One
Lorenzo
I was up shit’s creek without a paddle.
I should have known that theLordandMasteron high wouldn’t help me. It seemed all I did lately was anger big brother, even though that was something I tried to avoid like the plague. It wasn’t my fault he was too damn absorbed with his wedding plans to my future sister-in-law, Layla Franks. Sweet girl. I liked her. I really did. She was suitable for Giovanni. That was when she was around and could keep his temper in check. Yet somehow, she was never around when Giovanni was handing me my ass.
Looking back, I could see where I went wrong.
It was an honest mistake.
It could have happened to anyone but it didn’t. It happened to me and now I was the one who was going to have to pay the price.
You see, I wasn’t really looking for trouble. I just wanted to have fun. Fun is supposed to be harmless. But in my case, fun tended to cause more problems than necessary.
Story of my life.
I was the fourth oldest of the Valentinetti Family. I shared that spot with my twin Luciano, the good son. Luciano was friendly, kind and never got into trouble, I was the wild one, always in the papers and not the good kind and I was always looking for the easy way out.
What can I say?
I am who I am and I own it.
My whole life, I always took the easy way out. If I didn’t like something or it was too hard, I just dropped it. Like the piano lessons my mother insisted I take that barely lasted a month. The soccer team that ended rather quickly when a teammate kicked me in the groin. I was supposed to be in the high school play but never did because I never learned my lines. Yep, unless something benefited me in a way that suited my needs, I didn’t give a damn. I skated through high school and barely made it out of college alive.
Whoever said college was fun, lied.
The parties were fun, the classes not so much.
Like all the times before, I wanted to drop it like a hot potato. Only Giovanni refused to let me quit. He said if I didn’t finish, he would cut me off and I believed him. Not that he could actually cut me off. The trust our father set up for us was ours once we turned twenty-one but if Giovanni could find a way to make my trust disappear…he would.
My whole life, everyone that knew me told me that eventually, life would bite me in the ass, that I needed to grow up and be a responsible adult.
Why in the hell would I do that?
Being an adult was not fun.
Not at all.
I wanted to do what I wanted. Whatever made me happy.
Too bad I had no clue what that was.
I did know that my ass was about to be arrested and there was nothing I could do to stop it. So, when I walked out of the Valentine Nightclub, I wasn’t surprised to see several police officers and a swat team waiting for me.
Swat team? That was a bit of overkill, I thought, sighing.
Removing an invisible piece of lint from my suit, I straightened my jacket, smiled and said, “Hello, boys. Looking for me?”
Looking back, that probably wasn’t the best way to have greeted the officers of the law but hell, I was a righteous bastard with no sense of self-preservation. I honestly believed if they were there to arrest me, there was no sense in going quietly. What I hadn’t figured on was the amount of extreme measures the officers were going to use to apprehend me. To say I was shocked was an understatement but hey, I went down fighting.
That had to mean something, right?
If my troubles weren’t bad enough, I now added resisting arrest and bodily harm of a police officer. Well, several police officers but I stopped counting after seven.
Now I found myself sitting cuffed to a metal table in an uncomfortable metal chair. I was sitting in a small room with no windows to the outside world and a two-way glass mirror, where I knew three or more individuals were watching me.
Yep, my night was looking up.