“Where are you?”
I want to roll my eyes. “I’m dying of boredom.”
There is a pause where I can hear the great Leon Natali let out a sigh of frustration. “How did you get this number?”
“How did you know it was me calling?” I counter.
“What do you want, Mia?” His voice is sharp, impatient. I wonder, vaguely, how much progress he’s made on the Cartel since I collected the intel from the party.
“Something to stop me from crawling up the walls.”
There’s a beat of silence. “I don’t see how this is my problem.”
“It’s your fault I don’t have a job anymore,”I argue back. “I used to have career prospects, you know, before you went and decided that you wanted me to pump out a bunch of?—”
“YES, all right. I get it. Fuck.”
“Just give me something,” I hesitate before adding a softer word. “Please.”
“There might be something.”
“Whatever it is, yes.”
Leon ignores me. “Teo said he once asked you to oversee a casino in Brooklyn. Is that something you might still be interested in?”
“You want me to work for the Prince’s Hand?” I say, a little taken aback. I hadn’t considered the Prince’s Hand casinos as a potential career path, but they were the main source of income for my new mafioso.
“Yes and no, it’s an, er…collaboration project to showcase unity between the two Italian factions. His idea. Brooklyn location, Prince’s Hand branding.”
I bite my lip slightly. It would be a lie to say I hadn’t thought about it since Teo originally proposed the idea. Managing an entertainment establishment was one of the few (legal) things for which I was actually qualified.
“Don’t you think it’s a risk? Someone might start paying attention to me,” I mumble. “I don’t want to blow my cover with Carmen.”
“It’s still under construction, so you wouldn’t need to go to the site. Plus, you were Teo’s entertainment manager. I don’t think many would think twice about you being a part of the process.”
Good enough for me. “I’ll do it.”
“Can you be at a meeting in an hour?”
The address is a tall office building, the bottom floors comprising vast open-plan rent-a-desk spaces. The text Leon sends, however, guides me to a private meeting room several stories up.
The doors I pass by on my way contain large, corporate-style meeting rooms, so I half expect an entire committee to be sitting around the table.
So it’s quite a surprise to see that only one person is waiting for me.
More of a surprise that it’s my sister-in-law.
It’s even more of a surprise thatshedoesn’t seem that shocked to see me.
“Mia,” the beautiful blonde greets me with a sarcastic little smile. Her quintessentially Italian features make a mockery of my own fading tan and Irish-red hair. She’s perfectly presentable in her long Gucci boots and cashmere sweater.
God, I hate her.
“Isabella.” I pointedly maintain eye contact so she doesn’t glance down at the chucks falling apart on my feet. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Didn’t my brother tell you? It’s a collaboration project.”
It’s condescending and boorish, and I wish I had had the foresight to bring a knife so we could settle this tension the way that both of us is itching to do.
