by Sophie Lark
Not that I can entirely blame him for that.
“What is it with you Italians?” he sneers. “Where did you learn your manners? You come to a party where you’re not invited. Eat my food, drink my liquor. Then you break into my house. Try to burn it the fuck down. And you steal from me . . .”
I feel Sebastian stiffen ever so slightly. He doesn’t look back at me, but I know he wants to.
I’m also confused about what the fuck Callum is talking about. Then I remember the pocket watch, still tucked in the front pocket of my shorts. I’d completely forgotten about it.
“Look,” Sebastian says, “the fire was an accident. We don’t want any trouble.”
“Well that’s just bullshit, isn’t it?” Callum says softly. “You came looking for trouble. And now you’ve got it.”
It’s not easy to rile up Sebastian. Threatening his little sister is a good way to do it. Now he’s bristling, balling up his fists in return, and stepping all the way in front of me.
“You think you’re some kinda tough guy, bringing your boyfriend along?” Sebastian says, jerking his head toward the still-silent boxer. “I’ve got brothers, too. You better fuck off before I call them here to peel your lily-white skin off.”
Not bad, Seb. For someone who doesn’t do a lot of threatening, that came out pretty menacing.
I don’t need protecting, though. I dart forward so I’m right next to Sebastian and I say, “Yeah, fuck off back to your fancy little mansion. You wanna play at being a gangster? You’re just a bitch-ass politician. What’re you gonna do, rubber stamp us to death?”
Callum Griffin fixes me with his icy stare. He’s got thick, dark eyebrows above his pale eyes. The effect is inhuman and unpleasant.
“That’s a good point,” he says softly. “I do have an image to protect. But it’s funny . . . I don’t think there’s anyone around at the moment.”
That’s true. The pier is empty, all the way along its length. There are people up at the shops on Division Street. But no one close enough to hear us if I yelled.
My throat tightens.
I don’t feel afraid very often. I’m scared now. Despite what I said, I don’t think Callum is weak. He’s tall, powerfully built. And above all, he’s staring me down without an ounce of fear. He’s not wondering what he should do. He’s already decided.
He gives a nod to his enforcer. The boxer steps forward, fists raised. Before I can speak or move, he’s hit Sebastian four times, twice in the face and twice in the body.
Blood bursts from Sebastian’s nose. He doubles over, groaning. He tries to fight back—all of my brothers have been trained to fight in one way or another. But where Dante and Nero took their practice to the streets, Sebastian’s interest has always been athletic, not violent. Still, he manages to get in a couple of hits thanks to his superior height and reach. One of his punches makes the boxer stumble backward a step. But the nasty fucking goon blocks Sebastian’s other blows, before slamming my brother in the kidney with a punch that makes him crumple and fall to the ground.
The whole fight lasts maybe ten seconds. I’m not just standing there—I try to hit the guy from the side, and indeed I succeed in popping him once in the ear. He shoves me back with one hand, so hard that I almost fell over.
So I launch myself at Callum instead. I manage to nail him once right in the jaw, then he shoves me hard in the chest, and this time I do fall back, smacking the back of my skull against the pier railing.
Callum looks a little startled, like he didn’t quite mean to do that. Then his face hardens, and he says, “Where’s the watch, you fucking degenerates?”
“We don’t have your watch,” Sebastian says, spitting blood onto the wooden boards of the pier.
I do have the watch. But I’m not giving it to this gaping asshole.
The boxer grabs Sebastian by the hair and cracks him across the jaw again. The blow is so hard that for a second the light goes out of Seb’s eyes. He shakes his head to clear it, but he looks dazed.
“Get away from him!” I shriek, trying to pull myself to my feet. My head is spinning, and my stomach turns over. The back of my skull is throbbing. I bet there’s a lump the size of an egg back there.
“Give me the watch,” Callum says again.
The boxer kicks my brother in the ribs to encourage him. Sebastian groans and clutches his side. The sight of this monster beating my youngest and kindest brother is driving me out of my fucking mind. I want to murder both of these men. I want to douse them in gasoline and set them ablaze like those fucking curtains.
But I don’t have any gasoline. So I reach in my pocket and pull out the watch instead.
It’s heavy in my palm. My fingers clench tightly around it. I hold it up over my head
“Is this what you’re looking for?” I say to Callum.
His eyes move to my fist, caught there, and for a moment his face softens with relief.
Then I cock back my arm and I fling that fucking watch into the lake like I’m throwing the opening pitch in Wrigley Field.
The effect on Callum Griffin is incredible. His face goes marble white.
“NOOOO!” he howls.
And then he does the craziest thing of all.
He launches himself over the railing, diving down into the water, suit and all.
The boxer stares after his boss in astonishment. He’s confused, not sure what to do without instructions.
Then he looks back down at Seb. He lifts up one booted foot and he stomps it down on Sebastian’s knee as hard as he can.
Sebastian screams.
I charge at the boxer. I’m smaller than him, and I weigh a whole lot less. But by getting low and diving at his knees, with the element of surprise on my side, I actually manage to knock him over. It helps that he trips over Sebastian’s outstretched legs on his way down.
