4. — what happened in Miami.
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Staten Island, New York
Salvatore, Gallo Estate
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“Is that what I need to do, send you back to Elmswood?” Salvatore asked his daughter.
“You wouldn’t.”
“If you need it.”
“That’s half the fucking problem, Daddy. You don’t even know what I need!”
Salvatore tried hard to remain neutral, knowing it wouldn’t help to get angrier than he was, and show it. “I know it isn’t running laps until you vomit. How many times?”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Francesca Dove. You know exactly what I asked you, and I will not ask again.”
“That was the first time since—”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not!”
“Shall I get Larkin to have Cameron go back on the cameras and count the number of times you ran laps on the property when I was out of state?”
Silence echoed in the study.
Salvatore tipped his chin up slightly, staring down the teenager and daring her to lie to him one more time. “How. Many. Times?”
Frankie wouldn’t meet his eyes. She picked at the sides of her fingernails, and the way she bit at the edges of her lips told him that she wanted to stick her fingers in her mouth and chew until they bled. Another of her little habits that he hadn’t been able to curb.
“If I ask again...” he warned quietly.
“What, you’ll take away the Supra?” Frankie laughed bitterly. “Take it. I don’t go anywhere after you took it away the last time.”
“Because the car got impounded for having thirty-five camera radar tickets, Frankie! Jesus Christ. Don’t you think it’s concerning that you want to drive a hundred and thirty fucking clicks on the highway?”
“Which do you prefer—I run it out or drive?”
“They’re both going to kill you!”
She scoffed, and it almost sounded careless but for the choked sound at the end breaking his heart. “Well, that’d just be one less problem in your life, right?”
“Don’t you dare. I love you—to fucking death. I would give you anything you asked for, if I could. And God knows I’ve tried. I swear, it feels like you do this shit just to punish me sometimes.”
Her mouth tightened in anger, jaw clenching rhythmically. “Yeah, Daddy, sure. My unspecified eating disorder,” she spat out, rolling her eyes, “and speeding is all about you. Wouldn’t that be nice, huh? When you’re around, it just clears right up, so it must be you.”
Salvatore balked momentarily. “I didn’t mean it like that, I just—”
Her head shook erratically, making her messy bun in fall around her shoulders in waves.
“No, enough talking. Skip to the end where you do whatever you have to do, and I can get the hell away from you. Are you going to ground me? I don’t go anywhere, Daddy.
I don’t have friends, remember? Are you going to tell me that I can’t play soccer?
I’m probably already kicked off the team after yesterday and I don’t care anyway. ”
“What happened yesterday?” Salvatore knew—a message from her coach came in mere minutes after she left the field—but he wanted to give her the opportunity to come out with it. “I’m waiting,” he told her the longer she refused to speak.
“Just ground me, take shit away. I’m done.”
If she wanted to play that game...
“Okay, no penthouse for the next year. How’s that?” he asked.
This time, Frankie recoiled. “What, but—”
“Are we talking about yesterday, or not?”
Her gaze narrowed. “That’s a dirty move.”
“Or a great fucking bet on my part,” he returned.
Salvatore knew his daughter like the back of his hand. Before she had turned one, it was just him and her. She would never understand how much he had sacrificed and the things that happened so the two of them could scream at one another like this.
She didn’t need to know. It wouldn’t make anything better.
“No, take the penthouse. Take the new Rolls, and whatever else, too. I don’t care.”
She spun on her heel, but Salvatore didn’t let her get far. “We are not done here. Do not leave this study without my permission, young lady.”
Her steps faltered, but she didn’t turn around. Only glanced at him over her shoulder. The grin that twisted at her lips killed him from the venom behind it.
“I’m already stuck in this cage, so, lock the fucking door on your way out the next time you leave.
I made it easy for you, didn’t I? No uni in the fall.
No job lined up to give me something to do.
Why don’t you add some cameras inside the house while you’re at it, and you’ll never have to ask me another damn thing about any of it. You’ll always know.”
Salvatore blinked, taking her words in. “Is that how it feels? That I’ve put you in a cage?”
Poison came right back for him in the form of stinging words, but he braced himself for the impact.
“Are you kidding me? You’re joking, right?” She laughed again as she pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and turned back around so he could see the tears spilling down her cheeks. “I hate this fucking house. I hate my life. I hate you, Daddy.”
