Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 79991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
“How much longer should we stay?” Prince leans against a stack of crates, arms folded while I pace.
“How the fuck should I know?” I fire back.
He remains impassive, satisfied to watch me unravel.
“You realize there’s no way for us to go back to Nonno and tell him this didn’t work out?”
I pause and direct my gaze at him. “He couldn’t blame you—us—for this.”
“You do know who we’re talking about, don’t you? Surely, you’ve learned a thing about the man’s temper? If memory serves, you were with me in his study not so long ago, and you’ve witnessed his wrath on more than one occasion.”
He takes this calmly, too, merely shrugging. “If the man didn’t see fit to show up, there isn’t much you can do. If we push too hard, we run the risk of appearing desperate. And like Renato said, Alvarez needs this much more than we do.”
That prick. What’s his game? What’s he trying to prove? “So help me, if he’s hiding somewhere, waiting to see how long I’ll take this before walking out, I’ll break his neck.”
“Who knows? He might have gotten stuck in traffic,” he teases.
The look I shoot him is murderous, and he holds up both hands while wearing an expression that’s almost apologetic. Almost.
“Trying to lighten the mood, is all. It won’t do you any good, looking like you’re ready to tear someone’s head off if the man walked in this very minute. Remember. Never let them see what you’re thinking.”
The way he talks, I’d think he was the one who spent his formative years learning at our grandfather’s side. It wasn’t until he, too, was left orphaned when his bastard father was murdered in a deal gone wrong that Renato brought him to live with us.
“You don’t need to tell me that. I know how to turn it on and off when need be.” I’d be dead a dozen times over by now if I didn’t.
When I was a child, I couldn’t understand the different masks my grandfather wore and still wears to this day. I couldn’t comprehend how he spoke disparagingly or even bitterly about our rivals in the privacy of his study, among his men, then behaved entirely differently to their faces.
He sat me down and explained that lesson to me one day when I finally blurted out my confusion. I remember him as he was when I was a kid. He seemed to me like the biggest man in the world. Unbeatable, unbreakable, made of steel. When he spoke, I listened—not that he ever gave me much of a choice otherwise. I shudder at the memory of some of the punishments he inflicted when he caught me zoning out or disobeying him.
“We never show the world our faces,” he told me at the time, sitting in the study with a cigar between his teeth. “To each other, yes, because family is all we have. But the rest of the world? We can’t afford to let our guard down, not ever. That’s when mistakes are made, and lives are lost. One day, when you’re sitting at the head of our family, you’ll understand the responsibility of so many lives depending on your judgment. Whether or not you can hide your true feelings in a tense situation.”
From that day on, I trained myself to keep my true thoughts and feelings hidden when in the presence of anyone I didn’t trust, which essentially means anyone outside my family. I’ve smiled in the faces of men whose lives I ended moments later and felt nothing when their bodies hit the ground. I’ve lost not a moment’s sleep over it either because my grandfather was right. Family is all we have, and I protect what’s mine. Anyone who fucks up badly enough to earn a bullet between the eyes is an enemy of my family.
Yet there’s no revealing my thoughts in advance. Does the spider show off its web to the flies it hopes to trap?
In other words, as much as I’d love nothing more than to kick Josef Alvarez’s face in for making an ass out of me, I’ll be deferential once we’re face-to-face. Even overly so.
I mutter a string of colorful Italian phrases once I check my watch. “We’ve been here an hour.” My feet are about to wear grooves into the concrete floor from all this pacing.
“What’s the protocol for a situation like this? What’s a respectable amount of time before giving up?”
“I don’t have the first clue. But something tells me if we waited three hours, Renato would wonder why it wasn’t three hours and one minute.”
The way he snickers tells me he knows as well as I that it’s true. “Try reaching out to him? See if he has any thoughts? Maybe something has changed with Alvarez.”
“You don’t think he would have told me the moment anything changed?” I shake my head, my anger growing with every step I take. “One big fucking game.”