6. Nico
6
Nico
In the old dining hall, the Mori blood family gathers around an antique table. Noontime sun tints the windows white, breathes some life into the room. It’s a quick turnaround time. I thought Salvatore would push this meeting off for as long as possible, late into the evening, as he scrambled to make a counterplay and get to the root of my release.
The way I see it, there’s one of two options. Either Sal meant it when he said he wasn’t going to fight me— no chance —or he already has something up his sleeve. Some left hook that’s going to come out of the dark. I pace restlessly as everyone else files in. I can’t be still, suspicion running quick through my blood, fueling me past the sleeplessness weighing down my limbs.
I haven’t dealt with Sal as a don before, and I have a feeling underestimating him would be a dangerous mistake.
I’m greeted with handshakes and nods of respect as the family joins around the table. Some eyes regard me warmly, knowing . Others have tight-lipped smiles of uncertainty, their respect going only as far as it has to. Some, I hardly even know who they are, and that makes me uneasy. The kids have grown up while I’ve been gone.
Everyone takes a seat, finds their proper place among the ranks. Not me. I pace, restless and waiting.
Someone is wheeled into the room in a wheelchair, and I double-take, nearly jumping out of my skin at the sight.
“Jesus fuck ,” I snap as the withered old woman looks up at me from her seat. Cecilia Mori regards me, tight-lipped, looking like some living taxidermy project. Everyone said she was on her deathbed when I last saw the old crow, and that was over half a decade ago.
“I thought you were dead . Hell, I’m not sure you aren’t.”
“It’s a pleasant surprise to see you too, Nico,” she says, holding out a hand that could feature in an anatomy book. We shake, and I feel those brittle, bird-like bones under my palm. The slightest pressure and I think she’d crumble into dust. The old bitch is my great-aunt and the closest thing I ever had to a mother after mine died.
My father raised me—but he raised me into a don. A mafia man.
The woman in that chair is the one who raised the kid.
A handshake doesn’t feel like enough, but goddamn, I don’t know if she’d survive anything else. A hug might put her in the grave. Looking at her too long makes my skin crawl. It’s uncomfortable on some deep instinctual level. She’s too close to a corpse. You can’t look at her without being reminded of death, like he’s standing right there over her shoulder.
She’s wheeled up to her place at the table and her attendee shrinks back to a corner of the room.
When Salvatore enters, the room falls into a hush. Everyone stands. So much respect for a sheer presence . It sets my teeth on edge. Behind him, Marcel really has the balls to step into this room with the rest of us.
I bite out an insulted laugh.
“One of these things is not like the others,” I say, singsong and low, prowling in the back of the room while everyone else stands at attention. “One of these things doesn’t belong.”
“Marcel will wait outside for now,” Salvatore says, interrupting my taunting, “but in a few minutes, I’m going to have him join us.” Salvatore sits, and the rest of the room follows suit. For me, he gestures to the seat at his right. The one Marcel would have taken.
What the hell are they planning?
Salvatore opens up the meeting by welcoming me back. He makes half an effort to even sound like he means it. So generous . When we smile at each other, it’s with the pure certainty that neither of us would really mind if the other died.
“Nico has requested a meeting of the blood family,” Sal says, gesturing to the table. “I’ll let him speak his case.”
I lean back, glancing around the table and silently counting heads.
Like politics, most decisions in a family like this are already made before anybody sits down to vote. The outcome is already decided in some shady backroom where the power resides. But my case isn’t won just yet. I have a few friends here—men who know what they stand to gain from my control, who had better positions when I was in charge—but a few aren’t going to cut it.
“It’s not my case,” I say tersely. “It’s our case.”
I gesture to the people sitting around the table. “When our father was don, being blood family meant everything. You all were the top dogs. Even when I was just a kid, I knew who ran things. I knew who you didn’t mouth off to, who you looked away from when you passed them in the hall. Because you had that kind of respect. Being family, real family , meant something. So what the fuck happened?” I ask, glancing around the table at the people sitting there.
