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I twist my arms into a stretch above my
head, easing tension out of the ligaments, before lowering my hands in front of me, looking at the blood drying on my knuckles as I finish cooling down. The blood is already clotting. My knuckles are calloused, used to the weekly beating they endure against the heavy bag.
Carefully, I stretch out my hamstrings next, focusing on my breath.
“Christ.” I curse, flinching as pain shoots straight through my fucked up leg like an electric shock.
I try to walk it out, but it throbs and pulses mercilessly, a painful knot forming in my thigh. Grasping for anything, I steady myself on the workbench, cringing in pain as the sharp jolt fades to a dull ache. I try to stretch my leg again, more carefully this time, but the tension lingers and my muscles are stiff.
“Get it the fuck together, Hale,” I mutter, breathing through an agonizing pinch of muscles and veins. “You can’t—”
You can’t appear weak in front of your father.
I don’t want to say the words out loud. I don’t want to speak them into truth. I love the fucker, but Damian Novak has always been a driven, uncompromising man. Even though he knows I got injured for a worthy cause—freeing Ciro from a rival gang who held him hostage—the lingering pain from the bullet wound feels like a weakness.
I hate the way he looks at my leg sometimes, like he’s lost part of his son with it.
Despite that, I know he has faith in me. He’s given me more and more responsibility within the organization. His captains though? Some of them seem to think the weakness in my leg extends to my spirit. There are those who look at me with suspicion, doubting my ability to lead when my father steps down and passes the job to me.
They’re fucking wrong.
This is my legacy. My birthright. And I won’t lose what my father built.
I take a deep breath, shoving down the anger that’s flaring inside me all over again. I just have to get through today.
Today, we deliver Grace into the hands of my father. I’m not happy about it, but that doesn’t change what we have to do—it’s our duty, our obligation. I don’t have a choice in the matter.
If I did, she wouldn’t be anywhere near him.
When I step out of the bathroom, still securing the towel around my waist, Ciro is standing in the doorway of the bedroom.
“You ready?” he asks.
I nod but don’t say anything. I stride over to the closet to grab a suit, and his gaze tracks me as he leans against the jamb.
“You don’t have to do that, Hale,” he says gruffly.
“Do what?” I say without turning around.
I know what he’s talking about. I saw the way he glanced at my hands, the torn up knuckles. I’m not ashamed of my self-destructive habits, my coping mechanisms, but to have them so directly acknowledged makes my jaw tighten a little. Ciro already knows my flaws, my weaknesses—he has them too. We just ignore them.
It’s an unspoken rule that we don’t talk about this kind of shit. You learn quickly that there’s nothing personal in the mafia. Feelings are a weakness. A fault. We all have our own ways of coping with the violent turbulence of our minds—drugs, women, drinking, violence—but displaying anything other than a cold exterior is basically asking to get shot.
Still, instead of ignoring Ciro, I find myself saying, “I know.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?”
A picture of Grace flashes into my mind.
Her skin.
Her scent.
Her hands.
Because I don’t have any other way.
I don’t respond, pulling out a bespoke suit and shooting a glance over my shoulder at my best friend. Even without hearing the words, I’m pretty sure he knows exactly why my knuckles are so shredded today.
