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But I could definitely be more selective about my one-night stands. Limit them. Wait until I really wanted sex instead of just having it because it was easy and I was bored.
If Vince had yelled at me like Pops, I would have ignored him and gone on my merry way. But my big, invincible brother telling me he needed my help? That was a whole other story.
I nodded.
“I hear you. I’ll clean up my act.”
He clasped my head and brought me in close.
“Sometimes, I think you are the better man, little brother.” He let go of my head and stepped back, slapping my shoulder. “You just don’t know it yet.”
Chapter 1
Antonio
“Should I break his fingers or just go for the leg?”
I tilted my head, considering Tiny’s words. As much as I liked the guy kneeling in front of me, I hated sniveling more. And I hated people who didn’t pay up.
“We can’t have this, Timothy,” I scolded. He had been a family man, a hard worker, but like so many, he had a fatal flaw. He loved gambling and cheap women a little more than keeping a roof over his wife’s and children’s heads. “Word gets out that you didn’t pay us . . .”
“Please. I will get the money, I swear. I just hit a bad streak.”
We didn’t run prostitutes since my brother took over, but most of the other families did. He’d been holed up in Vegas with a rotating cast of hookers, losing money hand over fist. Worse yet, he was losing money to our competitors.
Ironically, it was one of our old girls who had called us with the information. My brother had a reputation with the working girls in Vegas. Not that he actually screwed any of them. But he’d protected more than a few from my father and his cronies over the years. I had, too.
Hurting women was unacceptable to either of us. We’d seen what mistreating a woman could do. We’d lost out on having a mother because of that old school patriarchy bullshit.
And our beautiful, fragile mother had lost out on even more.
“Rest in peace, Ma,” I muttered, kissing the cross that hung around my neck.
“Oh, God, please don’t kill me. I promise I’ll be good. I promise,” he said, practically weeping. He must have seen me kiss the cross. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
I sighed and shook my head, nodding to Tiny.
“Fingers. And then we need to pay a visit to his house, see if he has anything worth taking.” Timothy screamed as Tiny started breaking fingers. He was thorough, to say the least. The guy wouldn’t be playing the piano anytime soon.
I closed my eyes, fighting off a headache. I needed coffee. I needed to be doing anything but this.
“Enough,” I said as Tiny started on the other hand. “What time do the kids go to school?” I asked the writhing sack of shit on the floor. I wasn’t worried about the wife. She already knew what a weak asshole she was married to.
Timothy just blubbered.
I rubbed my forehead.
“You own the house?”
He nodded.
“It was in my wife’s family.”
I shook my head.
“Okay, let’s get Michael over there to sit with her. Tell him we need this piece of shit’s name off the deed and the main bank accounts. I’m not letting those kids starve. Everything else, we take.”
Tiny nodded. He knew I was ready to ruin the man, but not his family. In the old days, they would all be dead for this kind of debt.
It wasn’t about the money. Not really. It was about the lack of respect.
Lack of respect for himself. His family. But most of all, lack of respect for us.
We couldn’t let it stand. Not even for a long-term customer like him.
“You got it, Boss.”
“I’ll call Mikey now.”
‘Mikey’ was a grown ass man, our cousin and our family’s consigliere. He had gone to an Ivy League law school on my father’s dime. In fact, we paid for anyone and everyone in the family to get an education, be it a technical institute, adult education, all the way to law or medical school. We wanted as much legitimacy as we could get.
‘Fingers in pies,’ Pops used to say.
But Mikey was special. He was smart as a fucking whip. He could have done anything. Politics, even. Hell, he still might.
And he was like a brother to us. His mother had stepped in when . . . everything happened with our Ma. I was still fucking jealous that he’d had a mother, but I was also more than grateful that he’d shared.
“How many?” The voice on the other side of the phone barked at me by way of greeting.
“How many what?”
“How many nubile young women are you lying under?”
I laughed. He had me there. But he knew as well as I did that I hadn’t been playing the field much lately. The truth was, I was tired of everything and he knew it. Both he and Vince had been worried about me, though they tried to hide it.
