’m not fucking stupid, I can put two and two together.”
“My boy is mixed up in a lot of bad things, Mac. Heroin, messing around in the crews, stealing and lying. He’s facing charges I didn’t even know about with the police, so who knows what the fuck he’s been telling them.”
“And where is your son?” Mac asked, not giving a shit about the other details. He wasn’t about to feel the least bit sorry for Enzo’s son. He didn’t have the time or care for it.
“Safe,” Enzo replied. “That’s all you need to know. Don’t blame me for taking care of my boy, Mac.”
The phone call hung up just as Mac pulled into the complex of his apartment.
Immediately, he knew something was wrong.
Ambulances.
Flashing lights.
Crime scene tape.
He knew right then.
But it was only when an officer knocked on his window with a flashlight did the weight of it hit Mac.
And it hit like a fucking freight train.
Mac knocked on the glass of the ICU room’s door, not wanting to interrupt. Just because the boss had called him into the hospital didn’t mean Mac had any right to walk right into the room where Luca currently was.
“Come on in,” he heard called out, the voice muffled behind the glass.
The hiss of oxygen was the first thing Mac heard as he opened the glass doors to Enric’s ICU room. The second was the loud, beeping monitors—several were scattered about the room, from an IV, to one for his heart function, and another that seemed to be monitoring his brain.