Relentlessly, Jake went after him again. Jake bit at him, got a mouthful of fur, and broke the skin on Mario’s shoulder. Mario yelped and skittered away. For being a tough bastard as a Mob leader, he was a cowardly wolf.
He probably felt much more capable with a gun in his hand. Or having others doing his dirty work for him.
Jake leaped over the cardboard box in his way, and Mario tried to reach the door.
But there stood Alicia in her red push-up bra and silky red thong, her hand against her temple, unsteady on her feet, her face pale, her expression pained. Mario stopped for an instant. With her free hand, she shut the door, sealing his fate.
Worried Mario would hurt Alicia, Jake tackled him from behind. Mario whipped around with Jake clinging to his back, holding on with both paws, trying to get a better grip on his neck.
The voices of men hollering outside caught Jake’s attention, but he remained focused on Mario and bringing him down. He heard the box springs squeak and figured Alicia had collapsed on the bed before she passed out again.
Mario was still trying to wriggle free, and Jake kept losing his grip on the massive wolf’s neck.
“Where’s Jake?” Darien hollered outside the back of the house.
“In the house,” Sam shouted back. “He’s fighting someone as a wolf.”
Not for long.
Mario stumbled over a box and got his feet tangled in Alicia’s jeans, and Jake bit him hard in the throat. Killing him. For Alicia. For her mother. For her father.
The next day, Alicia’s temple was black and blue from where Mario had struck her. She was seated on the couch in Darien’s home with Jake’s arm around her. Darien, Tom, Lelandi, and Peter offered her moral support as two federal agents sat down to talk with her.
One was a pretty blond with a short bobbed haircut and a smart black suit-skirt and pretty hazel eyes. The man was dark haired and dark eyed, also wearing a black suit.
Both were probably in their early thirties and both professional, yet instead of appearing as though they wanted to grill Alicia, they seemed…
She wasn’t sure. Sympathetic, maybe?
That didn’t make any sense to her because she figured they would tie her into Mario’s death and his henchman’s, too. Peter had rounded up the men who had been the diversionary force for Mario at Jake’s home and turned them over to the federal authorities because they’d been involved in killings across state lines, racketeering, money laundering, and even lucrative Medicare scams.
But a couple of the men had to heal from their bullet wounds before they appeared in court, Danny being one of them.
“Miss Greiston,” the woman said, identifying herself as A gent White and the man as A gent Stone, “we want to commend you for bringing Constantino and his men down.”
Alicia looked at Jake. He smiled at her and tightened his arm around her shoulder in a warm embrace.
“Your father, Antonio Frasero, started the work.”
“He… was working for you?”
“Yes, as an informant. He was working for Constantino, but only to get the goods on him. That little black book you found in your mother’s safe-deposit box? It had all the records we needed to put the whole lot away for life.”
A gain she looked at Jake.
“I gave it to Peter to give to the authorities,” Jake said.
“The sheriff must have turned it over to the Feds.”
“But helping you got my father killed,” Alicia said to the woman agent.
“We gave him a deal. He was working for another crime boss when we caught up with him. We had enough on your father to give him a life sentence for his own crimes. He’d only been married to your mother for a couple of years, and you were not even two years old.
They agreed he’d work for us so he’d stay out of prison.”
“But my mother was dating other men.”
“Only undercover. They were Feds whose job was to make it appear Antonio wasn’t her husband or too close to her while watching out for her. We knew Mario would go after her if he thought Antonio was selling him out.”
“Which Mario did.”
The woman took a deep breath and exhaled. “She loved your father and didn’t want to see anybody else any longer. She wanted to pretend she was Antonio’s lover when she was really his wife. We couldn’t convince them how dangerous it was. Mario must have thought she knew about Antonio’s working with us and had them both murdered. Then you came along. You wouldn’t have anything to do with Antonio, so we figured you were safe. But then when your mother was murdered, you tried to arrest Mario and…” A gent White shook her head.
“Why didn’t you protect Alicia when you must have known Mario would want her dead?” Jake asked, his voice sounding irritated.
“We couldn’t keep track of her. We put bugs on her car four times, and each time she located them and put them on other vehicles. We bugged her apartment, but she never returned home. She took off from the motel in Breckenridge and vanished. We only learned of it when you had the clerk contact the police to say she had disappeared. We assumed she had vanished on her own and figured she was safe.”
“Until?”
“She was connected to Ferdinand Massaro’s murder. We learned later that he was informing her as to Mario’s locations. He was one of our informants until something happened. A ll of a sudden he went rogue. We think it had something to do with Mario trying to have him killed.”
A gent White cleared her throat and said to Alicia, “In any event, we just want to say that even though your father started out on the wrong side of the law, he helped to put away several who would have continued their criminal activities by keeping all the records he did.
And we have you to thank for handing over the little black book that made it all possible.”
“My mother was the innocent in all this.”
“Yes,” A gent White said sympathetically. “But she loved your father and couldn’t give up on him.”
Alicia understood some of what had gone on while she was growing up. The men who had been her mother’s boyfriends had only been Feds pretending to be something they weren’t. The ones who witnessed her weddings.
Had her father ever thought she was marrying the wrong men? Her mother hadn’t. She must have thought the guys Alicia had married were good sorts because they didn’t have anything to do with the Mob. But now Alicia understood why her father had wanted to keep his distance from her, probably to keep her safe but also to keep her from learning who he truly was—all about his checkered past. And yet, somewhere deep down, she suspected he wished he could have been the father to her that he might have been, had things been different.
She cleared her suddenly gravelly throat. “Thank you for telling me about my father and mother.”
A gent Stone stood. “Just for the record, Miss Greiston, Mario Constantino and another of his henchmen were found dead in a ravine over a hundred miles from here by a group of hikers. A t least that’s what the anonymous caller told us. Wild animals had eaten most of the remains. But we had enough to positively identify them.
The initial coroner’s report stated that they fell off the cliff to their deaths as they were attempting to escape prosecution. If you need anything from us,” he said, pulling a card from his suit pocket, “don’t hesitate to call.”
Alicia took the card and smelled a slight scent of wolf.
She looked up at the federal agent in disbelief. He gave her a wolfish smile back. But she hadn’t smelled… The air was so still in the room, and with him being such a distance from her…
She rose and stepped closer to him to shake his hand and took a deeper breath. He was a wolf.
She looked at the woman, who gave her a conspiratorial wink. They were wolves. Both of them.