“How did we get so many outsiders taking up roles that should be going to our own kin? Hell, do you even know who takes the reins if something happens to Sal? God forbid, of course.” I grin. “But the next descendant is in diapers and the right-hand man isn’t even one of our own. I’m requesting the family appoint me as the underboss, and we start putting things back in their rightful place, how they should have been all along.”
Salvatore cuts in smoothly, “You all know Marcel, as you know the respect he’s earned through his years of service to you all. But sometimes, as Nico says, service isn’t enough. To amend his point—and I do agree that he has one—we’ve taken steps to bring Marcel into the family properly. Before you make any decisions, you should be aware that Marcel’s sister, Ava, is arranged to marry Thaddeus Mori.”
There’s some reaction to the news, some ripple that runs through the room. Approval, disapproval—it doesn’t matter. I can’t hear it. I’m reeling, off balance, my own thoughts a freight train, fueled by flame and dark as soot.
Ava .
I was looking for the left hook, and he hit me with a right.
I look down and realize my hands are fists.
“Last night, Nico told us he was concerned about Marcel’s unofficial place in the family, and Ava happens to be in a good position for a marriage. The union will make the family stronger, more whole. Marcel and Ava have been two of us for a long time now, and it’s past time that we recognized that in an official capacity. Thaddeus and Ava have my blessing.”
I’m not listening to the spiel, to all the double meanings Salvatore is laying on thick. Suddenly, I don’t give a damn about Marcel. I don’t care which chair I sit in, who or what I’m in charge of managing around here now.
There’s only one thought that has my head in a vise— Ava belongs to me .
I had the girl under my thumb for just one night. That was all it took to know that I want her under the rest of me.
Paranoia seeps through my thoughts, sends me spiraling down deep rabbit holes of what-ifs.
Does the girl just get off on thwarting me, so much so that she’s willing to wad her whole future up and dunk it into the trash if it means I don’t get what I want? From stealing my keys straight to stealing my position within the family...the girl moves quick, I’ll give her that.
But something about it itches at the back of my skull.
Ava faced down the barrel of a gun with a glower and tried to go toe to toe with a crowd of men twice her size. So why the hell would she let herself be pushed around like a little pawn on somebody else’s chess board?
Maybe Salvatore wasn’t the one I should have worried about underestimating.
I barely hear the rest of the meeting. The room swims in opinions, the family giving relentless back-and-forths, prattling off their pointless concerns like the peasantry that finally has the attention of the king. I don’t care now. I don’t give a fuck. I called the damn meeting and I can barely hear it, can’t listen to anything that isn’t the possessive howl itching under my skin.
Of all the things I thought were going to get in my way, I never thought it’d be her .
Someone is talking to me, the words landing like leaves on the surface of a lake, while I’m down here at the bottom, drowning.
I push back my chair, bringing everyone to a surprised hush.
“Nico?”
“You’ve wasted enough of my time already, Sal,” I growl. “I don’t have any more to give you. We’ll all end up back here again once you realize this is a Band-Aid on a fucking bullet hole.”
I march out the door, leaving the circus and its grinning clowns behind. Cecilia and I catch each other’s gazes as I go, her eyes glimmering shrewdly as she tries to read me. I ignore the stare and put the room behind me. My path runs straightforward and steady. I reach Ava’s room, the plain dark door at the end of the hall. The doorknob twists in my grip, and this time, I open her bedroom up. The bed is half-made, the TV paused.
She’s not here.
From the shelves overhead, I’m watched by the dead button eyes of a few dusty stuffed animals.
I step into her space, curious.
There’s a downturned picture on the nightstand, and glass shards scatter as I lift it up. It’s a picture of her and Vincent Mori. Ava hides half her face from the camera, peeking up from his shoulder and blushing hot, while Vincent laughs and takes the selfie. The cracked glass spiderwebs across their faces, and a stain darkens the picture’s corner, like it laid in something.
I chuck the glass shards into the trash bin next to her desk.
I dig through her dresser drawers, open up her closet. There’s a heap of old clothes piled up at the bottom. Frumpy, oversized sweaters and skirts. The kind of clothes she was wearing in that picture.
