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Michael:This got anything to do with why Zephyr and Helios's team took off loaded for bear?
Michael's mother is Greek mafia. His father is a professor at USC. After six years in the Army, Michael decided he'd rather beat up and kill people for the mafia than the government. According to him, we're more honest about our motivations.
I don't follow politics, so I wouldn't know, but he's been an asset to my team for the last two years.
Atlas:Yes.
Bobby is the only one who had to learn to speak Greek and now he's fluent. We do all of our texting in Greek as a matter of course.
With every text my phone reads out to me over my car's speakers, Lucia grows more visibly irritated. Her whole body is turned away from me by this point and her posture is rigid.
She huffs out a sigh after the last text. "If you miss having someone to talk to in Greek so much, maybe you should go home and hang out with your family in person."
"I'm not going anywhere but back to the club with you."
"Maybe I want some time to myself."
No chance in hell.
Seeing an empty parking lot for an industrial building, I yank the steering wheel to the right and pull the SUV into it.
"What are you doing?" Lucia demands.
Not bothering to answer, I pull my truck around to the back, so it's not visible from the road. Once I maneuver it so I'm facing the way we came, I put it in park, but leave the engine running.
"What are we doing here? Why did we stop?" Lucia is looking at me finally, her dark eyes snapping with annoyance.
"You are angry."
"You think?" she snarks back.
I don't take the bait. "Yes. What I want to know is: why?"
"Oh, I don't know. You take me to a dive bar where the service sucked and you paid for beer we didn't drink. If it was busy, I could understand the server forgetting and opening our bottles, but the only people there were those two tables of thugs."
Thugs is right. Lucia has good instincts, even if she's too innocent to know what they are telling her.
"You're mad because I paid for the beer?" If I had known it was going to cause me grief with my woman, I would have taken the bratva bastards out back and eliminated them. "It was ten bucks. Twelve with tip."
"You gave me twenty, so essentially that's what you paid because we both know you'll get sneaky about not taking the extra eight dollars back once we get to the club and I can break the twenty."
She knows me pretty damn well for such a short time being together.
"What is this really about?"
"You talked to your family in Greek to exclude me."
And then I see it behind the ire. Hurt.
"I wasn't trying to exclude you." Just maintain her innocence about the reality of my business.
Yes, I'm keeping her, but even I realize it is too early to start inducting her into the mafia life. Some wives never know about theÁdis Adelfótitaand their husband's true vocations. I don't fool myself that Lucia can be kept in the dark indefinitely.
She's too smart.
"That's not what it felt like." She sighs. "I learned to speak Italian before English. My mother preferred it, but she taught me and my brother not to speak it in front of our friends and exclude them."
"You have a brother?"
