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I sat back that morning and watched as my two worlds collided, ones that I never thought would fit together. A part of me had been worried that I was going to have to either lie to Marcie about Matteo and his family, or completely cut her out of my life so I didn’t have to do that.
But there she was, laughing and teasing all the members of the Grassi family, fitting right in like she’d always belonged, and making it clear that I didn’t have to lose anything to gain something else.
“Your best friend was willing to take a bat to all of us for you,” Matteo said, pulling my back against his chest as we watched Marcie demand that Aurelio start stripping and show her his bullet wounds.
“She’s incredible,” I said, shaking my head as she seemed to inspect the wound and then promptly inform Aurelio that it wasn’t as impressive as she thought it would be.
“You’re incredible,” Matteo corrected. “Think of how amazing you are that your friend would threaten known criminals for you. That’s pretty fucking rare to find, baby. All these men and women who would fight and kill for you. And none of them more than me,” he said, giving my midsection a squeeze.
“It’s overwhelming,” I admitted. “But in a good way,” I was quick to add. “It’s just so different from what I’ve always known. I was just… I was very lonely most of my life,” I told him.
“Baby, with this family, you are never going to be alone again. Like it or not.”
“That’s okay. I like it. But they have to go home sometime,” I told him, turning in his arms to wrap my arms around his neck. “Because you promised me that we’d break in all the surfaces of this house. And that I can be as loud as I want to be.”
A low growling noise moved through Matteo, vibrating into my chest.
“How loud do you want to be?” he asked, smile wicked.
“Really, really loud,” I told him, pressing my chest against his.
“You’re killing me,” he said, giving me a hard squeeze.
“Get used to it,” I told him, taking a slow, deep breath as my hips pressed against him.
“Oh, I’m looking forward to it. A whole fucking lifetime of it,” he said.
“Yeah?” I asked, needing to hear it again.
“Absolutely. You’re the one, Josie. Now if we can just keep you from getting kidnapped long enough so I can take you on a proper date.”
I didn’t care about a proper date.
I would take eating cold pasta over the kitchen island in the middle of the night after hours of exploring each other’s bodies over a fancy restaurant somewhere.
As it would turn out, that was exactly how we spent our first alone night together.
It was a great start to the first day of the rest of our lives.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Matteo - 1 week
There was a big mess to clean up after the night of the attempted assassination of our entire Family.
As a whole, the guys and I had all silently agreed to keep that part from the girls. They didn’t need to know about dealing with the bodies in the shipping container. Or wiping the evidence from Luigi’s place, camera feeds and all. Or even disposing of the body Smush had killed in the basement.
It was a lot of work that we tried to do without anyone, especially Josie, finding out.
She’d been through enough.
She didn’t need to be privy to any more ugly details.
Luckily enough for me, Marcie was an insistent friend who demanded a girls day with Josie, giving me a full ten hours to help my brother and cousins take care of business.
“This was a big fucking mess,” Luca grumbled, kicking back behind his desk at the docks.
“How were you to know?” Lorenzo, the capo dei capi of the NYC mafia said as he leaned against the file cabinet.
Lorenzo Costa didn’t have a lot of reason to come down from New York to check on us. Our Family had been stable for so long that we always managed to handle our business without much fuss. We certainly never needed to involve New York in it.
But taking out almost an entire crime family was a huge deal.
And as our allies, we had to clue in the Costas.
Even if they had their hands full with their own shit since Lorenzo took over for his father after his sudden death.
Or as we heard it, murder.
But that was just a rumor.
A pretty widely believed one, but just a rumor.
We didn’t ask.
Lorenzo didn’t tell.
“We didn’t hear shit either,” Brio, one of Lorenzo’s men, a verifiable psychopath by all accounts, said as he picked up and inspected one of Luca’s fancy pens.
“Clearly, we all need to pay a little more attention to the smaller Families,” Lorenzo said. “They are assuming there are weaknesses because our Families are changing hands. And maybe they are right to an extent,” he conceded. “We all need to tighten up and pull in. And keep an eye on anyone who might be getting ideas about taking what we’ve worked for.”
