Page 31 of Reckless Seduction
“Your father, lass.” Liam’s jaw ticks. “Richard Crowe.”
My father?What does he have to do with any of this?
TEN
My father?
Why are they worried about my father hurting me? That doesn’t make any sense.
Sure, he can be stern and dismissive. Anyone who knows him would say that. Years in the Marine Corps had carved discipline into his bones before politics ever hardened the rest of him. Order. Structure. Accountability. Those are the things he believes in.
And sometimes lessons need to be… reinforced.
It isn’t as though he ever laid a hand on me himself. My father doesn’t operate that way. He has people for things like that—men who made sure the message landed when I stepped out of line.
But that wasn’t cruelty.
That was correction.
That was a father making sure his daughter understood consequences.
“My father is a good man,” I say, the words coming out steady even as something small and uneasy buzzes in the back of my mind. “He would never hurt me.”
It unnerves me to know that they somehow discovered the link to my father. I’ve been careful not to use his name in any way outside our social circles, which I am rarely invited to, anyway. We don’t even share the same last name. When he “adopted” me at the age of three, he let me keep my mother’s surname, telling the media that he didn’t want to diminish the memory of my biological family.
I barely remember the media storm that ensued after I was adopted. My father told everyone that my stepmother couldn’t bear any more children and that she always wanted another daughter. They said it had been love at first sight when they saw me.
As if. My cunt of a stepmother barely spent more than a few moments in the same room as me unless it was required. They shoved me into the background. I was put away like fine China. Only to be glimpsed on special occasions before being packed back up again.
“He may never have laid a hand on you,” Liam tells me. “But he is far from a good man. Trust me on that.”
Trust him? The mob boss who kills people and runs drugs and weapons through the city wants me to trust him?
“You don’t know my father.”
Liam smiles sadly. “Adoptive father,” he reminds me. “And I know more than you think.”
Adoptive father.So he doesn’t know the real truth. The dark truth.
“Still my father,” I bite out. “And if you’re expecting me to give you some inside information, you can forget it.”
There is a fine line between truth and lies.
I know little about his work or campaigns. He’s never involved me in his political career like he has my older sister. She’s the one who isn’t a stain on the Crowe name, and I am nothing more than his hidden indiscretion.
There is something I am aware of, however. I know that he and the DA are launching an all-out attack on the criminal underground, and Dashkov and Kavanaugh are at the top of the list. Washington is crawling with mafioso types. You wouldn’t know it. Mostly because everyone believes the mafia had been nearly eradicated in the 1970s when the RICO Act was passed.
That is a lie.
The American Mafia simply slid beneath the radar, moving west, taking over old Yakuza and Chinese Triad territories. It was in the late 1980s that the underground had been established, spreading up from California like a cancerous disease, slowly making its way back toward the East Coast.
From what I’ve been able to ascertain, the underground is run by one representative from each of the most powerful ruling families, but that is just a rumor.
Now, most mafia families are legitimate business owners. Casinos, hotels, resorts—anything that gave them an opportunity to funnel blood money through. Genius, really.
If you don’t get caught.
My father has been trying to topple the mafia empire for as long as I can remember. He is constantly cursing and complaining, murmuring about how they are an infestation. I’m unsure of where the animosity comes from. Crime isn’t running rampant in Seattle, not like it used to, but nothing deters my father. He is dead set against every mafia family in the city, even if it means going against the mayor.
