“You can,” he agreed easily with that confidant nonchalance I’d always admired. “But you’ve had reason to be less than you should be.”
“My therapist doesn’t like me to make excuses,” I muttered somewhat petulantly.
He chuckled. “Therapists typically don’t.”
“You’ve been?” I was shocked by the prospect of my infallible, affable brother needing therapy. It seemed like the kind of forced introspection only the deeply unhappy were forced to seek.
He shrugged. “Secrets, remember? There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“A secret for a secret?” I suggested.
There was reluctance in the set of his stubborn mouth, but when I pointed out it was him who had said secrets had corroded our family dynamic, he agreed.
“You obviously know about Savannah Meyers, er, Richardson,” he corrected, referring to the older woman he’d dated briefly a few years ago. I’d teased him often about liking older women, perhaps callously, so I only held his hand and listened with an open face now. “I met her when I was driving for a Town Car service in London when I first moved over there. She was glamorous and elegant, like nothing I’d ever seen before. I fell in love with her before I even touched her.”
It was hard to listen to the throb of heartache in his voice. Sebastian was usually so full of sunshine and charm, laughter and easy affection, that seeing him haunted felt heretical.
He sucked a deep breath in through his teeth, sat up a little straighter, and pinned me with a somber stare. “It was through Savvy that I met Adam.”
I blinked.
He powered on. “When he showed up at one of my shows, I thought he was going to punch me for hitting on his wife. He didn’t. Instead, he propositioned me.” His free hand moved through the air like an agitated bird. “He was powerful, handsome, successful, but there was just something about him that called to me.”
Called to him like a wolf song in the night. The way something about Dante, about this life of his, called to me.
I squeezed his hand in understanding.
“I lived with them for a year before it went sour,” he said, his eyes lost to the past. “I tried to follow Savvy to America, but you know how that turned out.”
I did. The whole world did. The beautiful power couple that was the famous actor Adam Meyers and his pretty wife, Savannah, had suffered an acrimonious divorce. Almost immediately after, Savannah had moved to America and married the media tycoon, Tate Richardson.
“Seb, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I only lost one person I loved, and it felt like the bottom fell out of my world. I can’t imagine losing two.”
He didn’t deny that he’d loved them both, but he shrugged tensely, clearly uncomfortable.
“You know,” I said slowly, teasing him gently. “Beau has been my best friend for five years, and in his words, he’s ‘as gay as they come.’ I would never judge you for loving a man.”
“Just an older woman, then,” he asked pointedly.
I shrugged. “You dig. I dig. It’s how we’ve been for ages. I think I have you to thank for the quick wit that makes me a good lawyer.”
“You’re welcome,” he said magnanimously. “Cosima might suspect, but Giselle and Mama don’t know about Adam. No one does.”
Why did it mean so much more than the money or success I’d coveted for years to know that Sebastian had trusted me with such a secret?
“I won’t tell a soul,” I promised, then conjured up the word we’d used growing up when we were afraid in the dark, mafiosos at the door coming for our father. “Insieme, Sebastian.”
Insieme meant together.
The four of us together against the world.
Against the mafia and Seamus, even against the obliviousness of our poor, stressed mother.
Somewhere along the way, we’d lost that.
“Insieme, cara mia,” he repeated with the massive movie star grin that I’d seen on billboards and magazine covers in the past few years. “Now, your turn.”
It was easy to take a scalpel to my own wounds after hearing the extent of his. “I had surgery to try to fix my fertility issues.”
“Oh, Lena,” he murmured, sliding closer so he could wrap an arm gently around my shoulders for a sideways hug. “That’s good news, right?”
“It should be. I only have one ovary left after an ectopic pregnancy, and we were worried they’d have to take out the other because of a few large cysts, but Monica said they were able to save it. Monica, she’s an old friend and one of the best women’s doctors in the city, seems to think I might be able to conceive naturally or with some help with IVF when I’m ready.”
“You’ll be a wonderful mama,” he replied instantly. “You were a great one for us, and you were only a kid.”
I submerged myself in his praise like sinking into a hot bath, my flesh, blood, and bones warmed through by his words.
“Thank you,” I said empathetically. “Sometimes, lately, I’ve wondered.” I hesitated. “Have you met her?”
He knew without clarifying who I meant.
“Yes, she’s beautiful,” he told me, gentle but firm. “They already call her Genny. She has red hair like Gigi, just a little lighter than yours, but Sinclair’s blue eyes. She can’t do much of anything yet, you know, except fart and smile, eat and sleep, but she’s a cute little thing.”
I knew she would be cute and lovely like Giselle had been as a baby. I’d expected the words to tear through me like a windstorm, eviscerating the ramshackle walls I’d built around that pain. Instead, I felt only a profound sense of loss.
“I don’t know how I’ll feel when I meet her,” I admitted. “It’s hard to imagine hating a baby.”
“You don’t have to,” he suggested mildly. “But I think we all understand how hard it is for you, Lena. Per la misera, the man you thought was the love of your life left you for your sister. It’s like something out of one of Mama’s soaps.”
