“I already know the answer.”
His eyes flicked away, like the answer really wounded him. “I didn’t expect you two to wed so quickly.”
“Then you don’t know us very well,” I said. “I wanted to marry her long before your dad fired me.”
“When we all went to Taormina…were you guys together then?”
“Yeah.”
“But you were with that prostitute.”
“We played cards,” I said. “I already showed Francesca proof.”
He didn’t challenge me, like he believed me.
I grinned. “When you dropped that information on her, she lost her shit. Went totally ballistic. Slapped the shit out of me I don’t know how many times. It was the moment I knew she loved me.” I’d known I had her right in my palm, and it was only a matter of time before she became my wife and we lived happily ever after, pushing arms and bashing skulls and making a killing.
He looked out over the vista for a while, staring into the hills in the direction of her villa. “Did you ever finish her house?”
“Yeah, I’m almost done.”
“She doesn’t know?”
I shook my head.
“When are you going to tell her?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Whenever he spoke, his eyes were full of so much despair. It seemed like he completely lacked the will to live. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“I really don’t think you can, Leo,” I said. “You can always make a new start somewhere else, maybe on the mainland. Get away from your reputation here and build a new one. Find a nice girl.”
“I don’t want to start over somewhere new. I want to fix what I broke.”
“You can fix a broken building or a jammed gun, but you can’t bring someone back from the dead.”
His eyes flicked away at the mention of his father. “I would rather spend decades trying to earn my sister’s trust back than to never see her again. I hate that it ended up this way, but it’s really taught me how much family means to me. It’s made me understand how lucky I am to have a sister at all.”
He shouldn’t have had to lose his father to realize that.
“She’s great at this job, just like Dad knew she would be.”
“Yeah, she is.”
His eyes dropped. “I’m not sure why I thought I would be better.”
“Makes two of us.”
He didn’t flinch at the insult. “He’d be really proud of her.”
“Fuck yeah, he would be.” I was proud of her every fucking day. Proud of the way she handled herself. Proud of the way she conducted business with an iron fist. Proud of the way she maintained the upper hand even when the assholes tried to take it from her. And she did it all while being the finest piece of ass I’d ever seen.
“I’ll keep trying,” he said, more to himself than to me. “If she really felt nothing for me, she would have just killed me, so…”
Francesca changed after work, putting on a dress and platform sandals and leaving her holster on the dresser. She spruced up her makeup and put some shiny lip gloss on her mouth, and then we started the long drive to Palermo.
If she didn’t have business to handle in the morning, we would have just spent the night, but after dinner, I’d have to drive us back.
