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Maybe she’d never done anything truly bad by her own hand, but all those little things made her a bad person.
Gio, on the other hand, had been more active in his transgressions. He had no qualms about murder, and he’d done exactly so without remorse in the past.
He was an active Romano caporegime, who’d made an extracurricular activity out of killing to protect the family and fucking every decent-looking girl in the city.
No amount of love I held for him or donations to charity to ease his guilt changed the fact that he was. Not. A. Good. Person.
Tessie, however, was the sunshine of our lives. Perpetually happy and radiating purity, she’d never had a malicious thought towards anyone—probably wasn’t capable of it.
When confronted with adversity, her solutions always involved unity, working together, and the type of rainbow-full-of-unicorns bullshit only someone with truly moral intent could conjure.
Sure, she was young and people changed, but goodness—true goodness like she had—wasn’t something that would go anywhere anytime soon.
If ever.
Everett, despite being raised by the female equivalent of an ass-faced wildebeest, was exactly the same way.
Pure. Good. Incapable of horror.
Point was, in my world, people were usually black and white. Good people were good, and bad people were bad, but so few delved into the grey area in between.
I was one of those people.
Ariana De Luca was one, too.
I was an asshole, and she was combative.
I was the type to continue jacking off when interrupted, and she was the type to watch it and enjoy.
I’d let my family’s indiscretions go uncontested time and time again while she had a secretive past she hid, and I knew—I just goddamn knew—it wasn’t a good one.
She knew things she had no business knowing, and I had no reservations when it came to spying on my employees or anyone else for that matter.
But in her cards-too-close-to-her-chest, take-no-shit, and answer-to-no-one crusade, she’d managed to be kind. To the staff. To the customers.
And most importantly, to my sister.
I wasn’t as nice as her, but I had my hard limits. Killing was one. Treating Tessie and the women I loved nothing less than the way they deserved to be treated was another.
I liked to think that, so long as I didn’t do anything truly bad, I could exist in this murky grey zone for the rest of my life and feel pretty damned content about it.
If the pendulum swung too far one way, I’d just swing it the other way.
And that was exactly what Ariana De Luca was doing, too.
Day One of her training period, she’d served me a dish for lunch that had gotten sent back to the kitchen by a customer.
A bite had been missing from the corner of the Miyazaki wagyu, which she’d tried to conceal with a piece of broccolini.
I’d insisted she return it to the kitchen, and in front of a Zagat food critic, she crossed her arms and decried my failings to the homeless population of New York City, as if the solution to world famine and hunger hinged on not wasting the three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar six-ounce steak.
Day Two, she’d taken my five-thousand-dollar Eames executive chair to the break room to nap on, and when I had demanded Ariana to return it, she turned it into a “unicorn” chair for Tessie to do her homework on, complete with an ice-cream-cone-turned-unicorn-horn and a makeshift tail made from cooked spaghetti noodles.
“But you can’t take Uni from us, Bastian!” Tessie had shouted when I’d accidentally stepped on the ridiculous spaghetti noodles hanging from the back of the chair.
Us, she’d said, as if she and Ariana were a unified front.
Squashing Uni’s tail, of course, had made me the bad guy.
