The Wild Wolf Pup (Zoe's Rescue Zoo #9)(19)

“He’s doing it on purpose, Grace. It’s not only about the promise he made that biker and his club but it’s because he doesn’t want you and his girls to see him deteriorate. He wants you to remember him the way he’s always been.”

“What about what I want? What about what the girls want? We never had a say in much but we’re the ones who will suffer when he leaves this world. —We should have a say! I vowed to love him through sickness and health and I thought when the time came that one of us became sick we would be there for one another. I’ve been robbed of my vows. I should be there taking care of him. I should be holding his hand when he takes his final breath! I should be able to say goodbye…”

I take a deep breath, trying to compose myself as I stand, bracing my hands on the counter and bow my head.

“How am I going to live without him?” I sob.

“You already are,” Gina replies.

“It’s not the same,” I argue. “How am I going to live the rest of my life, never being able to hear him call me Gracie, never being able to look him in the eye and see our whole life reflected in those eyes?” I shake my head before glancing over my shoulder and staring at Gina.

“How am I going to tell our girls their father is dying? How am I going to be strong enough for them?”

“I’ll help you, Bert will help too and so will Ma. You’re not alone, Grace. We’re crazy and maybe a little eccentric but we’re family and we all love Adrianna and Nikki…” she pauses, “We love you too, Grace.”

I spin around, dropping my hands to my sides and lean my back against the counter.

“I have to tell the girls,” I say finally.

As a parent we try our best to shelter our children, even when they become adults, we can’t help ourselves and still we try to protect them. I can’t protect, I can’t shield my daughters from losing their father but I will be their rock, their strength when they’re too weak with grief.

And when their hearts start to mend, then and only then will I grieve.

Alone I will mourn my love, my life. My Victor.





Chapter Eight




Dragging the comb through my gray hair, I make sure not a strand is out of place. Smoothing down the front of my jumpsuit, I flash back to a time in my life when I used to fit the most expensive cufflinks to my silk shirt. Some might call me vain, even eccentric, but in my world, appearances are everything. It's that first moment when you meet someone, when they size you up with their eyes and decide your importance to them. You are either someone they want to know or someone they’ll forget.

I was nineteen years old when I sat at a table with the five most lethal men in the mafia. Each of them ruled one of the five most prominent crime families in New York City. I was just a kid, another street thug looking for the easy way out. I wasn’t the first young guy looking to take the oath they were selling and I wouldn’t be the last. But I walked into that warehouse with confidence and a demeanor like they only saw when they stared in the mirror. I was the youth who had an old soul and enough swagger to demand they notice me.

I wasn’t someone you forgot.

I was Victor fucking Pastore, and I would be the man ruling their streets long after they took their final breath.

Me.

I would be the boss.

The man in a designer suit that men feared and civilians gravitated to.

Victor Pastore the mobster—the fucking legend.

And for most of my life that is who I was. I was the man you wanted to know, the guy you wanted in your corner and it didn’t matter that I was a criminal. I lied, robbed, and killed to get to the top, but to the public I could do no wrong—I was a fucking god.

Even here, locked up, I’m somebody. I’m the guy with juice, the man you come to in the yard when someone is trying to shake you down for your commissary.

I went from running New York to ruling a federal prison. Everyone is in my pocket, from the COs to the warden, they all answer to me. The feds want to think they took me off the streets, cleaned up the city and freed it from the mob, but that isn’t so.

There was no elaborate case against me that took years to build. I was a man on a mission to save what I had destroyed—my family. Not the one I ruled but the one I created with my wife, Grace. I was too busy building an empire to realize I was losing the people that mattered most to me. The flashy lifestyle they were accustomed to became more of a burden than something glorified, and as everything spiraled out of control, my daughters both threatened to fall victims to the mob, each of their lives compromised.

I had a choice to make.

My empire or their lives.

I confessed to every crime I committed, every hit I ordered, and gave my family one final gift—sparing them the life I brought them all into as a judge sentenced me to spend the rest of my existence in a cell.

They are free of my sins, my crimes and my organization.

Free from me.

My eyes wander to the photograph of my daughters taped to the wall of my cell. Their smiling faces stare back at me—those faces are the legacy of Victor Pastore—the husband and father.

“Vic, you have a visitor,” the guard calls, forcing me to tear my eyes from the photograph and glance over my shoulder at him. I watch as he unlocks my cell, sliding it open and stepping aside.

“Thank you,” I say, stepping out of my confinements and pat him on the shoulder. The inmates stare at me as he escorts me down the cell block. They call out to me, “You the man, Vic. You the man.”