Salvatore’s throat clenched as he tried to swallow down that bitter pill. An invisible knife stabbed into chest, making every heartbeat painful to breath through. Words were just words. She didn’t mean them, and he heard this all before.
“Frankie, please—”
“I don’t know why you give a shit, you’re not even around!” she screamed.
Yep.
There it was.
She might have said how her anxiety and self-destructive behaviors weren’t about him, but those festering seeds took root somewhere.
He first noticed when she was nine, going on ten.
She made herself sick at the drop of a hat, couldn’t relate to her peers, became a target for bullies at school, and thus he pulled her out and took her places, travelling with tutors every chance he could.
Sal knew if he was gone long enough not to know her last game score, or have a basic overview of her week, then his daughter already started spiraling. If her phone calls and texts lessened, it was even worse. It always happened, and more than one doctor had pointed out exactly how he could fix it.
She needed things that she tried to get only from him—and from Sissy, too. Confidants. Proper peers. People her age. Friends. Things to do that wouldn’t somehow feed into the negative coping mechanisms. Routines. Stuff to look forward to. Medication, if a time called for it.
And he tried, but Frankie wouldn’t move an inch.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered when Frankie fell into the same chair where Nico had sat earlier and continued to cry. “I love you and because I love you, I don’t want you to do things to yourself that hurt you, baby. Can’t you just understand that?”
Frankie only cried harder.
Standing from his desk, Sal rounded the corner and headed across the room. His hands found her bare knees as he kneeled in front of her. Her trembling vibrated into his bones.
“I’m not going to take anything from you,” he said softly. It didn’t make a difference to punish her for things that sometimes seemed out of her control. That felt cruel. “I just wanted to talk and try to figure out some things to help.”
“Nothing helps,” she replied through sniffles.
“Yesterday was bad, then?”
“J-just a stupid day. T-too much s-stuff,” Frankie hiccupped out.
Sal nodded. “Okay, so we just break it down a thing at a time and deal with it.”
Everything came tumbling out of her in that moment.
The girl at the game with her ignorant comments.
The break-up with her boyfriend. Sissy excusing Salvatore’s lack of presence and telling her how Carina would arrive earlier than expected during a time that should have been about Frankie as her eighteenth birthday and graduation approached.
As if somehow feeling her owner’s sadness through walls, a familiar clatter of nails against flooring echoed from somewhere outside the office. Seconds later, the white ball of fur padded into the room.
Sassy, the Pomeranian-Poodle mix approaching her tenth year in their family, sniffed Frankie and Sal out in no time. The poor dog didn’t have the legs needed to jump more than a few inches off the ground. It took her three years just to climb a set of stairs.
“Come here, you little shit,” he told the dog.
Picking her up and feeling her legs run mid-air as if she were helping the process along, he dropped Sassy into Frankie’s lap. Instantly her hands left her face to tangle in something else familiar and comforting in her life. A constant presence that hadn’t let her down like he did.
Salvatore stood and rubbed at his forehead, unable to look away from Frankie’s tears. Soft sobs returned to hiccups the longer their silence stretched on. He decided to end it.
“I’ll talk to Coach,” he muttered.
“I don’t really—”
“Soccer does mean something to you. It’s something. Something you’re excellent at. Something that is yours. I’m sorry that cross-country had to end this year, but I did let you make the choice on which one, didn’t I?”
She nodded once.
“As for the boyfriend, well, he is irrelevant.”
An honest-to-God waste of Salvatore’s thoughts let alone his daughter’s time.
Frankie laughed. “He really is.”
“And too old for you, like I said from the damned start,” he added.
Frankie looked up with a scoff already forming. “Get real, Daddy. The legal age of consent in New York is seventeen. He’s only one year older than—”
A throat cleared from the doorway making both Sal and Frankie glance that way at the same time. A stoic Nico stood there, his gaze averted to something beyond the middle of the room and the private scene between them.
“Shit, we’re already talking consent, huh?” Nico asked.
From his spot, Salvatore had the perfect view of two simultaneous actions. A pink wash of color tinged Frankie’s cheeks while Nico clenched his molars and forced his stare to remain removed. The first of which disappeared the moment Salvatore blinked.
The second...
Nico’s gaze slammed into Salvatore. “Sorry, uh, Larkin is where, boss?”
Shit.
He checked his watch, knowing exactly why Larkin hadn’t shown up the moment he saw the time had gone past ten. The head of security knew his job. How long had he and Frankie been at this now?