“We need to talk.”
“Then talk.” I gestured to the chair across from my desk. “I have inventory to review and a shipment due any minute.”
He didn’t sit. He never did when he was about to deliver a lecture. Instead, he strode to the window overlooking the bar floor, hands clasped behind his back.
“You’re thirty-seven years old, Lorenzo.” He noted dryly.
“Last time I checked, yes.”
He turned, and his eyes, the same dark brown as my own, fixed on me with that familiar coldness. “You think this is a joke. You’ve always thought everything was a joke. The business. The family. Your responsibilities.”
“I thinkthis,” I gestured at the bar around us, “is mine. I built it. I run it. I don’t owe you a goddamn thing for it.”
“Every dollar that went into this place came from the Falcone family trust,” he said, his voice soft and dangerous. “Every piece of paper that made this bar possible was signed with my name attached. You think you’re independent? You’re standing on a foundation I laid, and you’ve been too busy being a damn playboy to remember it.”
I felt the old anger rise. The same anger I’d carried since I was a boy, watching him tear my mother down with quiet words and sharper silences.
“Say what you came to say so you can go,” I spat out.
He walked to the front of my desk, placed his palms flat on the polished wood, and leaned forward. “It’s time for you to settle down. You’re not a boy anymore. You can’t spend the rest of your life running bars and fucking cocktail waitresses. The Falcone name requires more than that.”
I laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Settle down… You meanmarry.”
“Yes.” He didn’t flinch. “I mean, marry. It is time for you to think about our future bloodline as well. I’ve arranged a meeting with Edward Whitmore. His daughter, Eleanor, is twenty-eight, well-educated, and from a family of equal standing. She’s suitable. The Whitmores are interested in a union between our families. It would strengthen both our business positions and secure the legacy for the next generation.”
The words rolled off his tongue like a script he’d rehearsed a hundred times. Aunion. Abusiness position. Alegacy. Notlove. Not happiness. Just a transaction wrapped in silk and obligation.
I stood up slowly, letting the chair scrape against the floor. I was taller than him, had been since I was sixteen, and I used every inch of that height as I came around the desk.
“I’m not marrying some woman you picked out like a goddamn asset to diversify your portfolio.”
“She’s not?—”
“I don’t care who she is.” My voice dropped. “I’m not interested. I’ve spent my entire life watching you and mother pretend to be married. I’ve seen what that union looks like behind closed doors. You think I’d sign up for that? You think I’d trap myself in a cold house with a woman I don’t love, raising children who’ll grow up feeling like a burden?”
His face went pale, then red. “You willnotspeak about your mother that way.”
“Why? Because it’s true?” I stepped closer. “She’s been checked out since I was a boy. You destroyed her slowly, year after year, with your control and your criticism and your endless fucking demands. And you expect me to follow in your footsteps? To find some poor woman and do the same thing?”
His hand came up, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. He’d done it before. When I was nine, I was punished for talking back. When I was thirteen, because I refused to go on a business trip with him. When I was seventeen, because I wrecked his car. But now, in this office, with the bar full of people below, he stopped himself.
His hand dropped. His jaw tightened.
“You forget yourself,” he said, his voice trembling with rage. “You forget where you came from. The Falcone family didn’t build its empire by following feelings. We built it by making hard choices. By doing what was necessary. Your mother understood that, she accepted her role.”
“She accepted it because she was given no choice.”
“She had a choice.” His eyes narrowed. “And she made it. Just like you will.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“You will marry, Lorenzo. Or I will dissolve the trust. I will seize every asset in your name—the bar, the penthouse, the accounts. I will remove your name from all business dealings. All of it. You’ll be left with nothing but the clothes on your back and the debt you’ve accumulated.”
The threat hung in the air like smoke.
I stared at him, feeling the familiar weight of helplessness, the same weight I’d felt as a child, watching him cancel my mother’s credit cards because she’d been late to a party, watching him sell the horse I’d loved because I’d gotten a B in math. All my muscles tensed as every memory stacked upon the next. Control. It was always about control.
“You can’t take the bar,” I said, but even I heard the doubt in my voice.
