THE CALLAHANS (A Mafia Romance): The Complete 5 Books Series (64 page)

I was lightheaded. I reached up to brush the sweat from my brow and suddenly lost my footing. I knew I was going down, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Amelia….

Amelia

My heart was pounding in my chest as I grabbed my shoulder bag and headed for the door. Colin was there, leaning against the wall with his phone in his hand, clearly playing some sort of game.

“Do you have a car?”

He looked up almost lazily, as though I was interrupting some great moment of inspiration.

“I do. Why?”

“We have to get to the hospital. They’ve been shot!”

“Who?”

“Everyone!”

I ran for the door that opened onto the street, not even bothering to check if Colin was following. But he was. He came up behind me, grabbed my arm to keep me from barreling out onto the street by myself. He led the way to a small, nondescript, black car parked about half a block from the building the loft was in. Once we were inside, the doors locked, seatbelts in place, he focused on me.

“Who was shot?”

“Kyle and Jack. And someone named Carmine? I don’t know. Cassidy was talking quickly and I kind of stopped listening after she said Kyle was shot.”

Colin started the car and pulled quickly into traffic. He drove quickly, navigating the streets like a pro. I leaned forward as though that would make him drive faster. My heart was pounding so hard, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. All I could think about was Kyle lying in some hospital bed, covered in white sheets, his body as pale as the sheets. He couldn’t die. Not now. I had so much I needed to explain to him, so many things I needed to tell him.

I kept saying it to myself, whispering it under my breath:
He can’t die. He can’t die. He can’t die.

The emergency room was packed when we walked in, people everywhere, blood drops on the floor. Colin held my arm and moved me through the crowd, knowing exactly where to go. And he was right. We found the Callahan family, all of them with the exception of the one I had yet to meet and Kyle, in a small waiting room down a narrow corridor at the back of the emergency room.

“Amelia!”

Cassidy rushed to my side, wrapping her arms tight around me.

I let her hold me for just a moment. Then I stepped back.

“Where is he? Is he okay?”

“Yes, yes, he’s fine. They’re sewing him up in one of the trauma rooms.”

“But he’s okay.”

“He’s going to be fine,” Brian said, coming up alongside his wife, slipping his hand around her waist. “He was hit in the shoulder, but the doctor said it was a through and through. He’ll have to stick around awhile because he lost a lot of blood, but barring an infection, he should be good as new in a week or so.”

I nodded, surprised and a little embarrassed by the tears that suddenly began to flow. Cassidy hugged me again.

“It’s okay. Relief can be as painful as fear sometimes.”

Brian drew us both into the waiting room, explaining that I’d have to wait to see Kyle until they were done sewing the wounds. I sat on the edge of a chair and listened as Ian explained to Colin what had happened.

“We were basically ambushed by an unknown group trying to make it look like we attacked the Italians. Someone wants to start a street war, but they weren’t planning on Kyle being clever enough to first save Carmine and then pull both Carmine and Jack out the back.”

“Did someone call Sean and Delaney?” Brianna wanted to know. “I’m sure Delaney would want to know what’s happening.”

“I’m sure Kyle did,” Killian said, glancing at his father.

Brian nodded. “He did. They’re taking the first plane out from Italy.”

This all seemed a little surreal to me. A week ago I was serving drinks, and today I was in the middle of some sort of street war, waiting to find out how badly hurt my husband was. I was still getting used to the idea of having a husband.

I think they stopped paying attention to me the moment my tears dried up. I slipped away without anyone noticing. They were debating the subject of who could have been behind the gunmen and why, a subject I didn’t care the least about. I wanted to know where Kyle was. I wouldn’t believe he was okay until I saw it for myself.

I wandered through the halls, peeking in on patients waiting to be seen for everything from an earache to a missing digit. It wasn’t until I’d almost made a full circle through the emergency ward that I finally found him, sitting alone on the edge of a gurney, an IV in his arm and a thick, white bandage on his shoulder.

I busted through the door, rushing to him, not thinking of the logistics of throwing my arms around him. He groaned, but he didn’t push me away as my arm slammed against his shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” he asked softly.

“They said you’d been shot, and I had all these images in my head of you lying dead somewhere. I was so frightened!”

“Why?”

I pulled back, suddenly feeling an icy chill rush over me. “Because you’re my husband.”

“So you felt obliged because of some shady ceremony back in Vegas?”

I stepped back, more frightened by the blank stare he was offering me than I had been by the news of his injury. I crossed my arms over my chest, focusing on the bandage on his shoulder, telling myself that the injury was the reason he was acting like this. He was hurt and he was scared, so he was striking out. That was all this was.

