I could taste the bile rising in my throat. I thought of my father all alone in the dark outside the diner and how scared he must have been when Angelo Falcone approached him, yelling. He had no idea who was coming for him. He couldn’t have. He would never be involved in something like that. Right? I clenched my fists to stop my hands from shaking. Just how many people in my life weren’t who they said they were?
“I didn’t know Jack had a brother who looked so like him until the night I saw him shoot my brother. That’s terrible research, is it not? I can tell you, a lot of heads rolled after that unfortunate mix-up.” Felice allowed himself a fleeting smirk before adding, “Literally.”
“You were there?”
He sighed, his bravado diminishing. “It was dark, and Angelo approached the wrong Gracewell. The plan was for my brother to subdue Jack and drag him back into the alley behind the diner so that I would shoot him in private — it was my personal request, you see — but we never got that far, and that is something you do know, at last.”
I flinched at the thought of him shooting Jack.
Felice wagged his finger at me, back and forth like a metronome, until I wanted to rip it off and spit it back in his face. “You mustn’t conceptualize me as the monster. It was Jack who was and is contributing to society’s underbelly in the worst way. And it was Jack who got your father into such an unfortunate position. If I were ever to traffic drugs, which of course I would not, I certainly wouldn’t use one of my brother’s family establishments for storage.”
“Jack isn’t into that stuff.” Doubt caused my words to falter. They fell out of my mouth, unsteady and forced. “My father would never let him do that. I don’t believe you.” I would have crossed my arms and stormed off if I could have. Not because I was angry, but because I was afraid of the truth, and what it meant for my understanding of family, of right and wrong.
“Well fortunately for me, it is of no concern whether you choose to believe me. It does not change the truth of the matter.”
The more I thought about it, though, the more I teetered toward his version of events. After all, it was strange to think that Angelo Falcone would be skulking, unarmed, around a small suburban diner in the middle of the night. And stranger still was all of Jack’s mysterious business in the city. And the money he always seemed to have, the fancy cars and the exquisite suits. There was always something a little off about him: something that caused my mother to keep him at arm’s length, something that had kept him from settling down with a family of his own. And then there was his vehement hatred of the Falcones. The more I pieced everything together, the less ridiculous it was beginning to sound. “So if it is true …” I began.
“It is,” clarified Felice.
“Well, why am I here now, if this isn’t about my father? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“After the unfortunate death of my beloved brother, Jack’s activities experienced a significant decline, so much so that we believed the Golden Triangle to be finished entirely. Of course, we were always going to finish what we started with him — after the appropriate mourning period, that is. I must admit Angelo’s death took a heavy toll on all of us, the boys especially. But when we discovered our intel was incorrect and that Jack is now spearheading the entire gang from the city, we realized we would have to dispatch of him sooner rather than later. We procured a residence in Cedar Hill, and from there, we have been picking off your uncle’s key associates one by one.”
Did that explain the drowned deliveryman — was Luis part of this, too? And all the other mysterious disappearances Mrs. Bailey had been so eager to point out — the ones I had been so quick to ignore? All this time, and right under my nose, they were killing people.
“That’s horrible,” I said, feeling dazed.
“Actually it’s competence,” Felice corrected me. “And now, with Jack proving to be the final piece of the puzzle — and weakened without his most trusted henchmen — we must end him sooner rather than later, before he can regroup. It must finally come to an end the way my brother intended it to.”
I panicked at the thought of what they would do to Jack, wondering just how many of his “associates” had been killed over the past few months, and trying not to think about which ones had met their deaths at the end of Nic’s gun. “So you’re going to kill him.”
“Yes.” Felice eased himself into the chair like his bones would snap if he weren’t careful. “And that, lovely Persephone, is where you come in.”
I bristled. “That’s not my name.”
“I don’t see why you have chosen to cast it off.” He paused as if expecting me to justify something that seemed so unbearably trivial to me now. When I didn’t answer, he continued with obvious bewilderment. “Why wouldn’t you want to associate yourself with the majestic and beautiful Queen of the Underworld, the wondrous and infernal Goddess of Death? Sophie is so plain in comparison.”
“Do you really expect me to answer that?”
“The significance of such a name is amusing to me. You have even found your Hades.” He smirked, and I got the feeling he was expecting me to be impressed by his knowledge of Greek mythology. I wasn’t.
When I didn’t reply, he continued. “It was Dominico who found out who you were, when he was with that trivial British waitress, trying to gather information on Jack. By the time Nicoli realized that you were, in fact, Persephone Gracewell, he tried to pull away from you, but it was too late. Suddenly you had become the most viable way to lead us to our intended target at a time when we were running out of patience.”