Page 73 of Wicked Mafia Beast
And beneath it all, a single notation in Luca's handwriting, circled twice:
Seamus has held this over Declan for forty years. Primary leverage. The leash that controls everything.
My father killed his own mother. Hit her on a dark road and drove away because his fifteen-year-old brother told him to. And Seamus turned that guilt into a chain that has choked every decision Declan Malone ever made, including the decision to let his wife be destroyed.
I'm still on the floor. Kneeling in a pool of moonlight and scattered paper, surrounded by the documented destruction of my entire family. The concrete bites into my knees and I can't feel it. My hands are numb. My face is wet and I don't remember starting to cry.
All this time I never knew about my mother or my grandmother. All the sleepless nights and dangerous meetings and evidence gathered in fragments. I risked my life for scraps of truth I could never quite piece together. And the whole picture was here. In a folder. In his desk.
He knew. Kon knew.
He knew when he bought me. When he kissed me. When he spread me across his desk and his rooftop chaise and his bed. When he held me while I sobbed against a door and whisperedya znayuinto my hair.
He knew everything. And he chose to keep it from me.
"Onyx."
His voice reaches me from the doorway before I can wipe the tears from my face, low and rough with sleep, my name wrapped in that thick Russian accent that only surfaces when his guard is down. Of course he woke up. Of course he followed the cold absence of my body from his bed and traced my path through the dark hallways to this office, this floor, this moment I can never undo.
He stands in the doorway wearing nothing but sweat pants. His bare chest rises and falls evenly. His gaze sweeps from the scattered pages to my face and back again. I watch the understanding settle over his features, the slight tightening of his jaw, the way his shoulders draw back as if bracing for impact.
He knows what I found.
"How long?" My voice comes out shattered from the floor. I don't stand. I can't. My knees won't hold me. "How long have you had this?"
"Onyx, let me explain."
"How long?"
He doesn't answer right away. His jaw works and his shoulders pull tight, and I can see him measuring his words the way he measures everything, with a precision that tells me he's been expecting this moment for a long time.
"Luca gathered the information through our sources before the auction. We make it a point to know about powerful men trying to move into our territory. Some of it was gathered before I knew about your wish. Other details were pulled in and dug up after."
He's telling the truth. I can hear it in the flat, unsentimental delivery. No spin. No softening.
But that doesn't make hearing it any easier. I rock back on my heels, my hand slapping against the concrete for balance.
"You've had this the entire time." My voice climbs, cracking, but it's not rage. It's something worse. It's the bewildered hurt of a woman who has been handing over puzzle pieces to a man who already had the completed picture hanging on his wall. "Every piece of intel I traded you. The shipping routes. The shell companies. The warehouse. You already had all of it."
"Not all of it. Your firsthand knowledge filled gaps that..."
"Don't." The word comes out sharp enough to cut. "Don't tell me my scraps were valuable when you were sitting on this." I hold up a fistful of pages from the floor, my mother's medical records crumpled in my grip. "I have been killing myself trying to rebuild an investigation from nothing. Working off fragments and memory and whatever I could piece together on a laptop with half my files missing. And this whole time, the complete dossier was three rooms away in your desk."
"Onyx..."
"You could have given me this on day one." I'm shaking now, the tremor running from my hands up through my arms into my voice. "You could have handed me this folder and said 'here's everything you need to destroy your uncle.' I could have been writing. Building a real case. Doing the one thing I'm actually good at. Instead you let me sit at your breakfast counter trading sex for breadcrumbs while the whole damn bakery was on your desk."
His jaw tightens. The muscle beneath his beard jumps. "It wasn't about withholding from you."
"Then what was it about?"
"Protection. The less detailed intelligence you carried, the safer you were if Seamus ever got to you. I couldn't risk that information being extracted. I can’t lose you, Onyx. I refuse to put you in danger."
The tactical logic makes sense and I hate that it makes sense. I hate that even now, even kneeling on this cold floor surrounded by my family's documented sins, part of my brain is nodding along with his reasoning.
"You don't get to decide what I can handle, Kon." My voice breaks on his name. "I'm not a civilian you're shielding from the truth. I'm the woman who climbed out a window and ran through the woods and dropped a wish into a box because I was willing to trade my own body to fight back. I have earned the right to stand at your side, not be pushed behind you."
He steps closer. I scramble to my feet, papers crunching beneath me, and step back until my spine presses against the desk.
