CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Eighteen years ago

Dora Prince had decided. She was backing out. She told Luke at the fabric shop where they’d agree to meet that morning. There in the last row, amidst buttons and ribbons, she wrapped her arms around his neck and said, “I can’t do it. I can’t go through with it. But I can’t be without you either. I’ll leave him, and we can be together. I don’t need money. I have you.”

He smiled warmly, that smile she loved. “Of course, Dora. You just need to talk to Jerry Stefano and call it off.”

She drew a sharp breath. The man she’d hired to kill her husband terrified her, with his cold eyes and his even colder heart. He wouldn’t be happy. His eyes had glittered when she’d told him the price for the hit, and she was sure he wanted the money. “Can’t you tell him?”

Luke shot her a sad smile and shook his head. “Oh honey, I want to. But you know how this works. I need to keep my distance. The only way I can run the street operations for Charlie is by keeping myself clean. The less people suspect me, the more I can do his bidding, and the better I can pay my men on the street. The more I earn in the next year, the better the chance we can get away. I promise, baby. Call it off. Give me one more year to close out my deals, and then we’ll find a way to get out of town with all the kids.” He pressed his hands to her belly. “Including ours. I wish I could feel the baby kicking,” he whispered.

She smiled. “Soon. Another month or so.”

But Stefano didn’t take the news well when she tried to cancel the hit, nor did Charlie. The man in charge of a burgeoning drug operation in the city summoned her, picking her up for a drive one day when her kids were in school.

She got into Charlie’s car, and he talked as he drove out of her neighborhood. “Good to see you again,” he said. They’d met once before.

“Yes, you too,” she said, even as nerves prickled down her backbone.

“I hear you want to back out.”

She nodded. “I do. I can’t go through with it.”

He flipped on the blinker to turn right. “Ah, but therein lies the issue, Dora. You can, and you will.”

She shook her head, holding her ground. “I thought I could, but I need to move on from all this.”

He glanced at her, knitting his brow. “From what? You’re my top dealer. You run a magnificent route. I have plans, Dora. Big plans. You can work with me.”

She swallowed, sucking in all her fears. “I can’t do it.”

He slammed on the brakes and pulled over on the side of the road, then stared at her. “It’s too late for you to make that choice,” he said in a snake-like whisper.

“Why?” she asked, her voice quaking.

“You’re in too deep. Your husband has gone too far. His questions threaten my business, and when my business is threatened, my family is, too. I don’t like having my family threatened. You understand that, right?”

She nodded, bile rising up in her throat. She reached for the door handle. Maybe she could escape. Run. Call the police. But what would she tell them? That she was a drug-dealing, cheating woman who’d ordered a hit gone wrong?

He laughed and pressed the lock button. “You’re not leaving my car. And you’re not backing out. Your husband is figuring things out. I can’t have him knowing what I do.”

What he did was launder money through West Limos from guns and drugs sold on the streets by the Royal Sinners, who managed their business in the back of a piano shop. Luke, Charlie’s right-hand man in the Sinners, had set up that end of the operation to run so smoothly that no one could link Luke, Charlie, the Sinners, the piano shop, and the limo company. But Dora’s husband had started to catch on, only Thomas didn’t yet know that Charlie was involved.

Charlie clearly wanted to keep it that way. Oh the sheer bitter irony that she’d met the man of her dreams at a simple work party and had tumbled into this dark underworld of money, drugs, and power. A world her husband barely understood. A world she wanted to escape.

Her heart raced. “What if I leave? What if I leave town with my family?” Dora asked, casting out desperate ideas.

He scoffed. “What if? What if? What if?” He mimicked her like a parrot, then grabbed her chin in his hand. “I’ll give you the only what if that matters,” he said sharply. “What if you do as you planned? Then I won’t hurt your children.” His eyes roamed to her belly, and a fresh wave of fear rolled through her. “Are we clear? You don’t cancel the hit, and you come out on the other side with a neat, clean robbery-gone-wrong, executed by one of the finest hit men in the Royal Sinners, and then you are free. That is your last debt to me from the drugs you sold.”

“Why do you need me to order the hit? If you want him dead, you can call Stefano yourself,” she said, clutching at straws.

He narrowed his icy eyes at her and spoke, low and menacing. “I don’t order hits. I don’t have to. I don’t need a hit connected to me, because I haven’t made the mistakes you have.” He shrugged and fixed on a smile, his tone shifting to an easy one. “But if you pull this off, I will let you go. You can leave town and be free.”

Later that night, as she lay awake in bed next to her husband, Dora imagined calling the police. Asking for help. Turning in Charlie. But how was she to say anything and be believed? She was a drug dealer. A former drug user. A woman who was conspiring to commit murder for hire. An adulteress. They wouldn’t believe her—they’d lock her up, and her children would be in real danger then.

Thomas was better off dead than with Charlie hunting all of them.

She tiptoed out of bed, grabbed the cordless phone from the kitchen, opened the screen door, and closed it behind her. In her nightgown, she walked deep into her yard and called Stefano. “It’s back on.”

She hung up, closing her eyes, the ground swaying as she made her choice. This was the only way she could protect Michael, Colin, Ryan, Shannon, and the baby in her belly.

And she did protect them. Even when it all unraveled. Even when the police locked her up. Even when Stefano went to prison. Even when the jury convicted her to life, too. She never gave up the names of the others.

She wasn’t innocent. Not by a long stretch. But her silence made sure no one else ever knew who was involved.

It was her last chance to do the right thing when she’d done so much wrong.

For the next eighteen years from her six-by-eight-foot prison cell, she’d pulled it off, her silence driving her mad. But at least her children were safe from men who killed without mercy.