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When I tried teaching Cato how to play the piano, he slammed his hands down on the keys and tried to walk across them. A million-dollar Steinway & Sons grand piano.
This fucking kid was the devil.
“What did I tell you about beating the grass with the mallet?” I pushed the hair out of his gray eyes and held back an irritated scowl. “You put dozens of holes in the grass. Daddy Luca will beat your butt if you don’t knock that off.”
Luca still had zero tolerance for bullshit. He was usually the disciplinarian, and his voice alone was enough to get them to follow the rules. He never hit them, only threatened to do it. That alone was enough to keep them all in line.
The girls were easy.
They went with the flow and never gave us shit. Eve and Sofia were two years apart and were best friends. They did everything together, except for paint. While Eve followed in her mother’s footsteps and loved to paint, Sofia was more like Damian.
He taught her how to fish and hunt. At thirteen, she was the oldest and had just started archery lessons. She was like a little Arya Stark. Eve was creative and a free spirit like her mother, always with paint on her clothes and hair.
“Sorry, Dad,” Cato groaned. “But how do you expect me to play croquet without making divots?”
Our kids were bougie like that. Instead of playing with Nerf balls and water guns, they wanted to learn croquet and golf and take archery lessons and weird-ass shit normal kids didn’t do.
That was all Luca.
He was an elitist snob.
I extended my hand. “Give me the mallet. I’ll show you.”
He threw it at my feet and crossed his arms over his chest.
“You better pick that up, Cato.” I pointed at it. “Now!”
He was eight and still acting like he was going through the terrible twos.
“Cato,” Alex said in a singsong voice. “Come here, baby. Look what Momma got you.”
All the kids called Alex something different. She was Momma to Cato. Ma to Leo, Angelo, and Eve. Mommy to Sofia.
Cato rushed past me and snickered like he’d won a match.
Damn kid.
He launched himself into Alex’s arms, so the queen could protect him from the mean knight who wanted him to behave. Alex lifted him off the ground, even though she struggled to pick him up. She was pregnant again after trying for the past three years. We weren’t getting any younger, and the doctor said it would be more challenging now that we were all closer to forty.
Her belly was too round to carry an eight-year-old baby on her hip. But Cato climbed her like a tree. He loved the shit out of his mom. Whenever she walked into a room, his face lit up. Just the sound of her voice had him running toward her.
“You’re going to hurt Momma.” I gripped his shoulder. “Get down.”
“It’s okay, Bash.” Alex shifted him on her hip. “He’s still my baby.” She kissed his sweaty forehead, and he smiled as she gave him the popsicle in her hand. “Here, eat before Daddy Luca sees.”
Luca only let the kids have sugar on rare occasions. He was a possessive control freak, even with the kids and their schedules. As he did with Alex, he picked out their clothes, planned their lives down to the second, and even tried to do that shit with us.
After Cato ate half of the cherry popsicle, Alex set him on the ground. He ran toward the swing set in the backyard, dripping red juice all over the lawn.
“Why does that kid hate me so much?” I shoved a hand through my hair and sighed. “It’s like the more I try to connect with him, the more he pushes me away.”
Alex stood on her tippy toes and hooked her arms around my neck. She wore a red sundress that made her blonde hair look even more golden. “Cato is going through a phase. He’ll bond with you. Give it time.”
I shook my head. “No, he won’t. He already did that with Marcello.”
She took my hand and placed it on her stomach, moving our joined hands in a circular motion. “This child is yours, Bash. You’ll get another chance with him. Cato doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t fear you like he does your brothers.”
“So I’m supposed to be an asshole to make him like me?”