“I know you didn’t marry me because you wanted me, Amelia. You married me because you thought you were getting some sort of revenge on me and my family, right?”

“Kyle—”

“I’ve known since the beginning that the whole thing had to be some sort of set up. I just couldn’t figure out
why
you would be a part of it and
what
this person had to offer you. But when you told me who your father was—”

“That’s not it.”

“Isn’t it?”

His voice was so cold. I wanted to cry. I wanted to shrink away and disappear into the walls. I wanted to leave, go back to Vegas, and pretend this had never happened.

But the idea of leaving Kyle hurt more than anything I’d ever felt before.

“I thought Brian Callahan was the reason my parents divorced. And the divorce caused my father to create that pyramid scheme, caused him to get sick, caused him to ruin everything. I thought…” I shook my head. “I thought he was the cause of it all.”

“So someone approached you, told you they’d help you get revenge on Brian Callahan if you married his near-do-well son?”

“Sort of. Yeah.”

Kyle laughed, but again it was the coldest thing I’d ever heard.

“It was actually a pretty good scheme. If I insisted on a divorce right away, then someone would slip to the news outlets that you were Robert Clark Wallace’s daughter and that my father was an investor in his scheme. My reputation, my father’s reputation, my entire family’s reputation would have taken a serious black eye on that one.”

He reached up and touched his shoulder tenderly. “But if I kept you with me, played along with the marriage, then he had someone on the inside who he could manipulate. Someone who would give him information about the family, about the business, that she didn’t even know she was giving him.”

“I didn’t—”

“You wouldn’t have to do it yourself. He could have planted a bug on you. Done something with your phone. There’s a dozen ways he could have used you without you knowing about it.”

He was right. I knew he was right.

“This,” he said, his dark expression falling on me again, pouring ice cubes over my head, “is probably your doing. You, or I, somehow managed to convey to him what was going on tonight. I said something or you did something. It’s the only explanation for how someone on the outside of the either organization could have spilled the information about the meeting.”

“You never said anything to me.”

“I told you there was going to be a meeting.”

“Yeah, but how could he—?”

“With that information, all he’d have to do is sit back and watch. Then we were there a good two hours. He could have had his men in position in less than half that time.”

“Why me? Why not Brianna or Cassidy or one of the other wives? Why me?”

“He might have them wired, too. But Pops isn’t stupid enough to talk about this stuff with Cassidy or Brianna.”

I suddenly felt very sick to my stomach. I leaned back against the wall, my hand on my belly. I could feel him watching me and could feel the weight of his stare. And that only made my nausea worse.

“How did he contact you?”

“Phone calls, first. A mechanical voice making me all these promises, telling me things about myself. The things he knew were staggering.”

“And then?”

“Text messages.”

I tugged my cell phone out of my back pocket and took it to him. I’d pulled up the screen with all the text messages and watched as he read through them. I knew some of them would be painful to him because they talked about him, about his past, giving me instructions on how I should speak to him in the hours after he woke after the wedding.

“You fell off your script.”

I brushed my cheek, thinking there was a hair brushing against it, but then I realized I was crying again.

“Because I didn’t need it anymore.”

“Is this how you learned about my biological mother? You said I told you.”

“You did talk about her a little. But most of what I knew, I learned there.”

He continued to read, not really looking at me, but asking the occasional question. I tried to be as honest as I could be. I could see he was just pulling further and further away from me, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want any more lies between us even if it meant that he would never look me in the eye again.

“Why?” he finally asked, his voice low and rough.

“He promised to give me the money I needed to pay back the people my father hurt.”

There. Now it was all out in the open.

I waited for his response. I didn’t have to wait long.

“Go back to the loft and pack your things. You can keep whatever you bought, but I want you out before they release me.”

“Kyle, please—”

“And I’ll keep your phone. This is probably how he overheard our conversations. But I’m going to send Ian over to make sure that’s all there was.”

“Kyle…”

I touched his arm, tried to get him to look at me. Again he refused.

“If he doesn’t give you the money, let me know and I’ll arrange for it. But I’m sure he will because he got what he wanted out of you.”

“I don’t care about the money anymore.”

“And I’ll call my lawyer first thing Monday morning, see what we need to do to get this marriage annulled.”

Tears were rolling down my cheeks.

“I love you, Kyle. I don’t want to go back to Vegas. I don’t want an annulment. I want to stay here with you.”

“But I don’t want you.” He shrugged my hand from his arm. “Go home.”

I turned and walked away, managing to stay on my feet until I was out of the room and far enough down the corridor that he couldn’t see me if he happened to come to the door. And then I slid to the floor and cried harder than I’d cried in a very long time.

