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Salvatore is visibly reluctant. Jaw set, shoulders squared, arms crossed. I’ve never seen him look quite so torn before. Usually, his judgments feel like snap decisions. No indecisiveness.
But he’s weighing this one.
“Miss Lowry has acted how I would if someone took you from me. I suppose that’s forgivable,” he allows, reluctantly. “Except I wouldn’t have walked up to the front door, alone and in a dress. You should have accepted my offer of a plus one. Your odds would have been better.”
I glare at Salvatore’s thinly veiled taunting.
“My plus one bitched out,” she says. “So, I said fuck it and came alone. He’ll be doing a lot of that too from now on.”
It takes a second for the meaning to click.
“Wait—Cole?” I ask.
“Yeah, fucking Cole,” she says, on the verge of flying into a rage. “Apparently, when men say they’ll do anything for you, you really gotta press them on that shit. Because suddenly, they didn’t mean they would ‘fight the mob.’ Well, then what fucking good are you?”
I gawk numbly in the face of her ranting.
“Kay, please don’t tell me you actually broke up with him. Over this? Because of me?” I try to keep my words quiet, as if there’s any chance of us having something like a private conversation in this room.
“Hell yeah, I broke up with him!” I swear she gets louder the quieter I get. “That boy bailed before I ever got the invitation to this place. Once I was on this whole mob trail, he wanted me to just let it go. Let you go. He wouldn’t even sleep over at my place anymore because he was afraid somebody was gonna kick my door in in the middle of the night. He was a big enough pussy; he clearly didn’t need mine anymore. And I wasn’t gonna be able to fuck him after that unless I bought a strap-on, so—”
“Okay, okay,” I say, frantically trying to cut off her increasingly vulgar ranting. The familiar banter finally sinks in, and I find myself laughing with just as much sadness as amusement. “I really did miss you.”
She hugs me again.
“See? This is what all those crime podcasts were for. Preparation.”
“Kay, you didn’t even make it into the house—”
“No, but I really fucked that one guy up.”
I have to give her that. I turn to Salvatore, who does not look amused.
“So…she can stay, right?”
The silence could kill.
“Has she been searched thoroughly?” Salvatore finally asks, over both our heads.
Marcel nods, “She has. For her sake, I had Frankie do it privately.”
“Don’t make me regret this.”
Those words are spoken singularly to me. Kay bristles, completely misunderstanding the threat. I grab her arm.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk. We’re still setting up outside—”
“We better be talking shit about that guy,” Kay says of Salvatore, too loudly as I try to usher her toward the backyard. “I don’t give a fuck how hot he is. Dumbass cheekbones and Armani suits. Fuck him—”
Kay and I enter the sunlight. She barely even looks around as I take a seat at one of the tables away from the others, sitting almost knee to knee with her.
“Tell me everything,” she says, more quietly now that we’re alone. “And I do mean everything. I already know about your whole family situation. Which, by the way, how the hell were you not gonna tell me that you have ties to the actual mob? Best friend rules dictate that we tell each other everything! Especially about your family’s really fucked up criminal history!”
I wince.
“I couldn’t! It’s like Fight Club rules, Kay. You can’t talk about it, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I was trying to put it all that behind me. I didn’t expect to ever be involved in it, much less drag anyone else into it with me…”
Kay glances around with a sigh.
