Page 57 of Mafia Scars

I wanted to hate him. I wanted to hate him and show that I did.

He’d robbed me of my life by being a bad person.

And yet… when I looked at him, I saw the man who took me to my first ballet class and waited for me until class was over. I was five, and yet I still remembered.

He’d come with me to every single class. Then Mom eventually joined him. He told her I was good and something worth seeing. That made her leave her weekly shopping trip with her friends.

When I looked at him, I remembered how effortlessly he gave me one of his kidneys, as if that was just the thing to do. As if it were nothing to him if that was what he needed to do for me.

For me…

The memory made me take a step forward.

He did too.

The memory sparked others, and in the space of me moving at a snail’s pace, images of good times flickered through my mind. Playing my past. Playing my present.

He’d taken care of me even when he couldn’t do it himself. Sent Luc to me. The best person he knew would protect me, and look how Luc protected me. My father didn’t do anything he wasn’t sure of.

He knew Luc would protect me to the death if it came to it, and what had Dad said to me before I left so long ago?

That he’d protect me and love me with his last breath.

Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I wanted to hate him for all he’d done… but I couldn’t.

I couldn’t.

“Dad.” A rush of warmth filled me, sparking my soul, filling me with life.

He was what had been missing all this time. I’d felt the way I did, so incomplete, because I was living a made-up life. Shunning the one I had, shunning him.

Banishing him.

It was me whose legs started to shake now. Shake so bad they gave away beneath me.

He caught me and held me. “Amelia, my little girl.”

He held me close to the wild beat of his heart, and we both cried.

* * *

Luc came in when he heard me crying.

When he saw I was okay and just overwhelmed, he backed away to head back into the living room, but Dad stopped him.

“Stay, it’s time,” Dad said and motioned for us both to sit in the sofas by the window.

We sat down, me next to Luc. Dad in front of us.

I couldn’t get over how old and frail he looked.

How far had the cancer spread? I knew it was a brain tumor from what Luc had said. An inoperable one.

At least he could function as close to normal as possible from what I saw.

“The man who is running this operation is Taglioni Donachie. He was a close friend of mine.” Straight to business. “Amelia, before you left home, something terrible happened that had a knock-on effect, including taking your mother’s life. I was friends with Tag; that’s what we called him since birth. I kept you and your mother out of the business for obvious reasons. We weren’t like other crime families. Being the boss meant keeping what I held dear away from everyone. However, your mother and Tag met by accident. Something was going down one day at one of the restaurants, and I needed him to watch over her. You were away at summer camp. That chance meeting sparked an affair.”

My eyes grew wide. “Mom had an affair?”