“What happened to your mother?”
“She was killed…by one of my father’s enemies.”
He slowly dropped his arms and leaned over the table to be closer to me. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. It still hurts.”
He stared at me with eyes that were so soft, it was hard to believe they’d been hard a minute ago. “Know his name?”
So he could kill him? “It’s been so long, I don’t remember.” But I did remember. And I was afraid that Wolfe would leave the table in the middle of dinner and run off to kill him.
He didn’t press it.
“Did you kill the man who murdered your mother?”
“Yes. It was the day I became a man—the day I took my first life.”
Bumps formed on my arms, and I reached for my glass to take a drink, to have something to calm the nerves. I swirled it as I looked into the contents.
“Tell me about him.”
My eyes lifted to his.
“The man you lost.”
“Oh…” I hadn’t expected to be put on the spot. Hadn’t expected it to cause so much pain just to think about it. “Well, Emilio and Leo were friends since they were kids. We all grew up together. A couple years ago, Emilio needed work, so he joined us, even though I told him it wasn’t a good idea. His death was accidental. He was at the shipping dock when there was a drive-by. He wasn’t supposed to be there, filling in for one of the guys who got sick, and then he was the one who got shot in the head. My father had put him on low-profile jobs to keep him alive, but it didn’t matter in the end.”
“How long were you together?”
“Two weeks.”
His eyebrow immediately cocked. “Two weeks?”
“Two weeks before he was killed, he told me how he felt about me. It took me about a week to process it, and I said I was willing to give it a shot…and then the next week, he was gone.”
“So, let me get this straight,” he said. “This guy had access to you foryears, and he waited that long to make a move?”
“We’d been friends forever. He probably didn’t think he had a chance.”
“I’m sorry, that’s pathetic.”
My temper immediately flared. “You better tread very carefully, Wolfe.”
“No disrespect to the dead.” He made the sign of the cross from his head to his chest and then from one shoulder to the next. “May he rest in peace. But you try to keep me at a distance because of some guy you dated for a week?”
“It was a lot more traumatic than that. He was like family to me…still is.”
“But were you in love with him?”
“No, but?—”
“Then I refuse to be disqualified. I wasn’t going to anyway, but now I’m really putting my foot down.”
“But I think that if we’d had time, we would have gone all the way.”
“Well, you’ll never know because he was too much of a coward to do something when he had the chance.”
“Fuck you.” I grabbed the linen from my lap then threw it in his face before I stormed out. I made my dramatic exit from the restaurant and glided in my heels like they were flats.
