The Crime Boss Found His Ex at His Grandfather’s Funeral After 8 Years—And the Son She Never Told… Part 1
The Crime Boss Found His Ex at His Grandfather’s Funeral After 8 Years—And the Son She Never Told…**
Part 1
The man said it without raising his voice, which was how she had always known it was final. He set the glass down on the corner of the desk, looked at the folder with Riona’s name typed across the tab, and told the man standing across from him, “She was never part of this organization. As far as anyone in this room is concerned, she never existed.”
Then he closed the folder and locked it in the desk drawer.
That was eight years ago.
Tonight Riona Mallister stood at the top of the steps outside St. Patrick’s Basilica in Old Montreal with her seven-year-old son’s hand wrapped around two of her fingers. The November wind coming off the St. Lawrence was cold enough to make her eyes sting. She understood, with the kind of clarity that only arrives after you have survived something for a very long time, that coming back had been a mistake.
She had not told herself it would be easy. She had told herself she was past the point of caring whether it was easy. Those were two very different things, and she had spent most of the flight from Vancouver conflating them.
Anel tugged at her sleeve. “Mama, is that church?”
“Basilica.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s bigger.”
He accepted this and looked at the limestone façade with the focused interest of a child cataloging a new thing. He had her dark hair and her tendency to go quiet around large spaces. His eyes were gray-green, a particular shade she had spent seven years not thinking about the origin of.
She straightened the lapel of his small black coat, and they went up the steps.
The interior smelled of beeswax candles and cut lilies going soft at the edges. The pews were filling with people who moved the way people move at high-stakes funerals: with precision, measuring their proximity to certain other people down to the pew. Riona had learned to read rooms like this. Eight years of living under a different name in a city three thousand kilometers away will do that. She chose a seat near the back, left side, close to the secondary exit. She had been choosing exits since before Anel could walk.
Cosmo Ferrante, patriarch of the Ferrante family, had died at eighty-three after a decade of slow decline. He had been a man she had always struggled to categorize. He had run an organization that did things she would never reconcile with her sense of how the world should work. He had also, on a Tuesday afternoon when she had come in early and found him alone in the kitchen of the family estate, looked at her across a cup of espresso and said, with the tired precision of a man who had watched many people come and go, “You see things other people look past. Hold on to that. In this family that kind of seeing will either protect you or destroy you, depending on who finds out about it first.”
She had thought about those words more in the last eight years than almost anything else he had ever said.
She was here because six weeks before he died, Cosmo had sent her a message through a chain of intermediaries so convoluted that by the time it reached her she had almost dismissed it. The final line was a phrase from that Tuesday kitchen—a specific, strange, private sentence that no one else on earth could have known. So she had believed it was real, and she had come.
She was also here because Anel was seven and was going to keep getting older, and the half-answers she had given him so far were not going to hold much longer.
The service began. She watched the entrances. She recognized faces: associates from the two years she and Aldrich had been together, people from the three families whose alliances had defined Montreal’s organized-crime landscape for forty years. She recognized the Bertolini contingent near the front right. She recognized a pair of men near the rear columns who were not grieving but watching.
And then Aldrich Ferrante walked in through the main doors, and Riona felt every breath she had been taking leave her body at once.
He was forty-two now. There was gray along his jaw that hadn’t been there before. He moved with the same particular quality she had forgotten: the way a room seemed to register him before anyone consciously chose to look. He was looking at the casket, his face arranged into the careful stillness of a man doing significant internal work. Two men walked with him. Four more followed.
She pressed her hand flat against her thigh and concentrated on Anel’s small shoulder against her arm.
She had loved Aldrich with the complete, slightly reckless certainty of a twenty-six-year-old who had never understood what it was to have someone see her clearly and choose her anyway. She had loved him through the complexity of what he was. She had been willing to stay.
And then Roland Vane had put a folder on that desk and spoken, and Aldrich had believed what was inside it in the time it took her to draw one breath and open her mouth to speak.
She remembered every second of that room.
