Page 50 of Complications

“Am I gonna have one?”

“Depends on how cooperative you are,” I answered.

“Thought you were the bodyguard,” Cille sneered. He jerked his head in Joey’s direction and added, “You get demoted?”

“For someone who wants to walk out of here, you sure have a lot of questions,” Joey retorted. His voice sounded strained, and that pissed me off. “I’d find some fucking manners if I were you. For the record, being the bodyguard is the demotion.”

Cille squirmed under Joey’s unflinching stare. The scar on his cheek was more pronounced as he clenched his jaw in frustration.

“Why Connor?” I asked. “You put in a lot of effort to find him.”

And then I shut up. Cille squirmed a few times, looking anywhere but at me, before sighing deeply.

“His uncle owed me, and everyone knew it. If I let it go, then no one else pays either.”

“He’s dead.”

“Doesn’t matter. Connor’s his family, so he owes the debt,” Cille sneered. “I’ll take it from Matteo if I need to, but the debt is owed.”

“And Sam?”

“He takes down Matteo, and he can step into his place.”

Elio, who’d been watching quietly from the corner, stepped forward with barely controlled rage. “And you picked me to be the fucking fall guy for your bullshit?”

“Meh, Sam said no one would care.”

That comment earned Cille a hard smack to the back of his head. Maybe no one but me noticed Joey’s wince, but I fucking did. This man was gonna end up in physical therapy, and I was going to go with him just to watch how he’d explain the required shoulder movement for his goddamn job.

“Are you really this fucking dumb?” Joey interjected incredulously. “Seriously? Sam thought he could take over Matteo’s business, and you thought Matteo wouldn’t fucking destroy you? And your cop cousin was under investigation anyway and tried some bullshit story that Matteo was dirty, which got laughed out of the office. This is what I fucked up my shoulder and got stuck with this asshole over?”

“Jojo, that’s not nice.”

“Joey, for the record, I did do a little something to make the investigation go nowhere,” Matteo added with a smirk. “I thought you might like being lost in the woods with that asshole.”

“I can’t say I love being described as an asshole by my boss.” My complaint was ignored. “And we weren’t lost, except for that one tiny wrong turn that I corrected immediately.”

Joey’s snort was unreasonably loud. And rude, as per usual.

“I don’t think Jojo minded it as much as he wanted to mind it.”

“Fuck off, Frankie. Don’t call me that.”

“I will call you that.”

“Why does he call you Jojo?” Connor, who’d slipped unobtrusively into the room, asked innocently. He glanced between all of us, but I saw the glint in his eyes. He wasn’t innocent at all, but with the halo of red curls, it was always easy to forget that.

“It’s just a stupid nickname from when we were kids,” Joey answered defensively.

“It was my nickname for him when we dated as teenagers,” I answered at the same time.

And for just a second, the world stopped moving and the air around us stopped being heavy with whatever Cille was facing. All eyes shifted to me.

Matteo broke the spell first.

“You two dated when we were kids? When? How? Why?”

“Why do you have so many fucking questions?” Joey snapped.