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“Who cares!” She yelled.Patience, Brody. She’s yours and she needs you.
Adriana started to cry more, and I tried to get an intelligible thought out of her. I needed to know what was going on that caused her to ignore my explanation.What could have made her so distraught?
She took a while to calm down, but when she finally did, she yelled, “And it’s not like you care either! You missed our first appointment.”
I felt a slight sting at that. I did care. I did love her. More than she knew.
“I didn’t miss it on purpose,” I said.
“You just left without saying a word this morning.”
“You looked so peaceful, and the Reeds are…”
“You’re working with my father’s enemies?” She got angrier with each word she spoke.
“I’m going to kill them!” I said. “They threatened to kill you and your father.”
Adriana stopped at that. We let the silence ring in our ears. We were both tired of the day’s events, and the worst of it was that we weren’t together. I longed for her, and I could feel the relief in her sigh when I told her I was going to kill the Reeds.
Adriana’s voice cracked. “How?”
Her father was generally the muscle, but since he was still recovering, and some of his top men were dead, I had to make sure that we were careful in our strategy.
I didn’t know, but again, I had to come up with something.
“I have Carlo finding out their weaknesses, but…” I hesitated. What ensued would probably be more violence. I didn’t want anyone else getting hurt, but my top missive was Adriana.
“You don’t want war,” Adriana said. I almost thought she was of her right mind, and that she had at least accepted that I was trying to make things better with her family. Was I wrong?
“And you couldn’t even be bothered to tell me what was going on, because you don’t want me to be a part of whatever you do,” she warned. “Just like my family.”
“What?” I didn’t want to argue. She was worth protecting, and she wasn’t acting like herself. I understood that she was mad I missed the appointment, but whatever was on her mind now was much more than my own doing.
“Just like my family,” she said. “They can’t be bothered to come see my father.”
I thought that her mother was going to talk sense into her sister. This didn’t make sense.Things changed while I was gone.
“What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t leave anything to speculation, and Adriana was acting off. I couldn’t believe that she was acting this way, flip-flopping between being sweet to me, and being outright unpleasant.
Adriana remained silent.
I asked again.
She cried, and I couldn’t contain myself any longer.
“Where are you?” I asked. I needed to see her. She told me she was sitting in the corner of a coffee shop.
When I arrived, she had calmed down. But she was still upset with me.
“Let’s get you home,” I said. She followed me reluctantly, complaining that there was no ‘home’ for gangsters, something I had known for years. Someone always wanted you dead if you weren’t in control of the situation. If you did control the situation, you at least knew they weren’t going to kill you.
Adriana was pretty tight-lipped, but I had finally gotten what had thrown her over the edge of upset out of her. She was incredibly angry that I had missed the appointment, but even if that hadn’t been an issue, there was the fact that her mother had called with bad news.
Apparently, the family was pretty broken up, something that didn’t surprise me considering that Frank was never one to be very diplomatic. I had always served to smooth things over, but now the reigns were handed to me.
It turned out that neither Adriana’s mother or sister would go to visit Frank. He was still recovering, and he probably wouldn’t care, but the issue had hit close to home for her.
Calmly, I comforted her. “We chose a challenging life, but we can make the best of it.”
