“Since when do you drink?”
“I do on occasion.” Kate squares her shoulders then sighs. “I think I might need one here just to calm the nerves.”
I hand her a brandy, and Kate stares at the glass in her hands for a full minute.
“Well?” I finally say.
“I need to tell you about the treaty between the Orsos and the Ramsays,” she says.
“I already know about the treaty.”
“Yes, of course, but there are some details that were…left out of the core paperwork. An addendum, you might say.”
“So?” The last thing I want to talk about is the family business or the fucking treaty with the Ramsays.
“Well, it’s very…lopsided, isn’t it?”
“Lopsided?”
“When the treaty was signed, the Orso family got the bulk of territory. All in all, we got the better deal. Did you ever wonder why that was?”
“Ramsays kept the drug trade. That’s a lot more profitable.”
“We weren’t all that invested in the drug trade, even back then,” Kate says. “Giving it up was a minor concession.”
“I should have told you all of this a long time ago,” Kate says. “I thought I would when Carlo died, but everything happened so quickly. Then Cherice appeared out of nowhere, and I wasn’t sure what I should do. I’m sorry, Nataniele. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything sooner.”
“You haven’t told me everything now,” I say impatiently. “Could you get on with it, please?”
“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.” Kate takes in a deep breath and stares down at her folded hands as she speaks. “When we were at war with the Ramsays thirty-some years ago, we were so evenly matched, we knew we had to come to an agreement, or both families would be destroyed. We weren’t as favored back then, and the other families refused to take sides. They didn’t care who came out on top since they could get documents from either family.
“They didn’t get involved at all until Quinton, Carlo’s and my younger brother, turned up dead in Washington State. Finding his body in the Seattle mob’s territory was an outrage to them, and they demanded we settle the feud and make a treaty. If an agreement weren’t reached, the Seattle family would move in, wipe out both families, and set up someone they trusted to run the document business. Well, Chicago didn’t like that at all, and since Rosa was from Chicago, they told Seattle to come up with another plan.
“Carlo and Roland Ramsay sat down with Joseph Franks from Seattle. He was encouraging them to fight to the death in one of his tournament battles, winner take all. Neither of them wanted to do it the Seattle way, so Carlo and Roland agreed to negotiate. At that point, our family agreed to stop our relationship with the cartels, and the Ramsays turned over all of the documentation and counterfeiting to us. The town was divided fairly equally, but there was still a matter of blood spilt. Carlo’s brother had been killed, and he refused monetary compensation.”
Kate closes her eyes for a moment and then stands up. She moves to the bookcase behind the desk and reaches up to pull out a leather-bound book of Celtic mythology. She sets it down on the desk and opens it, revealing a piece of thin paper stuck in the middle.
Kate unfolds the paper, which is clearly labeled as an addition to the treaty between the Orsos and the Ramsays, and I catch a glimpse of the words “blood trade” and “compensation.”
“Along with the exchange of land and businesses,” Kate says, “there was one additional…well, let’s call it a swap. Cherice was one half of that swap.”
“Kate, you aren’t making sense,” I say, reaching for the paper.
Kate places her hand over the page, obscuring the words, and looks me in the eye.
“No one was supposed to find out,” she whispers. “It was supposed to never be spoken of again. That’s detailed in this document, too.”
“Find out what, Kate? Dammit, let me just read the damn thing!”
“When Cherice first came to dinner, I was going to tell you then, but I didn’t want to cause more stress in your life. You’d already been through so much, and I thought it would all work out. I thought it would balance everything. If you married, the head of the family would be an Orso, so…”
“I can’t marry her, Kate! She’s my fucking sister!”
“What? Oh, no. No, Nataniele. She’s not your sister. You don’t understand.”
I shake my head, and my mouth opens and closes a couple of times before I can get any words out.
“But…but you said she was an Orso. She’s my mother’s daughter. That makes her my sister, Kate!”