He falls hard on the pier. I’m punching and pummeling every inch of him I can reach. With his good leg, Sebastian rears back and kicks the boxer right in the face. I jump up and kick him several more times for good measure.
But this guy is the fucking Terminator. That’s not going to keep him down for long. So, I grab Seb’s arm and I haul him up, making him yell again as he accidentally puts weight on his bad leg.
I sling Sebastian’s arm around my shoulder. Leaning heavily on me, he half hops, half limps down the pier. It’s like a nightmare three-legged race, where the prize is not getting murdered by that boxer, or by Callum Griffin once he realizes there’s no way in hell he’s finding that watch in the freezing cold, pitch-black lake.
My head is still pounding, and the pier seems a mile long. I keep dragging Sebastian along, wishing he wasn’t so tall and so damn heavy.
As we near the street at last, I hazard a look back over my shoulder. The boxer is leaning over the railing, probably looking for his boss. He seems like he might be shouting something, but I can’t tell from here.
I hope Callum drowned.
‘Cause if he didn’t, I have a feeling I’m going to be seeing him again very soon.
4
Callum
I don’t know what I was thinking, jumping in after that watch.
The moment I hit the water—still fucking freezing, barely warmed up at all by the early summer weather—the cold is like a slap to the face, waking me up.
I’m so desperate that I keep diving down, eyes open, searching for a glint of gold in the black water.
Of course, there’s nothing to see, nothing at all. The water under the pier is choppy, full of sand and pollutants. Even at midday the sun would hardly penetrate. At night, it might as well be motor oil.
My suit constricts my arms and legs, my dress shoes weighing me down all the more. If I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I might be in serious trouble. The waves are trying to smash me against the pilings, the pillars sharp with muscles and barnacles.
I have to swim away from the pier before I can stroke back to shore. All of that takes enough time that Jack is pretty much
freaking out by the time I drag myself up on the sand—filthy, soaking, and angrier than I’ve ever been in my life.
That fucking BITCH!
I never knew much about the youngest Gallo. Her father keeps her out of the spotlight, and she’s not involved in the family business as far as I know.
At first glance, when we approached her and her brother on the pier, I almost felt guilty. She looked young, barely older than Nessa. And she’s beautiful, which shouldn’t have had any impact on my resolve, but it did. She’s got light-brown skin, dark hair, and narrow gray eyes, slightly tilted up at the outer corners. She stiffened up as soon as we approached, noticing us even before Sebastian did.
I felt a twinge of guilt threatening them, seeing how Sebastian tried to step in front of her to protect her. That’s what I would do for my sisters, in the same position.
But seeing the girl’s height and dark hair, I remembered my glimpse of the person fleeing the library, and I began to suspect that it was her that set the fire.
Then she stepped forward and started yelling at me, with the temperament and vocabulary of a sea-hardened sailor, and I was certain she was the one who broke into our house.
Then, instead of handing over the watch, she flung it over the railing like a fucking psychopath. And I realized that pretty face disguised the soul of a demon. That girl is pure evil, the worst of the whole family. She deserves whatever she gets.
The question is, what am I going to do about it?
Right now, I want to murder every last one of them.
But I can’t afford that kind of bloodbath right before the election.
So, I guess I’ll just have to do the next best thing—bankrupt the bastards.
They tried to burn my house down—I’m going to burn down the tower they’re building over on Oak Street.
That will be the appetizer. The main meal will be wiping out every restaurant and nightclub under their control as well.
Fantasies of the hellfire I’m going to reign down on their heads is the only thing keeping me warm while I stomp down the street in my soggy dress shoes and sopping wet suit.
Jack jogs along next to me, embarrassed that he let a kid and his little sister get the best of us. He can tell I’m in a murderous mood, so he doesn’t want to say anything to make it worse. I notice that he’s got a bloody nose himself, and a cut over his right eyebrow. Pretty humiliating for someone who won a UFC championship a couple of years back.
My shoes make a disgusting squelching sound.
My custom suit smells like a dying starfish.
FUCK THAT GIRL!
I’ve got to change clothes before I literally lose my mind.
I head back to the house, where the party is beginning to wind down. I’ve missed the singer, not that I cared, except to see the look of joy on Nessa’s face. Just another cock up in this shit-show of a night.
I’ve barely stepped foot through the door when I’m met by my furious-looking father.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he snarls. “Why didn’t you tell me there were Gallos at our party?”
He looks down at my clothes, dripping dirty lake water on the spotless tiles of the entryway.
“And why are you wet?” he says flatly.
“We had a dust-up down at the pier, but I’m handling it,” I tell him through gritted teeth.
“Unacceptable,” he says. “Get in my office. Tell me everything.”
I’m itching to get back out there and wreak fiery vengeance on those greasy guidos, but I march in the office to give him a report. He’s not pleased by a single word of it.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he shouts, so close to my face that his saliva hits my cheek. “Why are you starting a gang war in the middle of your campaign?”
“They started it!” I yell back. “They tried to burn our fucking house down. They stole grandfather’s watch and threw it in the lake! What do you want me to do, bake them a fucking cake?”
