KILLIAN: A Mafia Romance (The Callahans Book 2) Read Online Free

police think.”
    But the truth was, I didn’t think so. There was truly no word on the street. If it’d been a mugging, people would be talking about it. The silence around this thing was odd, suggesting whoever was behind it had some clout. That made me nervous. If the Italians had done it to stir things up with Jack and Pops… It was the only thing that really made sense.
    We still didn’t know who kidnapped Cassidy and Brianna. Someone knew things about the family that even Ian and I didn’t know and the two of us were the closest of all the kids to Pops. We knew things that would probably completely change the way our siblings looked at Pops. Whoever was behind the kidnapping had learned that Pops had an affair with Cassidy when I was just two, when Mom was pregnant with Sean and she’d kicked Pops out for his relationship with Jack. She didn’t want to be married to a criminal, but eventually she realized that she wanted her family whole more than she wanted Pops to give up the Irish mafia. Pops gave up Cassidy and never told anyone about her—as far as I know. But someone found out and used it to force Cassidy to send them information on Pops’ friends, family, and lifestyle until she finally told him they were holding the daughter she never told him they’d had. Then she was kidnapped, and it was a whole disaster that ended up okay when Pops was able to save Brianna and Cassidy managed to get away from her kidnappers.
    Pops was married to Cassidy now. Brianna got a job with a law firm in Boston and was living with them. She was trying to get to know her father and the rest of us couldn’t hold that against her. We were used to new siblings just suddenly showing up. One day I had four brothers, the next day I had a sister, too. That was Mom. She was a social worker, and whenever she came across a child who captured her heart, she brought that child home. Sometimes it worked out. Sometimes it didn’t.
    The man who kidnapped both Brianna and Cassidy threated Pops, telling him that he was going to lose those who were most precious to him one at a time. All Pops had now was us kids, so he immediately sent me to watch over Stacy. That was six months ago.
    It wasn’t that I minded watching over my sister. I just…
    “Pops didn’t want to tell you, but he was still getting threats from the kidnappers until a month ago. We’re not sure why the threats stopped, but it could be that whoever was doing all this got bored and decided to go do something else. Or he got caught doing something else.”
    “Or he’s playing with Pops’ head.”
    “There is that.”
    “What do you think?”
    “I think you should stay close to Stacy. I don’t like that she won’t come home to Boston. Her anger at Pops is going to get her hurt.”
    I knew that. I probably knew it better than anyone else did.
    I’d had a conversation with Pops about it just a few weeks before I came to New York…
    I started to turn, but stopped when Pops asked, “Did you know Stacy’s getting married?”
    I shrugged. “Ian might have said something.”
    “Why didn’t she call me?”
    I crossed my arms over my chest and regarded him for a long moment. I could almost see what Pops was thinking: I was the oldest, the one all the other kids went to whenever they had a problem. But I was already in high school by the time Stacy came to live with us. At ten, she was a handful, but I was the only one who could calm her without fail. If anyone knew what was going on in her head, it was likely me.
    “She was there, in the house, when Mom got sick, but you didn’t say anything to her. She and Kevin felt like you left them out of everything, that you took away Mom’s last good days. She’s pissed.”
    “That was her excuse for leaving for college so quickly after graduation. But that was almost five years ago. Is she never going to forgive me?”
    I shrugged. “I know it was Mom’s idea. Sean and Ian know it, too. But the others? Kyle and Kevin