Deep (Pagano Family #4)(57)

Nick allowed himself to be led into his uncle’s study, and he sat down on one of the sofas. “A plan. More waiting. More letting that piece of shit hurt innocent people. We have no more time for planning. From the first, he’s targeted innocents. We’ve never made him play our game.”

Ben poured two glasses of scotch and handed one to Nick, then sat across from him.

Nick set his down. He didn’t want to drink; he wanted to kill. His uncle eyed the rejected glass. “Drink with me, Nick.”

Nick met his uncle’s steely gaze for a few seconds, and then he drank.

Ben nodded his approval of that choice. “It’s not like you to be rash, but I understand. I’m livid myself. You know my feelings about women being hurt. When I saw you carrying your girl—Beverly—into the house, a powerful memory slapped me in the face. You remember what happened to my Lita?”

Ben’s oldest daughter, Lita, had been brutalized by her college boyfriend and his fraternity brothers. Lita was older than Nick; he had only been fourteen at the time. But he remembered. The story of Ben’s retribution had become lore, and every bit of it was true. Nick nodded. “I remember.”

“That was my own girl. Do you not think I was enraged? The rage I felt that day, when I carried my daughter into this house as you carried your woman in tonight—bruised and bleeding, brutalized—I feel that rage now even as I speak of it, thirty-one years later. Nothing else has ever made me feel its like. And I avenged her. The beasts who hurt Lita had no power. They weren’t players in our world—not yet, at least. They were not dangerous to anyone but innocents. They were little more than boys. That made no difference to me. They paid for what they did. They paid screaming.”

“And yet you’re stopping me from doing the same.”

“No. Your anger is clouding your eyes, Nick. I’m disappointed. Church will pay. You will have your revenge—for your father, for Brian, for Beverly. For every person we love that he took or hurt to do us harm. But you need to clear your eyes. Your cool assessment is one of your greatest strengths because it is a rare gift. We have beaten Church—he has no more business. This is his last gasp. He’s trying to provoke you—it’s all he has left. If you had come in on this night as an observer, you would see this. If you go after him right now, even expecting a trap, then he has set the terms. Give it a few days. Let’s make arrangements. Let his friends realize that he is ruined. Let them turn their backs—maybe even turn to us. Let him see that, feel that. And then go for him and make him see and feel everything else. That would be the counsel you’d give another, wouldn’t it?”

His uncle was right. This frantic need to do harm, to do it now, was an alien presence in Nick’s mind. But Ben was right. He was hearing the counsel he’d make to another. “Yes.”

“So we make a plan, and we make Church’s ruination complete. I’ll bring the capos in for a breakfast meeting. In the meantime, you see to your woman. She needs you.”

Nick nodded. “Thank you, Uncle.” He set his empty glass down and stood.

As he reached the door, his uncle called to him. “You should marry that girl.”

He stopped and turned back, honestly shocked. “Please?”

“You’re changed since you met her. Only real love or real pain changes a man. Sometimes, both.”

Speechless in the face of his uncle’s reasoning, Nick simply shook his head and went out of his study.

He headed straight upstairs, needing to know how Beverly was. He’d opened her uniform on the ride, but her chest had been covered in blood, so he still wasn’t sure of the damage. He’d seen one deep, long cut on the side of one breast, still oozing blood, and he had an idea what it meant, but he’d not yet been able to allow himself to imagine it. He would need to. When he faced Church, he would need to be able to visualize every second that Beverly had spent with the men who’d hurt her.

He knocked on the guestroom door and opened it. What he saw drew him up short: Beverly lying naked on the bed, unconscious, his aunt and his mother holding her legs up and open while Kerr sat between them. She was still covered in blood, her breast swathed in seeping gauze. Kerr made a sort of pulling or sweeping gesture with his hand, and Nick’s eyes went back to him. Jesus. He was sewing.

“God.”

He hadn’t realized he’d spoken until his aunt looked up. “Nicky, get out. You shouldn’t see this.”

His mother turned. “Nicky, no.” She grabbed a pillow from the floor and propped Beverly’s leg with that. “Come on, caro. Come with me. We’ll make espresso. No one is sleeping any more tonight, I think.”

Everybody was trying to make him drink. But he felt dazed and dislocated, and he let his mother lead him by the hand down to the kitchen.

She sat him at the table and then went to make the coffee. “I don’t know what’s going on, Nicky, and I’m not asking. But I have to say that this is not a world I know, where women are hurt like this. Where people aren’t safe in their own homes.”

“I know, Ma. We’re putting things back together.”

“Your father was shot on his own lawn. While he was walking Thelma and Louise. How is that business?”

At the mention of his mother’s two Yorkies—an apology gift from Nick’s father five or six years ago—Nick looked around. He’d told his mother to be prepared to stay with Ben and Angie for a few days. She should have brought the dogs with her. “Where are the dogs?”