now, I was looking at a person who had masterminded a large series of events to his own advantage. I couldn’t estimate the power and pull this person had. It was a lot more than I anticipated.
“So, you got what you wanted?” I looked at him, wondering what his intentions were. He stalked up to me, and I held my breath. I had seen this look before on men when they needed to get rid of loose ends. A quick bullet to the brain was usually the next course of action. I kept one hand holding the cigarette and the other stuffed in my pocket on a small revolver, ready to take him out if I needed to.
“I did. I got, exactly what I wanted.” He had gotten even closer to me. The first thing I noticed was how bright his eyes seemed. They didn’t feel dangerous. They were a emerald shade of green, a color I hadn’t seen often. My hand gripped the revolver in my pocket. He looked innocent enough, but I still had to be careful; looks were not to be trusted. He held up both his arms like he was about to attack me, and I readied my hand to pull out the revolver and squeeze the trigger. As his arms came towards me, I lifted my hand, but then they went all around me in what I could only say was a...
Hug?
He was hugging me. No violence, no anger. Just a manly kind of hug.
“Thank you so much Devon,” he said.
Thank you?
There was no malice in his voice.
“Your family has nothing to worry about. Everything will remain secret. Don’t worry.” He pulled himself off me, and smiled. He was smiling and he had just told me I had nothing to worry about. He hadn’t threatened me or asked for any money. He had hugged me like it was all nothing, like I never had anything to worry about. Like I was his friend?
What was going on?
I eyed him, still feeling very suspicious of his motives. “So, what is this all about? You had no intention of hurting my niece or exposing my family?”
He chuckled.
Yes, chuckled.
“Tess, oh of course not. I just needed you to not go through with what Clint Weston paid you to do. I didn’t have the kind of money to call it off, so I needed to find something, or in this case, someone to stop you. The deal I set up between the Voltaggios and Rossis had not gone through, so I couldn’t get Kyser to call it off at that point. I needed leverage. I couldn’t allow you to hurt Samuel. It was imperative that I kept him alive.”
He had used my niece to prevent me from completing a hit! That was a new approach and I had not seen that coming, yet something still didn’t make sense. I dropped the cigarette butt to the ground and stomped on it. “So why still get Kyser to call off the hit when you already had control of me after the deal went through? You didn’t need him to do that.”
Kyser’s request only reinforced what he had already succeeded in doing. The hit on Samuel Voltaggio became null and void when information about my relatives was brought up.
“I needed Joe Rossi to see how far I would go to make his daughter happy. It wasn’t enough to find a way to end the Rossi and Voltaggio feud. I wanted him to see that her happiness is all I care about, whether I was with her or not. Getting him to call in a favor with Kyser was proof of that. I knew Joe would tell his daughter.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Wait, wait, wait. So you did all this, for a girl? Not money, not power...A girl? The girl that Weston was with. Tess’s best friend...uh, Norah?”
“Yes, that girl.” His eyes seemed to become darker when he talked about her. This girl must have been special for him to go to such lengths.
I had so many questions in my head now. “How did you know Weston would come to me? How did you find out about Samuel’s hit on him?”
“Because Devon,” he ran his fingers through his hair, “the hit on Weston from Voltaggio was a fake hit that I set up. I figured if Weston believed that Samuel had put a hit out on him, he would respond the same way. Weston knew how Samuel tried to use the