Chapter 24
Michael
After kidnapping Brian Cleary and having him taken off our hands by my father without even a proper questioning, I’m somewhere between totally exhausted and completely pissed off. I’m lying here with this gorgeous woman in my arms, and we’re both aching from tiredness to the point where even sex barely sounds appealing.
And I hardly feel even a half step closer to resolving all of this and getting that damn money back. In fact, I’m pretty certain that my sister is currently spending that stolen money as fast as she possibly can, like a dog caught with something they shouldn’t eat chewing it up while running away.
If only my father would listen to me as closely as he listened to the women in his life. But I know it could be worse. He could be like Arya’s father and not listen to those women at all.
Arya is sleeping in my arms, so tired she narrowly managed to take her work clothes off and crawl between the sheets in panties and one of my T-shirts. She’s warm in my arms, and her soft breath on my neck soothes me. I’m so fucking tired; maybe enough curling up with her will ease away all these thoughts and finally let me sleep.
When I finally do, though, my sister’s there, sitting sullenly on the bed in her room, her eyes dilated from whatever drugs are in her system.
“Why did you fuck me over?” I ask her, and she just stares at me blankly.
“Why?”
She doesn’t know , I realize as I drift out of the dream to warm darkness and Arya’s soft breathing. Maria’s never stopped to think about her motives, about why she does what she does. She just does it, and damn the torpedoes.
Will my father figure that out? And if he does, will he act on it? Or will he let my mother keep shielding Maria from the consequences of her actions?
I close my eyes again, burying my nose in Arya’s hair. Right now, it’s all down to a waiting game, and I hate it. But at least I’m waiting with someone who makes all of this a lot easier to bear.
It’s funny how things worked out. My father thinks that Arya and I were together when he ordered me to intercept her heist. So now he’s actually feeling a little guilty about it. And yeah, I’ve been crazy for her for years, but I’ve never actually had her before now.
He doesn’t need to know that, though, especially not after how he’s acted around my sister.
What are the odds that my father will actually respond properly to what’s gone on? What are the odds that he’ll call me in and say that it’s all resolved, my sister is being punished, and I’m off the hook?
Not as good as they should be, and that’s what’s keeping me up tonight and focused on something besides sex despite there being a gorgeous woman I’m crazy about right here in my arms.
God, I want all of this to be over, but I’m worried that it will end with no real resolution at all. My sister will get away with it. Brian Cleary will disappear. I may even stay a pariah in my own damned family.
But at least I’ll have Arya. Provided, of course, that she can stand to be with someone who can’t keep his idiot younger sister from bullying him out of the family.
No. No fucking way. No matter what it takes, I have to make sure that Maria does not get away with this. I don’t care how much she or my mother cries, I’m not taking this shit so they can keep up their pretense of a perfect goddamn family.
No. This time, I will find a way to make them listen, not just for my pride’s sake but for my family’s sake. Maria can’t be allowed to keep acting like this, and my mother can’t be allowed to coddle her any longer, either.
But how the hell do you break over 20 years of bad family habits all at once? Will proving what Maria did even be enough?
I’ll have to fucking see this through somehow.
It’s late morning before either one of us can bring ourselves to leave that bed. Sex, warmth, cuddling, just spending time with her... all of those things are a million times better to face than the million problems waiting outside the bedroom door.
But that’s how things go. Either you face your problems, or they pile up at your door until they smash it in and completely inundate your life.
So, by early afternoon, we were both on our phones, each dealing with our own family drama.
“So... you’ve been dating Castellucci’s daughter this entire time and didn’t say anything?” Billy sounds astonished.
“I’ve been crazy about her for years. I tried to get Dad to see reason, but he wanted his proof of concept. We could have gone out and interrupted any wire transfer with her protocol. It didn’t have to be hers. He just wanted to hurt her to show up her father—who doesn’t even care about her.”
“God, what a clusterfuck. Is she okay now?”
