3. Dante
Dante
H e’s late as usual. It’s one of his many flaws that I despise. His tardiness is yet another one of his mind games.
“Would you like me to wait to serve dinner, sir?” Sophia asks.
I glance across the table at Maximo, who is chewing on a cocktail stick and drumming his fingers on the table. He’s not a patient man, especially when it comes to food, and I feel the annoyance in him crackling through the room.
“We’ll give him a few more minutes,” I say with a sigh.
“As you wish,” she says with a polite nod.
“Has our guest eaten yet?”
“I took her up some food at eight as you requested. She hasn’t left her room since.”
“Okay, good.” I dismiss her with a wave as my thoughts drift to Kat.
I wonder what she’s wearing and if she’s finally changed out of her cleaning uniform that’s too small for her curves.
When she was packing her things at her house, I tried not to look at her underwear as she stuffed it into the bag, but there was definitely a pair of panties with tiny pink hearts all over them.
She doesn’t seem like a hearts-on-her-panties kind of woman, but then she doesn’t seem like a woman who would quit her dream job to clean office blocks for twenty bucks an hour either.
Sophia comes hurrying back inside. “Your father is here, sir. Shall I put the steaks on now?”
“For the love of God, yes, please,” Maximo groans, but Sophia ignores him and keeps her eyes trained on me.
“Yes, please,” I tell her.
She hurries out again, surprisingly nimble for a sixty-seven-year-old woman with an arthritic hip.
She should really retire, but whenever I suggest that, she looks at me like I’ve broken her heart and tells me she has nowhere else to go.
We had two housekeepers when my brother and his wife lived here too, but that seems so long ago now.
Regret gnaws at the pit of my stomach, or perhaps it’s just hunger.
My father’s incredibly loud voice reverberates around the hallway outside, signaling his arrival.
With an inward groan, I brace myself for an evening in his company.
He insists on us meeting for dinner once a month, framing his visits as an opportunity to see his favorite son, but we both know neither of those things are true.
When he walks into the room, he opens his arms as he approaches me. “mio figlio.” He smiles widely.
I fake one too and accept his embrace. He pats me on the back. “You lost a little weight, son?” he asks as he steps back a little, his eyes full of mock concern.
He has done this all my life. Preys on what he thinks are my insecurities.
I was a scrawny kid until I hit fifteen and he reminded me of it every goddamn day of my life.
But I’m not that kid anymore. I’m six-foot-four and two hundred and forty pounds.
I train in my gym almost every day. I can bench press one and a half times my own body weight, and I spar with a former heavyweight champion.
My suits are custom-made and they still fit me exactly the way they always have, but I’ve lost weight. Right?
“Pretty sure my weight’s the same as the last time you were here, Pop,” I reply.
“Hmm.” He arches a brow as though he doesn’t believe me. “And, Maximo. I might have known you’d be here,” he says it with a smile on his face, but his tone drips with disdain.
“Well, I never could resist a good steak, Sal,” Maximo replies with a well-practiced smile.
My father’s eye twitches as Maximo uses his name informally. He prefers his full title — Salvatore or Mr. Moretti, especially from the orphan he brought into his home, and who he believes owes him a debt. But even my father knows better than to challenge the loose cannon that is my right hand.
“Shall we?” I pull out a chair for him and we all sit at the table.
Maximo pours us all a glass of Chianti.
“So, how is business?” my father finally asks — his usual opener.
“Good.” My standard reply.
“You dealt with the business at the warehouse last week?”
“Yes.” There’s always business at the warehouse.
“And what about Leo Evanson? You got that money he stole from me?”
My insides twist into a knot. Here we go.
Leo Evanson really fucked me over when he decided to enter the most lucrative poker game in Chicago.
Not only because he cheated and walked away with a quarter of a million dollars that he didn’t earn, but also because one of the men sitting at that table was my father’s old buddy, Constantine.
Now, Constantine Benetti has been a gambling man for as long as I’ve known him.
He’s one of the best poker players there is, however, his penchant for women half his age with expensive tastes in shoes, handbags, and cocaine means he spends it faster than he can win it.
So, when the big games happen once a month at one of our clubs, my father bankrolls Benetti and takes half of his winnings.