Suddenly, the closet door snaps shut in front of me. Ava wedges herself between me and the door. The girl’s dressed in nothing more than a skimpy set of pink PJs, silky short-shorts that show her thighs and a tight little tank top cupping her breasts. A basket of laundry spills across the floor in the doorway.
“What the hell are you doing in my room?” she demands, trying to push me back.
She can’t move me an inch.
I push her back this time, and she bumps the door, no space left between us.
“I just heard the happy news, Ava, and I’m here to give you my congratulations. You know, I’ve never seen anybody fuck up their life so fast before. Some kind of speed run world record you just set. And trust me, where I’ve been, I’ve seen some fucked-up, corner-painted, pathetic motherfuckers.”
“ Get out .”
“I bet you, Sal, and Marcel think you’re all so fucking clever, don’t you?” I ask, ignoring the way her hands try to hold me back, the way her shoulders pin flat against the door. “So, whose idea was it?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Oh, it is my business. You are my business. You thought I was just gonna play with you for one night, then let you go just like that? You thought that was all you were worth? A few hours of my attention until I had something better to do? Is your opinion of yourself so fucking low you could trip on it?”
“Get off !”
“You better stop pushing away the only person in this house trying to help you. Tell me who made the deal.”
She glares at me through those shaggy bangs, the cut on her lip now just a little crescent-moon sliver.
“I made the deal! I agreed to it! What else does it matter?”
“It matters because somebody’s using you. They’ll ruin your life, and for what? I don’t stop, Ava. They’re gonna learn that, just like you’re gonna learn that, pretty girl,” I mutter, running my thumb over her cheek and not letting her pull away. “This sets me back a step, maybe two. You’re getting signed away for life. You’ll have some fat fuck’s little prick crammed between your legs every night, his body sweating on yours. Is that worth it? Throwing away your whole future, just so your big bro can feel important for a few more weeks?”
She laughs. Of all the reactions, I didn’t expect that icy little sound, like a cold dagger.
“You can’t look past your ego for two seconds, can you?” she breathes. “I didn’t accept this because of you . You’re not that important. Maybe Marcel and Sal would find some other way to deal with you if they had to, or maybe they wouldn’t. But I did this for my brother, and I did this for me .”
I search her face, looking for some kind of clue in those hazel eyes and their ten thousand colors. What could they have possibly offered this girl? What would she have agreed to take in exchange for that ?
“You keep wondering what’s wrong with me,” she says, searching me in the same moment that I’m searching her. “But what the fuck is wrong with you ? What made you like this?”
“Nothing made me. I just am. And I know what I want.”
“No, you don’t.” She slips out from under me, going to gather her laundry off the floor. “Now get out of my room, Nico, before I really make you regret this.”
“I already told you once, and I made myself very clear— I don’t share .”
“Here. You want a fucking souvenir to remember me by?” she asks, throwing a thong at me. The scrap of black cloth bounces off my chest and drops onto the floor. I step over it, marching right toward her, but she expects it, meets me midway.
“I fucking warned you,” she says, bringing us body to body. It freezes me in the moment as she takes charge. She has to stand on her tiptoes just to whisper close to my ear. “You want to really go crazy over something, Nico?” she asks, soft and daring, our hips almost grinding together from the proximity. “My husband, whoever the fuck he is, and his ‘little prick?’ They’re going to take my virginity.”
She drops away from me, stares up at me with those wild eyes, and turns back to her laundry. She starts gathering it back into the basket again. She slings it into the corner as I watch her.
“But you and V…”
“No, not me and V,” she says, cutting me off before I can ask. Her eyes burn as she looks at me again, her mouth stretched into a painful, ironic smile that seethes with hatred. I don’t know if it’s for her or for me. “I never let him.” She laughs. “I was afraid that it would hurt.”
She stomps out of the room, leaving me standing there alone with her clean laundry and her old stuffed animals.
“It will,” I yell after her, but she doesn’t turn around.
She just yells back,
“Good.”