I stared at the yellowed pages.

My father — the ruthless patriarch who had built a criminal empire across forty years with fear and blood and money, the man who had taught me that sentiment was a weakness other people could exploit — had reached out of his grave and constructed the single most ruthless thing he had ever made.

He had built a dead man’s switch, and he had put the barrel of it against my head, and he had placed the trigger in the hands of the quiet young woman who had spent six months scrubbing my floors and sitting up with my dying mother through the night.

It was, I thought with something between horror and a terrible unwilling admiration, the most completely he had ever understood me.