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I turned back to him. “Even if I wanted to go back—and that’s not an if—it’s a fuck no. I would be dead as soon as I touch the ground.”
He caught up with me, and we squared off. “Maybe.”
I scoffed. “No maybe about it. My chances of seeing my forties are next to zero as is. But with this stroke of insanity, of yours, they are nonexistent.”
“I never pegged you as a wimp.”
I chuckled—the sound harsh to my own ears. “You literally picked me up lying in my own vomit, with snot and tears and piss running out of me. And you tell me you didn’t think I was a wimpy kid?”
I stared down and shuffled my feet before I locked eyes with him again. “Well, newsflash. This is a suicide mission, and I’m not in the game of self-destruction, not anymore.”
He nodded.
The airplane engine stopped, and the sudden silence had us both looking at the plane. “Is anyone besides Birdie pulling security right now?”
“I took care of it,” was all Hawk said.
Of course. He always had backup plans. And backup backup—if I knew Hawk at all.
“So, who else are you expecting to see at this oh-so-fine meeting of yours?”
He remained silent, his eyes trained on the small airplane.
We waited.
And I caught a look at the pilot.
Holy fuck.
The door opened, and out stepped someone I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Hadn’t spoken to in more than a decade. One of the few people, from my former life— besides my brothers—I’d longed to stay in touch with but didn’t.
Because he was a part of the life I failed.
The life I left behind.
I left him behind—though he was the hardest to forget.
Niggling guilt, I’d lived with daily, roared up into a full-blown inferno.
Would it be awkward? Would he shoot me on sight because I betrayed the family, betrayed him?
But my worries were completely moot.
Vincenzo Salvini crossed the distance in three seconds and pulled me into a hug—and squeezed all the air out of me—as if no time had passed at all.
Vincenzo Salvini, Alfredo Salvini’s son, heir to the most influential Italian Mafia family in New York, and my single best friend growing up, was not going to kill me just yet.
“Fuck, Falcone. How I missed seeing your ugly mutt.”
I hesitated, then hugged him back. “Vincenzo Salvini. I never thought I would actually see you again.”
“Well, it’s a small world, getting smaller by the minute.”
What did he mean?
He turned around, and my youngest brother Cristiano—Cristo—climbed out of the small plane.
No fucking way.