It was hard not to laugh around Seb, even talking about something so painful. “Do you understand, though? I felt like when it happened, you and Cosima were team Giselle.”
Sebastian huffed. “There were no teams. You are both our sisters, and we love you. It was just…It was easier for us to see that you and Daniel weren’t as well suited in reality as you seemed on paper.” He hesitated before admitting in a soft voice that struck me like a hammer to the soul. “Gigi has always been so…dreamy and fragile. She has an artist’s soul and all of us, you included, safeguarded her from the bad things as much as we could. I think it became a habit. It was harder to be angry with her for hurting you, especially when she was doing it because she was in love, than it was to be angry with you for being cruel to her about it. It wasn’t fair, Lena, and I’m sorry it’s been one in a long line of circumstances that have made you feel unloved.”
It was probably surprising how much comfort I took from his words. Not because I felt they were just, but because they validated what I’d always wondered.
“I was cruel,” I could admit as I wrapped my arms around myself. “But can you imagine what it felt like to have not one but two men prefer your younger sister to you?”
“No, though Christopher was more monster than man.”
A sharp laugh tore itself out of my throat and fell bloody between us. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“You could tell me,” he suggested, his body coiled tight on the bed beside me, as if Christopher was in the room and he was about to duel him for my honor. “It eats at me all the time that I didn’t know what he was doing to my sisters. I’m the brother, il padre di famiglia. I should have protected you.”
“Seb,” I soothed, reaching out to pat his handsome cheek, remembering how round it had been as a boy when I gave him the nickname little potato. “I was the eldest. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean it wasn’t my responsibility to protect you even from information that could hurt you. There’s no point in rehashing it all now, though. It’s in the
past. He’s in prison for assaulting Giselle, and he should remain there for a very long time.”
“So, you never think of him?” he pressed skeptically.
Only every few days now, I thought but didn’t say.
Still, Seb read my silence and grunted unhappily. “I hope one day you share it with someone you love, even if it’s not me.”
“I think this has been enough for one night,” I joked weakly, wincing at a pang in my belly.
A loud bang at the door startled both of us a moment before it swung open to reveal Frankie and Adriano holding a large black frame in their hands.
“Buona sera,” Frankie called out as he maneuvered through the door with what I realized was a massive television set.
“What in the world are you doing?” I asked, straightening instinctively, then gasping when it pulled at my surgical sites.
“Take it easy,” Adriano ordered gruffly without looking at me as they lugged the set to the wall opposite my bed.
A moment later, Chen appeared in the doorway, barely offering me a cursory glance as he carried in a wall mount and a drill.
“What the hell are you guys doing?” I demanded again, irritated that they were piling into my room when I was bonding for the first time in years with my brother.
Annoyed that I wasn’t looking my best at all. The minimal makeup I’d been able to wear into surgery had smudged off after hours of sleep this afternoon, and my hair was a wild mess of curls and flattened waves around my face.
I didn’t even like my brother to see me like that, let alone men I hardly knew. Men I could barely admit I wanted to like me.
“You can talk while we do it,” Marco offered as he sauntered into the room with his hands in the pockets of his black joggers. “Won’t take a minute.”
“I don’t need a TV in here,” I insisted as he took a seat on the end of my bed.
I thanked God I was tidy by nature, and no spare unmentionables were lying around.
“Sure, you do,” he insisted. “You’re sick. Binge-watching TV is the only good thing about being stuck in bed. You like HBO? My wife’s addicted to that True Blood. You like vamps, too? Lady catnip, I’m telling ya.”
“Marco,” I said, snapping my fingers to get his attention. He had the bad habit of rambling on and on away from the original conversation. “I really don’t need a television set, and I’m not sick.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “Don’t seem like the kinda lady to lie in bed all day, and that’s what you’ve been doing. Besides, I don’t follow your orders. I follow the boss’s, and he said, I’m quoting him, ‘Marco, get Elena a TV and set it up in her room within the hour.’” He winced. “’Course, it took me a little longer than that, but he don’t have to know that.”
“He already does,” Dante himself drawled from the doorway where we both turned to see him leaning against the jamb with his arms crossed like he’d been there a while.
Marco shot me an “oh shit” look, then smiled crookedly at Dante before ordering Adriano, Frankie, and Chen to pick up the pace.
“I don’t need a TV,” I reiterated to the “boss.”
It was difficult to look over at the long, broad glory of him in that tight black tee and gray sweatpants, more casual than I’d ever seen him outside of the gym, and not feel the ghost of his lips on my neck or those huge hands on my body. Not imagine the sheer power of the naked body beneath his clothes and the size of the dick that was a noticeable swell down the side of one thigh.
I shivered delicately but tried to hide it.
He stared at me steadily, unfazed by my messy appearance and my lack of gratefulness. “Beau said you liked watching it. He mentioned something about a show called Vampire Diaries.”
The only sign of his amusement was a twitch at the left side of his full mouth.
Marco hooted, slapping his thigh. “Didn’t I just say? All women like vamps. It’s a thing.”
“You’re a lady whisperer, Co,” Frankie remarked dryly over the sound of Chen drilling the mount into the wall above the dresser.
“Damn right,” Marco agreed with a cheeky grin.
