Page 23 of Naz & Roz

EIGHT

Naz scrubbed a hand over his face, and blinked up at the ceiling of his bedroom. He reached out to find the phone he’d left sitting on the nightstand the night before. His mind was only on one thing. He wanted to call Roz, and make sure she was still up for going out with him that morning.

“I forgot how lazy you can be in the mornings when you want to be,” came a familiar voice from Naz’s bedroom doorway.

If he hadn’t been fully awake before, he sure as fuck was now.

Naz straightened in the bed like a rod had been driven into his spine, and forced him up. It sent the blanket around his body pooling at his waist. The man grinning in the doorway of the bedroom was lucky Naz had even bothered to throw on a pair of boxer-briefs the night before. Usually, he’d hit the bed fresh out of a fucking shower because he was too damn tired for anything else after running all day.

So was the life of a made man being mentored. Their life was not their own. It was now owned and controlled by whoever the fuck had a button in Cosa Nostra. Someone called, Naz answered. Someone needed something, then he had to go out and fucking get it for them.

Naz didn’t mind a lot of the times. A made man was what he always wanted to be. Like his father, and his grandfathers. This life was as natural to him as breathing. It was bred into his very blood. He would be the fourth generation of Donati blood to be made—how the hell was he supposed to even consider something else?

“How did you get in my fucking place?” Naz demanded.

His father’s lips quirked up at the edge, and Cross cocked a brow. There was no need for Naz to wonder where his attitude and arrogance came from when he had this man standing right across from him. From his looks to his mannerisms, and far too much in between … he was just like his father.

Twins, his mother would say.

Not entirely.

But damn close.

“Really,” Cross murmured, giving his son that look, “you wonder how I got in here?”

“Without me knowing, yes.”

Naz knew his father could pick a lock like nobody else. Cross just needed a few minutes, and some inspiration to get a door open. That didn’t negate the fact Naz had his entire apartment wired to let him know if someone had gotten in while he slept.

Another benefit of being a genius, he supposed. All that work with electronics came in handy more often than it didn’t.

“Nothing tripped when I got the door open, son,” Cross said.

Naz’s brow furrowed, and he did grab a hold of his phone, then. A quick check of an app he’d personally developed, tested, and installed for his security system told him that yeah, he hadn’t even turned the final checks on the night before to set everything.

Well, fuck.

“Distracted?” his father asked.

Naz glanced sideways, and willed his father to shut up and stop asking questions. He didn’t need an error like this pointed out to him at the moment. He had far too many other things on his mind, and he really couldn’t afford to be off his game in life.

That only spelled bad things.

“Tired,” Naz offered instead.

Cross nodded like he was considering that. “Zeke did have you running all over New York and back yesterday, didn’t he?”

“More than usual, yeah.”

“Suppose there’s a reason for that?”

Naz stiffened as he started to move out of the bed. He took a brief moment to consider his father’s words, and then went ahead with getting out of bed, and grabbing the clean slacks and dress shirt he’d left sitting in a garment bag after snatching it from the dry cleaners before he came home the night before.

His father said nothing as Naz shrugged on the shirt, and pulled up the pants. He let his son get dressed in peace, thankfully.

“I hadn’t considered there was a reason he sent me running, no,” Naz said. “He’s your right-hand man, Dad. He’s made—I’m trying to get the button. He can send me wherever he likes, at whatever time of day or night he likes. That is how this goes, right?”

Cross chuckled. “It is, yes.”