She doesn’t say anything, watching me as if she is waiting for something. “So? Everyone knows who he is.”
“No, I don’t just know who he is. I actually know him. He is kind of my uncle.”
“What?” She flies up off my lap before I can grab her. She looms over me, her surprise and anger evident in her quivering mouth and clenched fists at her sides. “What do you mean, he is ‘kind of your uncle?’”
This is going well.
“Shit, baby, please sit back down.”
“No,” she says, taking two steps back from the couch, intentionally putting herself out of my reach. “Talk.”
“He isn’t my real uncle. We aren’t related. But, he grew up on the same block as my mother and my dad was in his class in school. They all knew each other since, like, grade school. My mom’s best friend growing up was his little sister, Maria.”
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” she groans, rubbing her hands over her face before turning back to me. I would do anything to spare her the pain I know this is causing her, but I can’t stop now. She needs to know everything.
“When I was little, he was kind of just around a lot. He and my father were friends, and we called him Uncle Dom. When my dad died, he was around even more, constantly checking on us and my mom, making sure we were okay financially or whatever. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I discovered who and what he was. I tried to distance myself from him, and I did, for a long time.”
“But,” she interjects, “I know there is a ‘but.’ There’s always a fucking ‘but.’”
I sigh and then take a deep, cleansing breath. “But, when I graduated from college, I couldn’t get a loan to open the bar. I didn’t have any credit.”
She sneers. “So, you went to Abello.”
“No, of course not, but my mother told him about my struggle finding financing, and one day a check from him just showed up. I called him and told him I didn’t want his money, but he insisted, said my father would have wanted me to have a chance to prove myself as a business owner. He said he had faith in me and would give me five years to pay back the loan, without interest.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah, so I took it. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did. I paid it all back in less than two years, and went on with my life and my various business ventures, trying to forget I had ever had ties to him. But, he started asking for favors.”
The nervous look returns to her face and I can only imagine what horrific things she’s imagining Abello may have asked me to do over the years.
“No, never anything like that,” I reassure her. “It was always innocuous stuff, like wanting to use the backroom at the bar for a meeting, or reserving the champagne room and entertaining one of his high-profile guests. Never anything illegal, as far as I could tell.”
“That doesn’t make it okay,” she retorts. “He is evil incarnate! I can’t believe you ever let yourself get involved with him.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I clench my hands into fists so hard I think my palms may be bleeding. I think of the position both Danika and I are now in with Abello. “You think I like being tied to a fucking mafia boss for the rest of my life?”
“Fuck!” she screams and begins pacing back and forth between the couch and the coffee table. She’s already freaking out and I haven’t even told her half of it yet. I’m afraid she’ll go nuclear when she finally knows everything.
Deep breath, Savage. Then get it out.
“There’s more.”
She pauses and turns to face me. “You have to be fucking kidding me. What more could there possibly be? You’re basically related to the man who tried to have me killed last night. What the fuck more can there be?”
Her voice rises several octaves as she borders on hysteria, but it does no good to withhold this from her. It’s like ripping off a bandage. Best to get it done quickly.
“When you were researching the mayor, what do you remember finding about his family?”
She closes her eyes briefly before she returns to pacing, alternating between squeezing her hands into fists at her sides and chewing on her nails. “Um, Mayor Dunne’s wife died giving birth, and everyone kind of lost track of his son after he graduated from high school. I think his name was Anderson. The mayor never talks about him.”
Bomb dropping in three…two…one…
“That’s because they haven’t spoken in over ten years.”
She stops in front of me, hands on her hips. “And how the hell would you know that?”
I take a deep breath and attempt to prepare myself for her epic meltdown. “Because Gabe is Mayor Dunne’s son.”
A gasp escapes before she shakes her head. “No, no, that’s impossible. Gabe isn’t a Dunne.”