I’d thought my life was over once before. This time I was positive.

Kyle

I read through the texts three, four times, trying to imagine what it was like for Amelia to read these the first time. The information was sound, things that very few people knew about me. I supposed it would be possible to find most of it out with a long, strenuous search, but it had the feel of someone close to me, someone who’d heard these things first hand. And the language was familiar. Whoever wrote the texts used the same quirky language, the same unique spellings as someone I knew, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Whoever did this was someone close to me.

I texted Ian and asked him to meet me in the trauma room since I was still hooked to an IV. He arrived, a big grin on his face.

“What’s it like to have a woman crying over you, brother? Even Killian doesn’t get that all too often.”

I held up the phone. “Can you tell if there’s some sort of listening device on this phone?”

Ian frowned. He took the phone and began studying it, moving through the screens faster than I could keep up. Ian was the family computer wiz. He knew things about all modern electronics that I would never hope to learn. I’d once seen him find a virus on a laptop in seconds, beating out the technicians MCorp pays to keep their computers running properly.

This time it took him almost a full minute.

“A virus. Someone was using this phone as a live microphone.”

“Can you tell where it came from?”

Ian shook his head. “I can send it to my computer and look at the code, but I’m not sure I’d be able to tell much about it.” He looked at the phone, then at me. “Why? Whose phone is this?”

“Amelia’s.”

Ian’s eyes darkened slightly. “Did you say something—?”

I nodded and Ian cursed under his breath. “Does she know anything about it?”

“She was getting text messages from someone. He offered to pay her a huge sum of money if she married me and kept me distracted.”

“Is that why?”

I shrugged, a little embarrassed now that I’d said it out loud. “She also happens to be Robert Clark Wallace’s daughter.”

“Oh, hell!” Ian spun around, headed for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“We should get Killian in on this. And Sean should be here by morning. He’ll want to know what’s going on.”

Great! Now the whole family will know about my disgrace.

***

We stood out in the hallway, reading through the text messages for the millionth time. Carmine had gotten out of surgery. It was rough going, but the doctor thought he might survive. Jack was still under the knife and everyone was waiting for word on his condition. Cassidy was with Caroline in a waiting room upstairs, the rest of us down in the emergency ward still. No one had noticed that Amelia was gone, and I was relieved. I’d already had to explain enough, and I didn’t want to have to explain that, too.

“It’s familiar,” I insisted for like the tenth time. “I know those texts—not the words, but something about the writing. I know the person who sent them.”

“An old enemy, maybe?” Killian suggested.

“I don’t normally text my enemies.”

“Who would want to hurt you this way?” Ian asked.

“The same person who kidnapped Brianna and tried to make sure Killian died.”

Ian and Killian exchanged glances. They knew I was right, but they seemed reluctant to admit it to themselves. Then Sean came marching around the corner.

“We need to talk,” he said even as Killian went in for the bro handshake. Ian got a hug and I got a chuck to the head. There was something about Sean’s movements, about the serious cloud in his eyes, that told me he knew something that was important to this situation.

“I know who’s doing this.”

The three of us exchange glances. “Doing what?”

Sean sighed with frustration. “I know who’s been trying to take Pops down, who tried to kill you, Killian. I know who’s been behind all these things, probably behind the shootings tonight.”

“You should know that we figured out that whoever it is has been blackmailing Kyle’s wife and used her phone to listen in to their private conversations.”

Sean’s eyebrows rose. “You’re married?”

“Long story,” I said.

He studied me for a long minute, then he inclined his head. “Does anyone know where Kevin is?”

“He was in the waiting room a few minutes ago,” Killian said.

“Not anymore,” Sean said.

Ian was the first to ask the obvious. “Why?”

Sean took a deep breath and said, “Kevin’s behind it all. Brianna’s kidnapping, the hit man Stacy put on Killian, the information the Italians have been receiving, the federal warrant against Pops. All of it.”

“Kevin?”

I think we all said it at the same time. None of us could imagine our happy-go-lucky, artistic little brother would be capable of some of the things this man had done. And we couldn’t imagine why. But Sean had an answer for all our questions.

“He thinks Pops killed Momma. He thinks Pops stole away the one thing that ever mattered to him, so he’s taking him out. I talked to him and he admitted every bit of it. But he threatened Delaney and I couldn’t risk that he’d go through on his threats.”

“Kevin.”

I grabbed Amelia’s phone out of Killian’s hand and looked at the texts again. Then I pulled up some of Kevin’s texts and, sure enough, there were the same quirks, the same funny uses of ellipses and emoticons.

It was Kevin.

“We have to find him before he does something else.”