A few of us dropped our heads at the fact that she’d lost her father. Family ties ran deep enough that some felt another’s pain. Mario shouldn’t have used her father for leverage. Couldn’t he have used something else? Couldn’t he have been less calculating?
Mario lifted an eyebrow. “You’re right. Douglass was my kind of guy.” He clapped his hands together as if it was decided. “Tell me where Jimmy was last night. With you? All night?”
She turned to stare at her boyfriend. He glared back at her, bullets of sweat forming as his eyes bulged silently, commanding her to back him. She hesitated, and I swear if Jimmy could have, he would have strangled the answer he wanted out of her.
She whispered, “He was with me.”
Jimmy yelled, “See! I’m not making up stories. Don’t pin this on me, Mario.” His brow was furrowed as he pleaded with him.
The silence stretched as we all waited for Mario’s decision.
Katalina spoke up before anyone else did. “He was with me,” she repeated. “But after we fought some and he held his gun to my head, he left to see Sasha. He didn’t return the whole night.”
“You littlestronza, do you think I give you what I do so that you can—” Mario’s muscle men shoved Jimmy down in his seat just as he was rising to go at her.
She didn’t cower or shrink back. She dragged her red fingernails across her lips. Her eyes shined like she enjoyed it, like a feline ready for a fight. I might have been the only one to see her brilliance in that moment, but it radiated from her. Katalina thrived in the midst of her lover’s demise. I wasn’t proud to admit my dick hardened watching her, and I wanted to know more about her than I should. I wanted to bottle up her radiance and study it, take her to one of the places I kept secret and hold her there long enough to slice away her layers and understand her.
She was the first enigma I’d come across that enraptured me.
But my heart jolted back as my mind registered her words.
“Sasha,” I whispered. The name matched my unborn baby’s mother, my ex-fiancée. The rhythm of my heart sped up, my stomach suddenly jumped into my throat.
It had to be a coincidence.
But there weren’t coincidences in the mob.
Mario set a hand on my shoulder. “Not your Sasha, son. She’s an untouchable. Who is this Sasha?” he asked.
Jimmy eyeballed us both. “Look . . .” He sighed and then ran a hand through his hair that was wet with his sweat.
The walls around me shifted at the fear in his voice. No one’s voice shook like that unless they knew they were about to reveal something unredeemable.
“This morning, I went there when you were working, Rome.” He groaned at his own story, as if he was disappointed in his actions. “I shouldn’t have been seeing her. You know how she was though? How she looked at you with those big doe eyes, huh?”
Was.
I attempted to rise from my chair, but Mario held me down, a hand on my shoulder. “You’re lying,” I said, but my voice cracked and I cleared my throat. “Don’t fuck with me, Jimmy. I’ve always wanted to kill you. Don’t fuck with me and make me do it.”
He shook his head. “She was going to cause problems, okay? She tried to tell me she had my baby in her belly and—”
I flew off my chair at the words. They rang too close to the truth.
The baby was mine.
No one was supposed to know about her pregnancy. We were going to wait to tell everyone.
Mario’s muscle men surrounded me. They were nobodies in the grand scheme of things. They did our dirty work when we needed scapegoats.
I shoved at them, fought them, took out one guy’s knee and hit the other guy in the throat. Three more jumped up, but Bastian and Cade pulled me back.
“Calm down,” Bastian kept whispering.
The rage consumed me, coiled around my soul, burned deep in my tendons and pumped through my arteries and veins. When I couldn’t break from my cousins’ grasp, I turned to Mario. “I get him. His life is mine.”
Mario nodded. “So long as it’s here. Now. Those are the conditions. Everyone sees now what happens when you hit an untouchable and traffic women with my family name attached.”
Our new way of life had come years ago. The Armanelli family endeavored to stop making money on drugs and women. We wove ourselves into businesses, undercut gas prices, played with the stocks.