“Yes, Mr. Morello,” replies Jacqueline, sounding a little faint.
Rocco shuts the door behind him, isolating us in my oversized office. He bypasses the sofa, sprawling out in the armchair opposite my desk. “You get her from the unemployment office, or what? Woman doesn’t know how to work a computer.”
“She’s fine.”
“She sucks at her job.”
“Like me.”
Despite the early hour, he lights a cigar, smoke obscuring his frosty blue gaze. The tattoos all over his hands have spread with age, but his wife’s name is still legible just above his knuckles. “Not according to theWall Street Journal.”
I pull a cigarette from my desk drawer, joining him. “I appreciate you watching over my sisters the week it all happened.”
His smile doesn’t touch his eyes. He sits forward, the faint wrinkles in the tanned skin on his forehead deepening. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Corbeau.” The steroid-enhanced muscles in his shoulders tense, fingers drumming together. “You endangered my children at Sorrowsong.”
I shake my head, taking a drag. “Not how it played out.”
“No?”
“I didn’t ask anything of them.”
“You sent my daughter on a hunt for a killer in that forest outside the castle. If you hadn’t have left her with a weapon, I’d have pulled your intestines out your mouth by now.”
“Consider us even, then, for the cleanup I did with the Ivanovs.”
When Ophelia’s roommate—the daughter of Rocco’s bitter rival—was found dead at Sorrowsong last year, Vincenzo looked like the obvious culprit.
The rift between the Morellos and the Ivanovs is decades long and is often only worsened by each family refusing to send their kids anywhere other than Sorrowsong. There are too many influential people there to let the other family have free rein over the secrets and societies that hide between those crumbling walls.
Thankfully, by the time I got to Ophelia’s stalker—some sad, sniveling psychology lecturer—he was alive enough to confess to the murder. Three days of pleading with the Russians to see sense and they eased off on the attempts to kill Vincenzo.
It’s never boring in their world; I’ll give them that.
He scoffs. “I could’ve handled the Ivanovs on my own.”
“With bloodshed,” I argue.
The skull tattooed on his hand stretches into a nasty grin when he clenches his fist. “Yeah, and explosions, probably. Risk my daughter’s safety again and I’ll kill you.”
“Have you ever tried to stop Belladonna doing anything, ever?”
That earns me a genuine smile. Rocco Morello and Cain Green may share many characteristics, but there’s one where they differ: Rocco loves his children with every piece of his soul. He wears the capo hat well, but when you pull it off, the father hat sits closer to his skin. His life revolves around Belladonna and Vincenzo. He cried like a baby at her sixteenth birthday party.
For all the wealth and power he sits on, I know he’d trade it all for them if it came to it.
Rocco gave me my first condom. Bought me my first bottle of whiskey. Told me which women to avoid and which ones to trust. After my first breakup, he called me to talk about it. In many ways, he was more of a father than Cain ever was.
He’s like Vincenzo: His morals are marbled in the shiniest gold and darkest shade of black.
He claps both hands onto his knees. “What gives me the pleasure of being here today?”
I exhale a breath of smoke over my desk. “A new deal.”
“I’m listening.”
“No more hits.”
His gaze ices over. “I’m no longer listening.”
