Page 75 of Made in Love and Blood

To a child, a couple of months could feel like years. He’d learned that with his own daughter.

“Sorry, I’ve been busy.” He patted the top of her head, smoothing down the stray black strands that flew every which way in the light breeze. Eleven going on twelve, she looked more like eight or nine given her small stature and tiny voice. “But guess who I talked to recently?”

“Who?” Carmen asked.

Salvatore smiled. “Nico.”

Her squeal echoed over the manicured yard. “No!”

“Yep.”

There wasn’t a soul on earth that loved Nico more than his little sister and vice versa

“But...but...but Mama said—”

“Mama said what, now?” came a new voice joining the fray.

Salvatore passed the woman leaning against the railing of the front steps a nod hello. She returned it subtly, but her focus remained on the girl bouncing on the spot in front of him.

“Is he coming home? Is he coming to visit? Why did you talk to him, but I can’t?”

Again, Sal looked to Vanna. Not quite forty, the Russian didn’t look a day over thirty, if that. Her straight black hair always gleamed under the sun and her blue eyes could freeze a man where he stood.

At the moment, that man was him. To be fair, Salvatore knew better. Wherever little Carmen went, her guardian surely followed.

“Vanna,” Salvatore greeted. “Beautiful day.”

“It is, isn’t it? Someone wants gelato, go figure.”

He smiled, but she didn’t return it.

“I think they’re waiting on you to begin,” she told him, referring to the boss’s quarterly dues.

“I better not keep them, then,” he agreed.

Vanna’s gaze never wavered from him as he climbed steps and made for the front door. All the while, the constant refrain of Nico, Nico, Nico echoed from Carmen. He could practically hear her silently cursing him.

“The boss is waiting in the dining room with the others,” the enforcer manning the front door informed Salvatore.

“You act like this is my first time.”

He didn’t wait for the response and almost missed the sound of the man exiting the house to stand at the ready outside with the snap of his loafers against marble floor. The whole damn house might as well be carved straight from Italian marble. Salvatore hated every inch of it, despite having quite a bit of Calcutta marble himself throughout his own home.

Perhaps, he despised the way the man procured it more than its prominence, but that would take emotional energy he didn’t currently have to expend just to dig into it all.

And that would do him no good now.

While he had a moment, Salvatore pulled out his phone to give more than a passing glance at Larkin’s earlier reply.

Sal’s text sat directly above the response: What time did she come up to the main house?

Larkin’s reply had his molars sore. Same time she has been—about two-thirty.

In the fucking morning.

His daughter’s sudden need to spend her late evenings and early morning hours with Nico at the guesthouse was yet another thing he couldn’t deal with right now. The sight of Matty standing on one side of the closed doors at the entrance of the large, stately dining room of the Russo home reminded him of that fact. Marco, poised on the other side, minding the appearance of his fingernails, as an unmade man could not attend a proper tribute with made men, really hammered the nail home for Salvatore.

He sent off a quick text to Larkin so he could deal with at least one half of the equation that had become Frankie and Nico: I want to see Nico as soon as I’m home.