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“Would you like me to wait to serve dinner, sir?” Sophia asks.
I glance across the table at Maximo, who is chewing on a cocktail stick and drumming his fingers on the table. He’s not a patient man, especially when it comes to food, and I feel the annoyance in him crackling through the room.
“We’ll give him a few more minutes,” I say with a sigh.
“As you wish,” she says with a polite nod.
“Has our guest eaten yet?”
“I took her up some food at eight as you requested. She hasn’t left her room since.”
“Okay, good.” I dismiss her with a wave as my thoughts drift to Kat.
I wonder what she’s wearing and if she’s finally changed out of her cleaning uniform that’s too small for her curves. When she was packing her things at her house, I tried not to look at her underwear as she stuffed it into the bag, but there was definitely a pair of panties with tiny pink hearts all over them. She doesn’t seem like a hearts-on-her-panties kind of woman, but then she doesn’t seem like a woman who would quit her dream job to clean office blocks for twenty bucks an hour either.
Sophia comes hurrying back inside. “Your father is here, sir. Shall I put the steaks on now?”
“For the love of God, yes, please,” Maximo groans, but Sophia ignores him and keeps her eyes trained on me.
“Yes, please,” I tell her.
She hurries out again, surprisingly nimble for a sixty-seven-year-old woman with an arthritic hip. She should really retire, but whenever I suggest that, she looks at me like I’ve broken her heart and tells me she has nowhere else to go. We had two housekeepers when my brother and his wife lived here too, but that seems so long ago now. Regret gnaws at the pit of my stomach, or perhaps it’s just hunger.
My father’s incredibly loud voice reverberates around the hallway outside, signaling his arrival. With an inward groan, I brace myself for an evening in his company. He insists on us meeting for dinner once a month, framing his visits as an opportunity to see his favorite son, but we both know neither of those things are true.
When he walks into the room, he opens his arms as he approaches me.“mio figlio.”He smiles widely.
I fake one too and accept his embrace. He pats me on the back. “You lost a little weight, son?” he asks as he steps back a little, his eyes full of mock concern.
He has done this all my life. Preys on what he thinks are my insecurities. I was a scrawny kid until I hit fifteen and he reminded me of it every goddamn day of my life. But I’m not that kid anymore. I’m six-foot-four and two hundred and forty pounds. I train in my gym almost every day. I can bench press one and a half times my own body weight, and I spar with a former heavyweight champion. My suits are custom-made and they still fit me exactly the way they always have, but I’ve lost weight.Right?
“Pretty sure my weight’s the same as the last time you were here, Pop,” I reply.
“Hmm.” He arches a brow as though he doesn’t believe me. “And, Maximo. I might have known you’d be here,” he says it with a smile on his face, but his tone drips with disdain.
“Well, I never could resist a good steak, Sal,” Maximo replies with a well-practiced smile.
My father’s eye twitches as Maximo uses his name informally. He prefers his full title — Salvatore or Mr. Moretti, especially from the orphan he brought into his home, and who he believes owes him a debt. But even my father knows better than to challenge the loose cannon that is my right hand.
“Shall we?” I pull out a chair for him and we all sit at the table.
Maximo pours us all a glass of Chianti.
“So, how is business?” my father finally asks — his usual opener.
“Good.” My standard reply.
“You dealt with the business at the warehouse last week?”
“Yes.” There’s always business at the warehouse.
“And what about Leo Evanson? You got that money he stole from me?”
My insides twist into a knot. Here we go. Leo Evanson really fucked me over when he decided to enter the most lucrative poker game in Chicago. Not only because he cheated and walked away with a quarter of a million dollars that he didn’t earn, but also because one of the men sitting at that table was my father’s old buddy, Constantine.
Now, Constantine Benetti has been a gambling man for as long as I’ve known him. He’s one of the best poker players there is, however, his penchant for women half his age with expensive tastes in shoes, handbags, and cocaine means he spends it faster than he can win it. So, when the big games happen once a month at one of our clubs, my father bankrolls Benetti and takes half of his winnings. So the money that he stole, really belongs to my father — and therein lies my problem.
My father doesn’t need the money. It’s pocket change to him, but he doesn’t need his old friend thinking that he’s incapable of getting their money back from a street punk like Leo Evanson.
