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“I’ve never done this before,” I tell her quietly. “So if you can give me some advice, I’ll share a little bit of the profits with you, for this first round. Just the first batch,” I add quickly. “I can’t afford to keep doing that. But if you help?—”
It’s a risk. She could tell someone, get me in trouble, demand that I keep cutting her in on the deals in exchange for her silence. But I’m gambling on my friendship with Jewel being strong enough that she won’t do that, and from the look on her face, I think I’m right.
“Oh, shit.” She chuckles. “Alright then. Listen to me, and I’ll explain what to do.”
I let out a quick breath of relief as Jewel opens the door, and follow her back inside. And briefly, I feel a glimmer of hope.
Maybe, there’s a light at the end of this particular tunnel.
Lorenzo
I’ve never found it as difficult to get a woman out of my head as it seems to be to exorcize Mila. In a matter of days, she’s made me behave in ways that I never have before.
I came dangerously close to taking her up on her offer, that afternoon in my office. If I hadn’t objected so strongly to exploiting her clear desperation for my own sexual satisfaction, I might have. Seeing her there on her knees, looking up at me as the warmth of her mouth wrapped around my finger, it was a close thing.
In a way, I know I’m still exploiting her. Mila doesn’t strike me as the sort of woman who deals drugs, stripper or not. I imagine that the step towards her arrangement with Alfio Altiere was made easier by her work at the club, one more step down a path that she’d already started on. This is something altogether different, and I saw the nervousness in her eyes last night, when I handed her the product.
Which is yet another tally added to the list of things that I would never normally do, along with considering Mila’s original offer and then jerking off in my office after she aroused me past the point of being able to bear it. Normally, the uncertainty in her face would have been enough to make me call off the job.
Running drugs at the lower level—in places like the Rosebud—is where most of the risk is. Cops won’t bother the higher-end clubs, but they’re eager to make a bust somewhere like that. Mila could be caught, and while my family’s regular donations to the LAPD should ensure that she quickly gets out of any trouble, there’s always the chance that someone will have to fall on their sword to maintain the delicate balance between us and the law. That means that anyone who deals for us has to understand both the risk involved, and the consequences—primarily that they’ll have to take them if they’re caught, and not rat.
I’m not sure Mila understood either of those things. I’m not entirely sure she even knows where to begin with selling drugs. And yet, I still handed over the product, because I know she needs the job. I saw the desperation on her face, and thought of how I’d helped kill Altiere and taken away her safety net, and felt compelled to help.
I’m usually neither sentimental nor a fool, but right now, I feel like I’ve been both. And I have a feeling that when Dante gets here for our meeting, he’ll have the same opinion.
Dante walks in a few minutes late, striding in and sitting down on the other side of the desk. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “Emma had an appointment. I couldn’t let her go alone—I had to make sure that everything was alright.”
“You had a doctor come and check on her while you were waiting for her to wake up.” I look at him, slightly amused. My brother was once a playboy, through and through, with a steady revolving door of women coming through his penthouse. But that all changed after he met Emma—his tattoo artist, of all things. It was a development none of us saw coming, that’s for sure.
Dante glares at me. “I’m going to be at all her appointments,” he says crossly. “Until the baby is born. And every appointment after, for the baby. So I’m going to need your help, Lorenzo. Until things settle down?—”
Oddly, I don’t feel the satisfaction that I expected to. I knew this was coming. Dante has been preoccupied since he knew Emma was back in Los Angeles—since before that, really—and I knew he would need my help, especially since Fontana demanded that the illegal part of our family business expand in exchange for the assistance he gave Dante in getting Emma back. But there’s something else, too—something I wouldn’t have expected to feel, and don’t like. An odd sense of—dissatisfaction, really. And I can’t put my finger on why.
“The expansion is going well.” I lean back in my chair, trying to put Mila out of my head. “I’ve had meetings this week, and I’ve started distributing the additional product.”
“To who?” There’s an edge to Dante’s voice. He doesn’t like any of this; I’m well aware of that. Before he needed Fontana’s help to get Emma back from Altiere, he was in the process of pulling our family out of all of this. Out of drugs, out of as much of our illegal dealings as he could. He resents that we’ve been pulled back into it, and I know he intends to resume his retreat as soon as it’s possible to do so without incurring too much wrath from Sicily.
“Vasquez, at the Velvet Rope. Some of the product will move through the Neon Rose. Calabria, at the Black Stiletto. And I’ve allocated some product to smaller places as well. A few lower-quality clubs. The Rosebud.”
Dante’s brows draw together. “You know the owner of the Rosebud?”
“One of the girls there is moving product for us.”
Dante’s expression says everything it needs to, without him uttering a single word. I don’t know the owner of that establishment, and Dante knows that. He also knows that it’s not how we usually do things—and if there’s anything I’m a stickler for, it’s how we usually do things.
“Do you want to explain the reasoning behind that, Lorenzo?” His voice is deceptively calm, but I know he’s waiting for an answer. He has a right to one—I’m not someone to usually change things up, especially without discussing it with him first. Our usual mode of operations is to work with a trusted business owner, and let him distribute the product to the employees he trusts to move it.
I let out a long breath. There’s no point in lying or beating around the bush. The four of us—me and my three siblings—have always been close. Dante will know if I try to hide something, and it will only blow the situation even more out of proportion than I have a feeling he’s already going to.
“The woman in question had an arrangement with Altiere.” I press my lips together. “I don’t think I need to explain to you what kind of arrangement that was.”
“I think I can guess,” Dante says darkly. “So what?”
“So, our execution of him put her in a difficult position.”
Dante snorts. “I’m sure she can find another rich man’s dick to suck in exchange for Hermés bags, or whatever Altiere was giving her.”
I frown at him. “For a man in love, you haven’t become all that sympathetic to the rest of the fairer sex, have you?” I often wondered, during Dante’s playboy days, what drew women to him. His looks, obviously, but he was careless with all of them, and their feelings. Emma changed that about him, but something about his dismissiveness of Mila’s plight hits a nerve within me. I remind myself that he doesn’t know her, and can’t know the sincerity of her situation.
