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I didn’t think she’d ever needed their protection, due to the power of her own family, though I didn’t have any proof of that. No one talked about her family or what they could do. No one had ever confirmed my suspicions that they were bigger than any of us.
Fuck, I didn’t even think ‘Peterson’ was her real last name.
But that was all guesswork, and years of trying to figure it out hadn’t gotten me any further.
I watched her swing through the door now, casting one last glance over her shoulder at me, and grinned to myself. I had no idea what Brooks Peterson had been doing in my bar, but I was positive she hadn’t come to listen to the music. Or just to say hi. She’d been looking for me, no mistake.
The question was: Why? What did she want? Information, without question. She’d been far too happy to discuss old times and what was going on with my family, and I remembered well enough how bored she’d been by All Things Massimo, as she’d said when we were younger. She’d never been interested in my father or his brothers. She’d hated when I brought any of my cousins along on our adventures.
The fact that she’d asked about any of them was suspicious.
Though I couldn’t fault the girl for fishing for information. After all, I’d been doing the same thing. And I was betting my reasons were even less honorable than hers.
***
“What?” I gasped into the phone, shielding my eyes against the light streaming through the window in my bedroom.
“Family meeting,” my cousin Luca growled. “An hour from now, at my father’s house.”
I groaned and hung up without answering him. He didn’t need any answer, honestly. If there was a family meeting, he knew I’d be there.
It wasn’t like I had any choice.
I’d grown up hating that I was part of a family like mine. I didn’t like violence and I certainly didn’t like bloodshed. I’d wanted to be a history major, and had adored music and the art of writing. I’d had grand plans for getting away from the family and living a quiet, normal life, far away from the city and its underworld.
And then my uncle had killed my father and taken the family right to the top of the food chain, telling the rest of us that he owned us and that we’d shut up and get in line if we knew what was good for us. I hadn’t shut up or gotten in line, and it had very nearly gotten me killed. I’d wanted to be a musician, not a gangster, and for a while I’d been young and stupid enough to think I could stand up to my uncle and do whatever the hell I wanted.
That little rebellion had ended when he told me he’d kill my mother and sister if I didn’t learn to get in line and do what he demanded.
Since then, I’d been his pet musician. The Every Man of the Massimo family. The only Massimo with a public face—and the one my uncle could count on to go into the world and gather information for him. I’d been forced into weekly meetings with him where I was told what to ask and who to ask it of, and where I reported everything I’d heard. He put me on stages and made sure my band was constantly working, so I got to live the life of a performer the way I’d always wanted.
But only because I’d agreed to gather information for him.
I had no idea what he did with the information. I didn’t know what games the family ran these days, though I knew enough to know the Massimos weren’t involved in the underworld in any obvious way. To the outside eye, it would have looked as if we were just a family that did high-end business with other companies.
That didn’t explain why my uncle was so busy constantly gathering information on the other families, though, and particularly on the Rossis and the Brennans. It was one of the reasons I’d been so surprised to see Brooks last night. She was both Rossi and Brennan, and had been on my uncle’s watch list for years.
I hadn’t decided whether I was going to tell him that I’d seen her and that I had an opening to see her again. I hadn’t decided whether it would put her in danger if he knew she was coming around. I did know that I wasn’t willing to risk her life for the sake of whatever my uncle was doing.
Though something told me he already knew she’d been at my bar last night, and that I’d talked to her. We’d been in a public space and he had more spies than I could count. And this particular meeting hadn’t been scheduled. Which meant something had happened that made him think he wanted the leadership of the family together.
I slipped out of bed and headed for the shower, already working on my game face. Because I had a bad habit of speaking too quickly when it came to my uncle, and if he didn’t know about Brooks already, I didn’t want to be the one who told him.
***
An hour later I slid through the front door of my uncle’s brownstone, closed it quietly behind me, and leaned up against it, trying to catch my breath.
That meeting... hadn’t gone well.
Though I guessed that depended on what side you were viewing it from. If you were my uncle, it had probably gone exactly the way you wanted it to.
I closed my eyes and relived it as quickly as I could, wanting to track down and keep any of the important details. Everyone my uncle trusted had been there—and some people I knew for a fact he didn’t trust—because he’d said he had important news. He wanted all the information he could collect on the Brennans and the Rossis, and went around the room asking question after question of everyone sitting there. I still didn’t know what his beef was with the Irish or the Rossis, but he was collecting information on them like a man obsessed.
And then, the ringer.
He didn’t like how close they’d become over the last couple of months, what with Sloane Brennan marrying Joseph Rossi and the two families presenting a united front to the rest of the world. Which shouldn’t have surprised him, I’d thought. He’d been attacking both families through the gangsters working for him, and neither family had known what was going on. Of course they’d teamed up. It had looked like they had a common enemy, and they didn’t say that thing about the enemy of my enemy just for fun. Ercole had basically pushed the Rossi and Brennan clans together and guaranteed that they’d stand against him when the time came.
Not that I said that part out loud.
