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“You realize there’s no way for us to go back to Nonno and tell him this didn’t work out?”
I pause and direct my gaze at him. “He couldn’t blame you—us—for this.”
“You do know who we’re talking about, don’t you? Surely, you’ve learned a thing about the man’s temper? If memory serves, you were with me in his study not so long ago, and you’ve witnessed his wrath on more than one occasion.”
He takes this calmly, too, merely shrugging. “If the man didn’t see fit to show up, there isn’t much you can do. If we push too hard, we run the risk of appearing desperate. And like Renato said, Alvarez needs this much more than we do.”
That prick. What’s his game? What’s he trying to prove? “So help me, if he’s hiding somewhere, waiting to see how long I’ll take this before walking out, I’ll break his neck.”
“Who knows? He might have gotten stuck in traffic,” he teases.
The look I shoot him is murderous, and he holds up both hands while wearing an expression that’s almost apologetic.Almost.
“Trying to lighten the mood, is all. It won’t do you any good, looking like you’re ready to tear someone’s head off if the man walked in this very minute. Remember. Never let them see what you’re thinking.”
The way he talks, I’d think he was the one who spent his formative years learning at our grandfather’s side. It wasn’t until he, too, was left orphaned when his bastard father was murdered in a deal gone wrong that Renato brought him to live with us.
“You don’t need to tell me that. I know how to turn it on and off when need be.” I’d be dead a dozen times over by now if I didn’t.
When I was a child, I couldn’t understand the different masks my grandfather wore and still wears to this day. I couldn’t comprehend how he spoke disparagingly or even bitterly about our rivals in the privacy of his study, among his men, then behaved entirely differently to their faces.
He sat me down and explained that lesson to me one day when I finally blurted out my confusion. I remember him as he was when I was a kid. He seemed to me like the biggest man in the world. Unbeatable, unbreakable, made of steel. When he spoke, I listened—not that he ever gave me much of a choice otherwise. I shudder at the memory of some of the punishments he inflicted when he caught me zoning out or disobeying him.
“We never show the world our faces,” he told me at the time, sitting in the study with a cigar between his teeth. “To each other, yes, because family is all we have. But the rest of the world? We can’t afford to let our guard down, not ever. That’s when mistakes are made, and lives are lost. One day, when you’re sitting at the head of our family, you’ll understand the responsibility of so many lives depending on your judgment. Whether or not you can hide your true feelings in a tense situation.”
From that day on, I trained myself to keep my true thoughts and feelings hidden when in the presence of anyone I didn’t trust, which essentially means anyone outside my family. I’ve smiled in the faces of men whose lives I ended moments later and felt nothing when their bodies hit the ground. I’ve lost not a moment’s sleep over it either because my grandfather was right. Family is all we have, and I protect what’s mine. Anyone who fucks up badly enough to earn a bullet between the eyes is an enemy of my family.
Yet there’s no revealing my thoughts in advance. Does the spider show off its web to the flies it hopes to trap?
In other words, as much as I’d love nothing more than to kick Josef Alvarez’s face in for making an ass out of me, I’ll be deferential once we’re face-to-face. Even overly so.
I mutter a string of colorful Italian phrases once I check my watch. “We’ve been here an hour.” My feet are about to wear grooves into the concrete floor from all this pacing.
“What’s the protocol for a situation like this? What’s a respectable amount of time before giving up?”
“I don’t have the first clue. But something tells me if we waited three hours, Renato would wonder why it wasn’t three hours and one minute.”
The way he snickers tells me he knows as well as I that it’s true. “Try reaching out to him? See if he has any thoughts? Maybe something has changed with Alvarez.”
“You don’t think he would have told me the moment anything changed?” I shake my head, my anger growing with every step I take. “One big fucking game.”
When moments pass without a response from Prince, I look his way to find him staring straight ahead. I follow his gaze, finding nothing but a pallet of boxes wrapped in plastic, compressed into a cube. Is he suddenly interested in small kitchen appliances?
I’m about to ask him that very question when something inside me thinks better of it. It’s the pensive expression he wears. He isn’t zoned out because of boredom or a lack of any way to calm my temper. He’s watching something. The hair on the back of my neck stands on end, and I wonder if Alvarez sent someone after all. Are we being watched? Listened to?
Keeping that in mind, I amend my approach, pulling back a little on the rancor. “When I think of the trouble we went to in order to come out here and how eager Grandfather is to make this work.” I rub my hands together, keenly aware of the tightness in my shoulder with every move I make. I didn’t want to arrive for a meeting wearing a sling and looking weak. Besides, I hardly need it. So long as I don’t get any ideas about lifting weights anytime soon, I should be fine.
“Don’t act like you won’t make up for it, hunting for pussy.” Even when he speaks to me, he’s staring at those boxes. Why? I finally pass him and take a look from the corner of my eye.
Now I see it. Dark hair, the top of someone’s head. Someone is hiding behind those boxes. It isn’t close-cropped, either, but parted in the center and shining in the light coming from over our heads. A woman? I exchange a glance with Prince to indicate my understanding but keep quiet on it.
“What I do on my time is my business. But it still isn’t reason enough to cross an ocean and end up in this humid swamp.”
A woman. Why would Alvarez send a woman? Is this another means of throwing us off-balance so he can take the stronger position? Yes, he needs this deal, but I imagine a shrewd one like him would want to take every opportunity he can to get a leg up. No one in his position wants to be perceived as an easy conquest.
“All the more reason for the girls to take their clothes off,” Prince muses with the ghost of a grin playing over his mouth. His eyes widen a little, and I look over in time to see the head bobbing slightly, moving away from us.
Without saying a word, we follow its progress.
