Very bad.
I couldn’t kill her father.
He grinned beneath the mask. “I can see your mind working. So, I’ll do you a favor.” He straightened. “You have thirty-six hours.”
He reached into his coat and tossed something at my feet.
A photograph.
Dante Alfero stood in my house.
At his feet?—
My little brother.
Dead.
Silence swallowed the room.
“Any questions,” the man asked softly, “or are we done here?”
I walked out of that restaurant a changed man.
The rain came down hard, soaking through my coat, pounding against my skull until everything felt distant—muted. Numb. The woman I married. The man I was supposed to kill. The weight of it all pressed down until breathing felt optional.
I kept walking.
I knew someone was behind me. It had to be Cassian. He never rushed. Never hid. He let inevitability do the work for him.
I didn’t stop until I reached a dive bar that had seen better decades. Flickering neon. Sticky floors. The kind of place people came to forget the rest of the world.
I slid onto a stool and tapped the bar. “Whiskey. Neat. Maker’s.”
I didn’t look up when the stool beside me scraped back.
“Same,” a familiar voice said.
“You knew,” I said quietly.
Cassian took the glass when it arrived and rolled it between his palms. “I had suspicions. I only ever got as far as discovering that the men at your house that day were there under orders to cleanse the De Lange family—and that they believed you were part of that cleansing.”
My jaw tightened.
“They got one shot off before they realized they’d made a mistake,” he continued calmly. “Dante Alfero made an error. One Nixon Abandonato was happy to help bury. Luca and Frank cleaned the rest. But one made man didn’t sit right with it. Said Dante should’ve known better, age or not. He walked.”
Cassian finally took a sip.
“When the Vescovis came into the picture a few years back, that man joined them. He talked too much when he drank.” A pause. “He never said Dante’s name outright. I narrowed it down to Dante, Luca, or Nixon.”
He glanced at me sideways. “Nice to have proof.”
I exhaled slowly. “Didn’t want to kill the wrong one.”
“Tough break it’s her father,” he said mildly. “Good thing you don’t love her, right?”
He snatched my glass and downed it.
“You’ve got thirty-six hours,” he added. “And in that time, I expect her to fulfill her end of the game.”