Page 26 of Privilege

“You’re calling him a kid, really?”

“Well—”

“And let her, Lucian. Let her, though.”

Her father sighed loudly. “It’s not about Chicago, but the fact they have business there. I don’t want it to seem like us buying that vacation home would be … us trying to step on their toes in some way.”

“Well, I liked the home in the Maldives. Far more than the other ones we looked at. And it’s over the water, Lucian. I want the Maldives home. Call Tommas—”

Her father let out another one of those grunts. He only did that when he wasn’t pleased about something. Lucia might typically find an exchange like this between her parents amusing. But right then, she was just thinking about someone and something else.

“Make that sound to me one more time, Lucian,” Jordyn warned. “Call Tommas in Chicago, let him know we’re looking at a home to buy in the Maldives, and it has nothing to do with business. Simple.”

“Yes, everything about the mafia is exactly that simple, Jordyn.”

Lucia had absolutely no reason to open her mouth and join their conversation. It wasn’t like her parents had invited her to do that, or anything. They also hadn’t said she couldn’t join in, either. She was seventeen, not five. If they didn’t want her to hear their conversations, they wouldn’t be having them with her within earshot.

“How many homes do we have?” Lucia asked.

She watched her father’s gaze shoot to the rearview mirror, so he could get her in his sights. Her mother, on the other hand, never even looked away from the passenger’s window as she said, “A few.”

“But how many is a few?”

Lucian hummed under his breath. “That depends on what you want to know, Tesoro. Just vacation homes, or … properties as a whole.”

Lucia blinked.

“Is there a big difference?”

“Big difference,” her mother said.

Huh.

“We have three vacation homes in Europe—one in England, another in Italy with an attached vineyard, and a smaller penthouse in Paris. We also have a large cabin in Canada. They call it a cabin, mind you, but that is only because it is made out of logs and not because it sits on a hundred acres of private property, and has three floors.”

“There’s also the one in Maine,” Lucia said.

She remembered that one because she’d visited it more than once as a young girl.

Jordyn nodded, and shot her daughter a look over her shoulder. “We bought that to have somewhere to stay when I visited my biological father, but after he passed, we rented it out and have not been back.”

“One in Vegas, too,” Lucian put in after a moment.

Like it was nothing at all.

Like they hadn’t just admitted to having six fucking vacation homes, and were considering buying a seventh.

What kind of a waste of money was that? Sure, she knew her family was well-off. They were beyond the simple title of rich. The Marcellos were vastly wealthy. But sometimes, it didn’t always look that way from the outside when they simply lived in beautiful homes tucked away in normal suburbs with luxury cars in the driveway.

It was what people didn’t know and couldn’t see where the Marcellos hid their wealth.

“Do you even visit them all every year?” she asked.

Lucia was pretty sure she knew the answer to that question. Her parents went on the occasional vacation, and she typically went with them.

So no, no they did not visit all their many homes.

“We try to visit a different one each year, if they’re not rented out to someone else,” her father said. “They are good investments, which in turn, means a good profit in the future. That’s why they were purchased and added to our portfolio. Maybe with all you kids out of the house, we will be able to visit more than one a year.”