Page 10 of Mafia Scars

I still found her as interesting as I did back then and trusted her.

However, I’d never trusted anyone with the truth of my past. Sometimes it ate me up inside because of the lie I lived.

We went downstairs and got to making breakfast.

When it was ready, we sat down to our feast and tucked in.

“So, what’s on for today?” I asked, trying to sound chirpy.

She looked up at me and gave me a look of sympathy. “It’s okay, Amelia, you don’t have to talk or sound cheerful if you don’t want to.” She reached over and gave my hands a gentle squeeze.

Thrown off guard, I looked down to my pancakes, focused on the syrup and jelly on the center, and then returned my gaze to her.

“I know when you’re not okay,” she reminded me with another squeeze.

“I’m fine,” I lied.

She winced. “I know when you’re lying too. Amelia… what really happened to Luc?”

Of course, I hadn’t told her exactly what happened, only that Luc and I weren’t seeing each other anymore. I was already getting heat at work from the guys because they thought I’d allowed Luc to escape.

It was mainly Holloway. He came right out and said it.

Then there was Sinclaire. I didn’t know what to say about him. He thought that too. He wasn’t wrong. Not right either, because even if I wanted to, there wasn’t any way I could have singlehandedly caught Luc myself.

The only way would have been to shoot him with my gun, and that wasn’t even a choice I’d contemplated.

Roose, our captain, was the only person who didn’t really blame me, although I expected him to. He just reported Luc’s case to internal affairs and told us to focus and put our attention back on the investigation. The same investigation that I knew revolved around me, but I couldn’t tell them that.

Same as I couldn’t tell anyone who I was, like my father had cautioned.

“We’re just different. He was different from what I expected.” That was the best I could do and the best I could offer without revealing the depth of my hate for mobsters.

I became a cop because of what had happened to me, and what had happened to my mother.

I knew it must have killed my father to find that one out, but I didn’t care. The day I decided that was what I wanted to do was the day when it all felt right.

It felt right at the time. It felt like my way of doing something good in this world, for whatever part I could play. Even if deep down being a cop didn’t feel like the real me.

The only time when it didn’t feel like me was when I was with Luc. I didn’t know if the irony in that was down to the fact that Luc was a mobster and the universe was trying to give me some weird messed-up warning, or if maybe it was real.

The man brought out a side of me that I’d buried and didn’t want to acknowledge. He said things and knew how to reach me, but that could have been my father’s doing. He could have simply told him all he needed to know about me to charm me out of my dignity.

“It didn’t seem that way. It seemed like you lov—”

“No.” I cut her off before she could finish the word. “No.”

I didn’t want to even thing about that damn word.Love.

No, not for me.

Love was an enemy emotion to someone like me who’d lived so much disappointment and had trust issues. Love opened me up for disaster, and weakness.

What I had to do now was move on, and as far as these people who were after me were concerned, I had to find some way to eliminate them before anyone else got hurt.

I’d have to look for them myself.

Gigi pressed her lips together in a thin line, then sighed. “Okay.”