The tightness in my stomach was so substantial, I felt my entire body go rigid. All the muscles in my core ached.
We ate in silence for a while, sitting together at the kitchen table sometime around midnight. I was an early bird, usually in bed by ten and up at seven. I spent every day at the vineyard helping my father run the family business—the legal and illegal parts of it.
“I want to know you.” He finished his meal and left the dirty fork and knife on the surface. His elbows were on top of the table, his arms crossed.
I stared at him, unsure what that meant. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to share.” With unblinking eyes, he stared at me, stared straight into my soul.
“Um…” When he put me on the spot, I didn’t know what to say.
“Are you close with your father?”
“Pretty close, yeah.”
“And your brother?”
“He’s an idiot, but yeah, we’re close.”
“I’m sorry about your mom.”
“Yeah…thanks.” I didn’t tell him she skipped out, but it was easy to deduce. “What about you?”
“Parents are dead. Only child.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
He gave a shrug. “My dad had it coming. Mom didn’t.”
I wanted to know more, but it felt wrong to ask about it when we hardly knew each other. “How are you liking the winery?”
“Very fucking boring,” he said. “But you’re a pretty nice perk.”
I smirked then looked down at my pasta. I spun the noodles onto the fork and took a bite. I ate so slowly that my food had turned cold. I hadn’t had much of an appetite in the first place. I felt him stare at me while I looked down at my plate.
“You’re really fucking beautiful, you know that?”
I stilled when I heard what he said. It took me a moment to lift my eyes and meet his. He’d already fucked me countless times, so there didn’t seem to be an angle to his words. Just honesty, without a filter, without an agenda. “Thank you.” I wore no makeup and my hair was a mess, so I was a bit self-conscious…but he didn’t seem to care.
My phone started to ring upstairs. It was quiet from all the way down here, but I could hear it. And since it was past midnight, the call must be important. “Excuse me.” I left the table, headed upstairs, and found my phone somewhere on the floor where it had landed. Leo’s name was on the screen, so I quickly answered. “What’s happened?”
“We were fucking robbed,” he snapped over the phone. “Our shipment came from customs. It was logged, but when we went to grab it, it had been swapped for kitchen tools. Jace says it was an innocent mistake, but I don’t fucking buy that.”
I processed all this in silence for a moment. “Does Dad know?”
“Oh, he knows. And he wants to know whose head needs to get blown off.”
“Cristo…” I stood in my bedroom, my arm crossed over my chest as I stared at the rumpled bed.
“It’s just one thing after another, over and over. And everyone is laughing at us, Frankie.” He screamed into the phone, “They’re fucking laughing at us. It’s the fucking Lombardis or the Gallos or fucking Cosa Nostra.”
“Let’s figure it out first before we start a witch-hunt.”
“In what universe did anyone think they could fuck with us?”
“We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
Click. Leo hung up.