“Lower your voice,” my father hisses at me. “People will hear you.”
As if he wasn’t just yelling at me twice as loud.
I take a deep breath, trying to control the anger threatening to spiral out of control.
“I told you,” I say, quiet and strangled. “I. Will. Handle. This.”
“Absolutely not,” my father says, shaking his head. “You’ve already proven your incompetence. Crippling the youngest son? You’ve lost your mind. You know he’s some star athlete? You might as well have killed him.”
“Next time I will,” I seethe.
“You’re done,” he says, shaking his head.
“That’s not your decision!”
He shoves me hard in the chest.
It spikes my adrenaline all the more. I respect my father. He may look like a professor, but he’s killed men with his bare hands. I’ve seen him do it.
But he’s not the only one in the room who can break bones. I’m not the obedient son I once was. We’re eye to eye these days.
“As long as I’m head of this family, you’ll do what I say,” my father says.
There are so many things I’d like to say to that. But I swallow them down. Just barely.
“And what do you propose . . . father?” I mutter.
“This is getting out of control,” my father says. “I’m going to call Enzo Gallo.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Shut your mouth,” he snaps. “You’ve done enough damage. I’ll see what I can do to repair this before both our families end up dead in the street.”
I can’t believe this. After they spat in our face in our very own house, he wants to call them up and negotiate. It’s insane. It’s cowardly.
My father can see the mutiny in my eyes.
“Give me your phone,” he says. He waits, hand outstretched, until I give it to him. It was in my pocket when I jumped in the lake, so it’s useless anyway.
“I’m going to contact Enzo Gallo,” he repeats. “You will stay here until I send for you. You won’t speak to anyone. You won’t call anyone. You won’t step foot outside this house. Do you understand me?”
“You’re grounding me?” I scoff. “I’m a grown man, father. Don’t be ridiculous.”
He takes off his glasses so his pale blue eyes can bore all the way into my soul.
“You are my eldest child and my only son, Callum,” he says. “But I promise you, if you disobey me, I will cut you out, root and branch. I have no use for you if you can’t be trusted. I will strike you down like Icarus if your ambition outstrips your orders. Do you understand?”
Every cell of my body wants to tell him to take his fucking money, and his connections, and his so-called genius and shove it right up his ass.
But this man is my father. My family is everything to me—without them, I’d be a ship without rudder or sail. I’m nothing if I’m not a Griffin.
So I have to nod my head, submitting to his orders.
Inside I’m still boiling, the heat and pressure building.
I don’t know when or how. But if something doesn’t change between us soon, I’m going to explode.
5
Aida
My brothers are down in the basement, suiting up. Or at least, Dante and Nero are. Sebastian is still at the hospital with my father. His knee is fucked, that much is certain. Ribs are broken, too. I can’t bear the look of misery on his face. His season is ruined. Possibly the rest of his career. God, he might not even walk right after this.
And it’s all my fault.
The guilt is like a shroud, wrapping around and around and around my head. Each glance at Sebastian, each memory of my idiocy, is like another layer wrapping around my face. Soon it will smother me.
I wanted to stay with Sebastian, but Papa snapped at me to go home.
There I found Dante and Nero strapping on bulletproof vests and ammo belts, arming themselves with half the guns in the house.
“Where are you going?” I ask them nervously.
<
br /> “We’re going to kill Callum Griffin, obviously,” Nero says. “Maybe the rest of his family, too. I haven’t decided yet.”
“You can’t hurt Nessa,” I say quickly. “She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Neither did Riona, but I don’t have the same sense of charity toward her.
“Maybe I’ll just break her knee, then,” Nero says carelessly.
“We’re not doing anything to Nessa,” Dante growls. “This is between us and Callum.”
By the time they’re ready to leave, they look like a cross between Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator.
“Let me come with you,” I beg.
“No fucking way,” Nero says.
“Come on!” I shout. “I’m part of this family, too. I’m the one that helped Sebastian get away, remember?”
“You’re the one who got him in that mess to start with,” Nero hisses at me. “Now we’re going to clean it up. And you’re staying here.”
He shoulder-checks me on his way by, knocking me roughly against the wall.
Dante is marginally kinder, but equally serious.
“Stay here,” he says. “Don’t make this worse.”
I don’t give a shit what they say. The moment they leave, I’m out the door, too. So I follow them up the stairs, not knowing exactly what I’m going to do, but knowing I’m not going to be left here waiting like a naughty puppy.
But before Dante is even halfway up the stairs, his phone buzzes in his pocket.
He picks up, saying, “What is it?” in a tone that makes me certain that it’s Papa on the other end of the line.
Dante waits, listening, for a long time. Then he says, “I understand.”
He hangs up. He’s looking at me with the strangest expression on his face.
“What is it?” Nero says.
“Take off that vest,” Dante says to Nero. “Aida, go change your clothes.”
“Why? Into what?”
“Something clean that doesn’t look like shit,” he snaps at me. “Do you own anything like that?”
Maybe. Possibly not, by Dante’s standards.