“More or less. There has been a lot of fallout with her family.” It feels good to finally give him the details. I rarely leave my brother out of much because sometimes, he feels like the only one in my family who really has my back. So, this is all a big surprise to him, and I feel a little bad about it.
“How did Dad take it?”
“Dad underreacted to everything that whole evening. I don’t know what’s going on with him. He seems to be apologetic and calm about the idea, but... I don’t know. I worry that he’s going to just let our witness go and go back to pretending like Maria’s a normal, well-behaved daughter, and I’m just incompetent and paranoid.”
I glance at the bedroom’s open door, hearing Arya’s voice as she whispers to her sister and mother on a conference call. I don’t like that they have both insisted on talking to her at once. She says her sister is trying to moderate things, but I suspect they’re double-teaming her.
“Shit. Yeah. I get it. Dad’s always saying that it’s Mom who is overprotective of Maria, and that’s why she’s like that, but then, he does absolutely nothing to fix the situation.” I hear him take a swig of something. It fizzes faintly: beer. He doesn’t drink soda unless he’s hung over.
I don’t really blame him for day-drinking around our family right now.
“So, have you heard anything about what he’s doing with Cleary? The guy locked in our basement, I mean.” Dad has a holding cell down there, usually unused unless he wants a personal crack at some captured asshole who has wronged the family.
“He’s been down there four times already, from what I know. The guards are talking about it. He goes down angry, he comes up frustrated. The guy must still be alive,” Billy muses, “and Dad must be learning something, or he wouldn’t keep trying.”
“Well, that’s hopeful.” I hesitate, then catch myself at it and push on. “How’s Mom doing?”
“She’s upset. Maria has taken off with her latest boyfriend and is insisting on staying away until ‘the family comes to its senses.’ She may try to run if it turns out she’s guilty.”
I feel my blood pressure rising as this news hits my ears. “She’s already running,” I growl. “Damn it. Do you think Dad can find her if he decides she’s guilty?”
“Dad can find pretty much anyone, Mike. If he wants to.”
And there’s the rub. It would be so easy and convenient to satisfy Mom by simply... not finding Maria. Acknowledging what she did for about three seconds, then burying it and ignoring why she’s suddenly disappeared from our lives.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
“Yeah.” He huffs, and I hear him take another swig. “But just because this could all turn out badly doesn’t mean it’s actually going to. Dad is interrogating that guy, and at the end of the day, he’ll deal with any threat to the family. Even ones that come from within.”
I really hope he’s right. “Did Maria say anything to you before she took off?”
“Not a damn thing. She knows she’s cooked. What I don’t get is why Dad didn’t grab that guy we’ve got in the basement the night he threw you out.”
I do my best to forgive him in my head, at least while I’m talking to Billy. “Probably an oversight. Emotions were high. But God, it would have made things so much simpler if he had.”
I hear something from the bedroom then, something that sets my nerves on edge. A sob.
“Billy, I’m gonna have to call you back,” I mutter. “Got something up here.”
“You okay?”
I’m not. “I’m fine. I’ll call you back later tonight. Text me if you learn anything.” I hang up and turn to hurry into the bedroom and see what’s happening with Arya.
I almost immediately know, and my heart sinks.
Arya is holding her phone away from her ear with tears in her eyes while her mother is screaming and her sister lecturing. They’re double-teaming her. I don’t even have to make out the words to know it’s a whole giant undeserved pile of abuse.
My blood boils. I come over to her, put an arm around her, kiss her hair... and then gently take the phone out of her hands. She resists for a moment and then lets it go and buries her face in my chest.
I put the phone to my ear.
“And on top of everything else, we find out that your silent partner in this investigation is the very man you let steal from us? Are you completely out of your goddamned mind, Arya?”
I wince. Ouch. It seems that the Castelluccis have found out about Arya working with me. That level of pissed off isn’t entirely expected... but she is still their daughter, damn it.
They fill up the silence with more yelling. Her sister, this time, from her slightly more reasonable tone: “You’re betraying the family, Arya. First, you refuse to get married, then you screw up being our computer person, and now this? Do you hate us?”