I couldn’t help but grin back.
“They’re sexy,” I admitted with a little shrug.
“It’s the blood, isn’t it?”
This time, I had to gasp as laughter rippled through my belly. “No, Marco, it’s not the blood. It’s the…I don’t know. The passion, the possession, the animalistic tendencies.”
“Noted,” Dante drawled again from his place in the doorway.
The look on his face was pure hunger, the dark in his eyes expansive enough to drown in.
I swallowed thickly, then reconsidered what he’d said before. “When did you talk to Beau?”
Dante straightened from his lean and strolled in the room on the rolling gait that made my mouth dry, stopping only when he was at the side of my bed.
“Move over,” he demanded before reaching into his pocket and tossing my cell into my lap. “You should really change the passcode on that. Your mother’s birthday isn’t exactly original.”
“Hey,” I protested, hugging my phone to my chest. “Rule number two, no snooping.”
“When you keep things from me, I have no choice,” he said in that agreeable tone that made me see red.
“You are the most frustrating man on the planet,” I muttered.
Dante sat on the edge of the bed even though I hadn’t moved over and gently reached over to reposition the pillow at my back and neck so I was close to the middle of the bed and cozier than I had been before.
If I closed my eyes to breathe in his lemon and pepper scent while he leaned over my torso, he didn’t notice.
“You are the most infuriating woman,” he countered, but his eyes glittered like the New York City nightscape outside my windows.
“What a pair,” Sebastian interjected in a long drawl.
I shot him a glare, but he only widened his eyes in faux innocence and readjusted against the pillows on my other side. “The last time I saw you two together, you were practically choking Dante out for information on Cosi.”
Seb shrugged. “We’re men. We shared a glass of wine and talked about women one night this summer when we were both visiting Cosi in England.”
“Old friends,” Dante agreed.
“Men,” I muttered under my breath, secretly wishing things between women could be half as easy.
“Done,” Adriano announced, stepping back from the TV with a little smile on his big face.
“Took you long enough,” Marco grumbled.
“You did shit all,” Chen pointed out.
Marco sniffed. “I supervised.”
Frankie threw the remote control at his head in response.
“Interesting company you’re keeping these days,” Sebastian murmured to me.
As I looked at the motley assembly of criminals in my bedroom trying to make me comfortable after an invasive, personal surgery I thought I’d recover from alone in my brownstone, I considered the fact that Seb was right.
The nightmare that had started out as Dante and Yara forcing me to move in with him to keep him abreast of the RICO case had become something surprisingly more.
For now, these interesting men had made me one of their own.
“What’re we gonna watch?” Marco demanded as he settled at the foot of the bed. Chen and Addie also took seats in the armchairs by the vanity. “As long as it ain’t vamps, I’m good.”
“I don’t know, Co,” Frankie said, winking at me before he took a seat at the foot of the bed. “You might learn something valuable.”
Everyone, even Sebastian, laughed.
And that was how I ended one of the most vulnerable days of my life, surrounded by laughing men, most of whom had probably killed a man or committed any other half-dozen felonies.
And for the first time in my life, snuggled between the two big warm bodies of my brother and the mafioso I was coming to like more than I should, I didn’t care.
>
ELENA
Four weeks of little touches, a hand wrapped around my neck when he wanted me to focus on him, a stroke of my hair when he passed me in the kitchen, a squeeze of my hip when I stood beside him at the island making dinner, late nights spent watching movies in my room or on the couch with our shoulders pressed tight.
A few times when I’d fallen asleep on the couch following my surgery, Dante had even picked me up, all five-foot-ten inches of me, and carried me to my bedroom. I’d pretended to be asleep, too embarrassed to do otherwise when I was so close to his heart beating through the hard wall of his chest.
Four weeks of little touches while I recovered from my procedure and nothing else.
It was death by a thousand caresses, slowly shredding my ten-foot walls to ribbons.
My skin pebbled into goose bumps just being in the same room as Dante now, just catching the gravitational pull of those dark eyes across the living room.
I had to remind myself sternly that Dante was a criminal, a killer, essentially a beast in a multi-thousand-dollar suit. He wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all me.
I knew better.
Every experience in my life had taught me to know better.
But there was this flutter, a palpitation that I wondered if I should get checked out at the doctor whenever he found an excuse to touch me. And he did. Touch me. Often.
It wasn’t personal. I was learning that Dante touched everyone. He kissed Tore freely on both cheeks, hello and goodbye. He clamped a hand on the shoulder of a soldato, shook hands, and rubbed shoulders with his men the way a puppy might in a pen with its siblings.
He was incredibly tactile, which struck me as odd for a man in this day and age. Society had moved to a more cerebral plane, perhaps because of the influx of technology that allowed us to interact with minimal physical effort to obtain whatever we desired. Dante seemed to go out of his way to remain archaic. He had a young boy, Tony, deliver three physical copies of the paper every morning––The New York Times, The Guardian, and Corriere della sera. He demanded in-person meetings whenever he could manage it, even under the close watch of FBI surveillance, when there were countless platforms he could have used to conduct his business online that would have undoubtedly been less circumspect.
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