Page 83 of Duty

Ah, shit.

“Everybody else, move your asses somewhere else,” Dante said. “Upstairs, outside … I don’t give a fuck. Get out of my sight until the rest of the men get here. Go.”

Andino turned back around to face his uncle. Dante looked like he was hanging onto his last rope of patience, and it was getting thinner by the fucking minute. This was life as a Cosa Nostra boss, though, no way around it. Stress was constant—from the business to the family, and more importantly, the men working under the boss.

This was what it was.

This was the duty Dante handed to Andino.

Like he should be grateful for it.

Dante only spoke again once the rest of the men of their family had scattered elsewhere—Giovanni outside with a mutter about needing a smoke, and Lucian and John upstairs to the large office that Dante liked to use whenever he visited the mansion, likely.

“What is wrong with you?” Dante asked.

Andino blinked.

That was not the question he expected.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You, Andi,” his uncle murmured, gesturing at him. “What is wrong with you? This—all this insolence and disobedience—this is not the made man your father raised. You know your place, and you’re quite comfortable in it. You don’t cause problems, and you do good work. Stop behaving like a man who doesn’t know how to act in this family and life, Andino. What’s changed?”

Andino laughed.

Instinctual, maybe.

Nerves and anger, most definitely.

“What changed?” he asked.

Dante nodded. “That’s what I said.”

“Everything fucking changed!”

Andino couldn’t believe the gall of his uncle to ask something like that as if he didn’t know exactly how he’d upended his nephew’s entire fucking life by shoving something onto his shoulders that he’d never asked for, and without any kind of proper warning. Like it wasn’t a big deal.

It was a big deal!

And now … now he wanted to tell Andino how he could or could not be as Dante’s little boss in waiting?

Fuck all of that.

Fuck that noise.

“What changed,” Andino said, taking a step toward his uncle although Dante stayed firm in his position, “was that somewhere along the lines, you decided you get some kind of say in what kind of boss you want me to be. Somewhere in this bright fucking idea of yours to make me the next boss of the Marcellos, you figured you could turn me into you. I am not you, Dante. I am me. And that means you don’t have to like the way I do business, or who the fuck I do it with, or how I decide to sit down in your seat once you’re done with it.”

His uncle’s stance softened a bit. “Andino—”

“The only thing you get to decide—you already did. You put me here. You decided this for me. You chose my future, and what you and everybody else wanted for it. And you didn’t give one good goddamn about what I might have wanted. So, fine. Fuck you, too. You got your one choice about me, but the rest?”

Andino laughed, and sneered. “The rest, boss, is up to me. Don’t forget it.”

He could be a good boss—he knew it because of who he was, his bloodline, and the way he’d been raised in this family. He could be a good boss because this was who he was, and this was all he’d ever known.

He could be a good boss.

Except he’d never asked for it.