That’s emotional manipulation at its finest, and it makes me see red in the corners of my vision. I take a deep breath and weigh whether to answer for her or not. I’m done with letting them make her cry, and Arya clearly hasn’t learned yet how to tell bad relatives to fuck off.
Then, again, she doesn’t seem to have any good ones.
“Arya?” the sister asks.
I decide speaking won’t do anything to help and hang up instead.
Arya continues sobbing, and I drop the phone on the bed. It’s set to vibrate and starts buzzing right away. We ignore it as I hold her.
“Thank you,” she mumbles into my neck. I pet her hair and say nothing for a while.
“I should have hung up when they said the family’s disowning me,” she mutters, her voice breaking up in the end. “But they are, they’re really actually doing it this time.” Her arms wrap around me, she jams her face against my shoulder, and I hold her tighter.
“Fuck,” I murmur. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about this possibility, but talking about it is way different than facing it. I want to go storming off to her house to confront them in her defense, but that would be a bad idea even if we weren’t mob families.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I add, not sure what to say beyond that. “I didn’t talk to anyone about my working with you except my family.”
“They must have had someone keep tabs on me,” she mumbles against me. “And now, they’ve gotten the report back, so they do this.”
“Arya...” God fucking damn it. I hate this feeling. I can’t hack or fight or talk away this problem for her. I can’t defend her from her family being shitheads. But I still want to.
“I love you, baby,” I say. “I’m so sorry. If I can do anything—”
“Just hold me,” she breathes against my neck. “I love you, too.”
It doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t make her family sane or unbreak her heart, but it gives her something to lean on, and that will need to be enough for now.
I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve had sex at this point, and that’s a good thing. We’ve started really discovering each other. This time, it builds up slowly as the weight of her grief eases away, and our caresses start to take on heat.
Her fingers tremble as they slide up my bare chest; her back shivers under my palms. Her mouth is warm, sleek, and yielding against mine. Comfort-seeking, distraction-seeking, call it what you want. I don’t care, as long as her cries aren’t of grief anymore.
I don’t really know who kissed who first this time, when her hands started moving over me, or when our clothes started coming off. It was all a slow blur of kisses and murmurs, my lips at her neck, her tears on my tongue, and her nimble little hands unbuckling my belt.
Now, I can feel my comforter sliding under us as I lower her onto it. Her body tenses and squirms under me as I pull her jeans down off her hips and take her panties with them. I cover her thighs with kisses before working my way up to caress her warm pussy with my fingers and my tongue.
I have her gasping and squirming in seconds; in under a minute, she’s fighting to keep her legs apart. I prop them open, holding one while bracing the other against my shoulder, and listen to her voice rising up into desperate cries of pleasure.
She squeals, her hips buck, and I hold her, lapping at her clit insistently until her sobs of ecstasy die down into whimpers and aftershocks. Then, I wipe my mouth, grinning when she moans out a plea to fuck her.
Rolling on a condom takes ten seconds and a million years. By then, her eyes are dry, and her breath comes in little gasps. Her nipples are tight little beads against my chest as I press down against her.
I go in in one long, easy thrust, letting out a blissful groan as her arms and legs tighten around me. My breathing shudders as we find a rhythm together, and I feel her stretch and shiver under me as her body starts ramping up again.
I’m so turned on I can barely see. My eyes swim; I shiver as I move against her, each stroke feeling better than the last. She coos and groans in my ear as I struggle for self-control. Our lips meet in rough kisses, tongues tangling and hands sliding over each other frantically.
I feel her trembling under me, hear the way her breath catches, and delve into her hot, sleek pussy even harder. The pleasure dizzies me as I feel her tighten around me. Then, her back arches, and her eyes fly open before squeezing shut in bliss. Her grinding and thrashing carry me over the edge with her, and ecstasy cracks through me like lightning.
Minutes later, drifting off with her, I feel the slightest twinge of apprehension about my family and how this will all shake out. But then, I push those thoughts away and bury my face in her hair.