Page 54 of One Breath After Another

“Your caseworker thing,” he muttered.

“What about it?”

That was probably the easiest of all the issues he had to deal with over the day. Finding information on the woman wasn’t exactly hard when he only needed to find certain people, ask a few questions, and shove a couple of hundred dollars into the right hands to get the right answers.

Simple.

And the information was good, too.

“The woman is in a lot of debt,” Luca said. “Surprise, like most Americans. Hers started with student loans and just grew from there. A bad divorce three years ago added another hundred grand on top of what she already owes. Interest isn’t terrible, but it still isn’t great. So, she’s pulling more hours than she should on top of an already massive workload. Something to consider as a reason why she might not be seeing Penny’s living situation clearly.”

“Hmm,” Naz hummed under his breath. “Anything else?”

Wasn’t there always?

Luca just hadn’t gotten there yet.

“The good thing is she doesn’t have any kids,” Luca said. “The bad thing is she has even more debt from the death of her father two years back ... and her mother is currently sick. Cancer, I guess.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Luca saw the way Naz flinched at that news. It was subtle, sure, but it still happened. Despite what a lot of people might assume about them—or men like them, for that matter—they did actually have morals. Nobody wanted to kick someone else when they were already down. That shit just wasn’t fair.

Some things also couldn’t be helped.

Was this one of those?

Luca didn’t know. He just did what Naz wanted him to do. He found the information he needed on his problem, and the rest was for his friend to handle the way he wanted. Unless, of course, he asked Luca to deal with that side of things as well.

He would.

Didn’t mean he would like it.

“So, I’ll fill in the rest of the details,” Luca murmured, tipping his head Naz’s way to meet his friend’s stare. “Her debt just continues growing because she’s picking up responsibility left and right. She’s overworked, likely underpaid, and it doesn’t end when she goes home because guess who just moved in? Right, her mother ... currently undergoing treatments for cancer. Shitty thing is, she’s not wrong about looking into us. You’re not the right kind of home for a girl like Penny by all standards.”

“Luca—”

“I’m not finished. She’s not being abused, though. Everywhere else she’s lived after leaving her parents, she actively planned to run away or made suicide attempts. She has made progress here. And other than overlooking everything you do business-wise, this home is just fine for Penny. She—and you guys—have done everything asked from school to therapy. The caseworker just sees what’s on the surface, the obvious, and she’s trying to run with it, so she doesn’t miss anything. Crossing ts and dotting any is, you know?”

“And probably missing the not-so-obvious from another case that needs actual help,” Naz said under his breath. “Wasting my fucking time along with it.”

Fair enough.

Luca figured ... what could he do now? He did what he needed. Naz had to make the hard choices beyond this point.

“Anyway,” Naz said, removing his hands from his pockets to rub his palms together, “it’s good to know I’ve got something to work with there—the debt thing, I mean. Better for me to go a helpful route rather than a hurtful one, as my father would say.”

“Bribery and blackmail.” Luca grinned, the action being returned easily by his best friend. “The very foundations upon which Cosa Nostra was built.”

“Oh yeah, this thing of ours ... it always comes full circle.”

Their jokes eased the tension if anything. Both men laughed, and Luca was grateful for the reprieve from it all. Even if it didn’t last long.

It never did.

Naz went right back to business, reminding Luca that the days of their easy banter, before the family business had come along to give the men other things to deal with constantly, were long gone. They fit in what they could, now. Sometimes, that wasn’t very damn much.

“As for today,” Naz said, turning back to Luca in the car.

“Yeah, that.”