Page 137 of Loyalty

“Siena. She’s not with everybody else in the theater. Where is she?”

“Probably still in the kitchen,” Cross said, lifting a brow. “That’s where Catherine left her.”

“Did anybody think to ask if she might like to join them, so she wouldn’t be alone?”

Catherine frowned. “I was with her—we were washing dishes. She’s really nice, John.”

“Quiet,” Cross added.

John tried to soften his defensive stance a bit, but it was hard after the shit show upstairs. “Yeah?”

Catherine—his favorite cousin next to Andino—nodded. “Yeah, I really like her.”

“Even if she is a Calabrese?”

Cross scoffed. “That old bullshit again?”

Yeah, that old bullshit again.

John only shrugged.

“So, the kitchen?” he asked.

“The kitchen,” Catherine said before going back to whatever Cross had been showing her.

John left the two of them behind as he navigated the halls and rooms of the mansion. He never understood why his grandparents didn’t sell their large estate. It was far too big for them, yet they held strong and refused to let it go.

He had hoped that by the time he found Siena, his anger from earlier would have lessened. That wasn’t the case at all—more than ever, he just wanted to get the fuck away from his family. Quick, fast, and in a hurry.

John crossed through the dining room to get to the kitchen, but the sound of his mother’s voice carrying from the kitchen made him slow down.

“You have to understand what he’s like in those times,” he heard his mother say.

“He’s told me,” Siena replied.

“John saying one thing, and actually experiencing one of his episodes are not the same thing.”

“No, I get that, I just meant—”

“In his mania, he can be reckless in everything from his choices, to his behavior. He can blow through thousands of dollars in an hour, and the next day forget where the money went. We used to have boxes of things show up on the doorstep when he was a teenager because he would steal one of our credit cards, and order things online.”

Jordyn let out a sigh, adding, “And relationships—romantic ones—can be difficult for him to navigate when physical attraction adds to his mania.”

“I don’t understand,” Siena admitted.

John hated how quiet she sounded. Like the entire conversation had her backed in a corner, and she didn’t how to fight her way out of it. He should have explained more to her, so that a conversation like this one didn’t take her entirely by surprised.

It pissed him off, too.

How dare his mother do this? How dare she corner Siena and air out all of John’s history like it was her right to do so?

It wasn’t.

Siena could come to him.

Not anyone else.

The conversation in the kitchen continued with his mother saying, “Hyper-sexuality means physical expressions of attraction can often be confused for other things. And it only adds to his reckless behavior—like a high he chases. If he can’t get high, he can do things that make him feel high. It’s another way for him to self-medicate.”