Off The Record (With Me in Seattle Mafia #3) -Kristen Proby Page 0,58
hips. “Really? That’s really stupid.”
“You’ll watch your tone with me if you want to keep that tongue in your pretty little mouth,” Claudia replies, her voice full of venom.
“You just try to touch her,” I suggest. “I beg you.”
“You blamed my family for protecting Pavlov,” Mick Sergi says coldly, now that the Martinelli side of things has been explained. “Built an entire web of lies that my men believed and had dozens of them killed because they believed they were carrying out my orders.”
“You might want to hire men who aren’t so gullible,” Claudia says with a shrug. “It’s certainly not my fault that they believed a bunch of lies. Besides, it was for the greater good, Mick. Pavlov was a mess. And he was from your city. Why didn’t you take care of him when he lived there?”
“Because I had him under control,” Mick replies. “And then, suddenly, one day he was gone. I thought he was dead and forgot him. Until my men started disappearing and ended up dead, and it all came back to me.”
“Well, I had to blame someone for it, didn’t I?” Claudia asks. “I mean, I was building an empire for my son.”
“And you killed my father,” Maceo says.
“I told you. Benji was the only man who could be the boss. The Carlitos are the only family who matter.”
“You killed my father and other families who never had a beef with you,” Maceo continues. “My mother could still die.”
“You’re not listening to me.” Claudia’s frustrated now. “No one else matters except Benji.”
“But it was just you and Benji. There is no Carlito family,” I point out.
“He would have married within a few years and started a family. We would have built from the ground up. But now you’ve ruined that. You’ve ruined everything. I should have known you would. The people I came from never did anything good for me, not once in my life. Benji was going to do great things. He had his whole life ahead of him. I just had to get a few roadblocks out of the way, and the sky was the limit for him.”
“By killing off the other families,” Igor says, shaking his head.
“Yes. You and Nadia were next, but I couldn’t pin you down. I was just going to blow you all up.”
“And us?” Pop asks.
“I was saving you for last.” She taps her lips thoughtfully. “I planned to put the bullets into your heads personally.”
“Are you finished with your story?” Pop asks.
Claudia lets out a loud, gusty sigh. “Boy, it feels good to get it all off my chest, you know? Keeping secrets is tough. Yeah, I think that’s it for now.”
Without another word, Pop raises his gun.
“It’s my bullet going in your head.” He squeezes the trigger and kills her instantly with a bullet right between the eyes.
“Is more security on the way?” I ask Curt, who stayed on the perimeter, keeping an eye out.
“No, we got them all. She may have had more men in different locations, but I disabled the communication systems before we got here.”
“We make a pact, here and now,” Mick says, his eyes hard and on Claudia as she bleeds from the forehead in her fancy chair. “Nothing like this happens again. We don’t let it get this far just because we’re too proud to speak to each other. No matter what our issues are.”
“Agreed,” Igor says with a tired sigh as he looks at Nadia and then the rest of us. “You young people remember this. Let it be a lesson to you. When Mick, Carlo, and I are long gone, and you’re the ones in charge, don’t let anything like this happen again.”
“We won’t,” Carmine says. “It won’t be repeated.”
“All because she didn’t get enough attention,” Annika says again. “I’m no psychiatrist, but I’d say that’s psychotic behavior.”
“Claudia always had mental health issues,” Pop says. “But it sounds like it festered as she got older. I don’t know that woman. And now that my family, all the families, are safe from her, I’m ready to go home and forget her.”
“We have to tell Elena,” I remind him. “She deserves to know.”
“You’re right.” Pop pats me on the shoulder as we file out of the Carlito house. “We’ll tell her together. She’ll need all of us with her.”
“I have a question,” Maceo says, catching all of our attention. “Does this mean we’re…friends?”
“Think of it like this,” Mick says thoughtfully. “We’ve been through a war together. We fought for the