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Gazes moved around the room, people having silent conversations as I avoided the way Milo was glaring at me.
He was young still.
It was “the Family” over everything else still for him. He’d get it. As he got older. If a woman ever came into his life who sparked the interest, that need to protect her above it all.
Many of the men in the room—Luca, Matteo, Massimo, Lucky, Nino, and August—had all been there themselves. They got it.
“You knew?” Milo asked, looking at Luca.
“Yeah, Aurelio told me the day she showed up at his door. I decided to keep it quiet while we tried to figure all this shit out.”
It was his place to make decisions like that, but there were some less than thrilled faces in the room at that information.
“So, is that why he’s still here?” Nino asked. “Because of Claire and his son?”
“Just his son,” Dante said, surprising me. “Warren’s history with women is of the short and brutal sort. Two, I haven’t even been able to find after Warren left town. Making me think they’re in the ground somewhere. He wouldn’t give a fuck about Claire. But knowing what I know about his family, he wants his son back.”
“And, obviously,” I said, in case it wasn’t already clear to all of them, “we are not handing Judah back to him.”
“So, what, then?” Milo asked.
“In my eyes, this changes nothing,” Luca said. “Sure, it would have been nice if he was hightailing it out of here already. But we still need retribution for what was done to Santo and Aurelio’s man. Not to mention the disrespect to your family. This changes nothing.”
“Then why keep it secret?” Milo asked, and I almost wanted to smack him on the back of the neck, remind him that Luca was the boss, not just his cousin.
“Because shit was new,” Luca said, tone a little harder than usual, and Milo had the good sense to relax his damn posture. “We had no idea where the threat had come from, if any of our men were involved. And we damn sure didn’t want it getting around to the moms and wives about Claire and Judah, in case anyone overheard, and that information got back to Warren.
“Now that we have more information, and we have limited the possibility of one of ours being in Warren’s pocket, it was time to share. Until now, it was only pertinent to people who needed to know.”
The conversation veered back to Warren’s crew, naming some of the higher-ups, and what their strengths and weaknesses appeared to be.
In my pocket, my phone kept buzzing with texts.
Worried maybe it was Claire, I pulled it out.
To find about half a dozen texts from Smush instead.
Someone’s been keeping a dirty little secret locked up in his fancy house.
She’s gorgeous, by the way. And the kid is adorable.
Mom is going to love this. Don’t worry. I won’t tell her. Yet.
She’s totally got a thing for you, by the way. In case you’re too dense to see that.
I added some of her requests to my list, btw. Just so you know why the price is up.
Oh, and stop fucking referring to me as Smush to people.
I tucked my phone away, trying to flatten my lips into a straight line, knowing this was important shit we were discussing. But some part of me was flying high on one particular text she’d sent.
She’s totally got a thing for you, by the way.
I knew there was attraction, of course. She wouldn’t have let things progress as they had without that. But I’d been around long enough to know that attraction and interest weren’t exactly the same thing. And that just because I was interested in her, didn’t mean she was interested in me.
But I had to admit that Smush was usually a really good judge of this sort of shit.
Hope built in my system, and I decided to maybe try to find a way to broach the subject when I got home. Maybe after Judah went to bed. So things could… continue to progress. If that was what she wanted as well.