So the money that he stole, really belongs to my father — and therein lies my problem.
My father doesn’t need the money. It’s pocket change to him, but he doesn’t need his old friend thinking that he’s incapable of getting their money back from a street punk like Leo Evanson.
Their whole arrangement was under the table of course. Nobody knew about it and Benetti’s ego and my father’s paranoia ensured it stayed that way, until now. Now every fucker knows that Leo stole from the Morettis and he is running for his life.
“Leo took off. No one knows where he is.”
“What about the sister? You looked into her, right?”
I sense Maximo’s eyes on me.
“Yeah. He was staying with her, but he bailed. Took her savings too.”
“So, does she know where he is? Have any leads to chase?”
I shake my head and sip my wine. “She didn’t know anything.”
My father frowns at me. “She must have known something.”
“No,” I say firmly, trying to keep the annoyance from my tone.
“How hard did you push her to talk?” He looks at Maximo now because that’s his particular area of expertise.
“Enough,” I reply on his behalf.
“She dead?” he asks nonchalantly as he drinks his wine.
“No.”
“You get any money from her at least?” he asks with a sigh.
“She doesn’t have any.”
That seems to be the final straw, and he turns to face me. “So, you got nothing? That fuck steals a quarter of a million dollars from me and you got nothing? Are you losing your touch, ragazzo ?”
My knuckles turn white as I clench my hands.
Maximo catches my eye across the table and gives a subtle shake of his head.
My relationship with my father is complex and bound up in so much guilt and regret and anger that communicating with him in any way feels too damn difficult.
So I keep it all locked away and deal with him as little as humanly possible, because if I were to ever lift that lid and let some of this rage out of me, I might just fucking kill him where he stands.
And despite who I am, killing my own father — the great Salvatore Moretti — is not high on my list of priorities.
I force my muscles to relax, curling my fingers around the delicate stem of my wineglass before I take a sip.
“Not nothing. I have his sister,” I say calmly.
He blinks at me, amused. “You have her?”
“Yes.”
“Where? Are you using her as bait?”
“I don’t think he’d take that bait. He doesn’t give a fuck about her,” I say, annoyance prickling beneath my skin again. But this time, it’s directed at Kat’s brother.
“So, what then? You taking your pound of flesh?” he asks with a sly grin, and my stomach churns as I think about the things this man has done.
Nothing would make him happier than me telling him I had Kat chained in the basement downstairs where I could torture her or use her for whatever pleasure I wanted to take.
That is the kind of man he’d be proud of.
“No. She’s working for me,” I grit out as I await the inevitable disdain that’s about to spew from his mouth.
“ Working for you?” he snorts. “As what? Your personal whore? You’re Dante Moretti, you don’t pay women for that, mio figlio . It’s beneath men like us.”
“No, we just fuck them anyway, right? Regardless of who they are and whether they want it?”
“She’s a nurse,” Maximo interrupts our heated exchange, and my father’s gaze shifts to him instead.
“A what?”
“A nurse. She can remove bullets. Stitch wounds. Help a man live after he’s been tortured for days. Stop him bleeding out too soon,” Maximo says with a shrug.
“So, she’s your little pet?” my father asks with a scowl.
“Maybe I’ll train her to be my assistant?” Maximo laughs darkly, and that seems to appease my father a little.
“And what about my money? What about that piece of shit who stole it?”
“We’ll find him,” I assure him.
“Just make sure you do,” he hisses. “Because it makes you look weak when you bring home strays instead of putting them down.”
“Weak?” I snarl at him. “Who are you to call anyone weak? The man who let his wife die alone in agony because he was too busy fucking his whore?”
“Watch your goddamn mouth. I should have known you wouldn’t be able to handle this responsibility. I should have let Lorenzo…” He shakes his head, and a whisper of regret flickers over his face.
I think that must be the only thing in his whole life he feels any regret over.
He made me head of the Cosa Nostra to punish my older brother and to drive a wedge between us that could never be healed.
Lorenzo and I were unbreakable when we stood together, and he hated that.
He thought the threat of losing his legacy would be enough to bring my older brother back to his side.