Chapter Forty-One Enzo #2
I wrung my fingers together, unsure where to start. The last few weeks had been eventful, the last twenty-four hours a mess. Still, I had to begin somewhere.
“I’m gay.”
The words tore from my throat sharply.
All the expressions in the room changed at once.
Luca—anger.
Achilles—annoyance.
Tiernan—amusement.
Lila—shock.
Tierney—glee. Her eyes were brimming with tears. The corners of her mouth softened, and I knew she was proud of me. I clung to her reaction like a lifeline, hung on to the fact there was someone in my corner here.
Tristan’s face was dispassionate, bored. Fortunately or not, I couldn’t give two shits about what he thought.
“Okay…” Luca weighed his words cautiously. “We all knew this was a possibility. If we keep it under wraps, you can conduct discreet affairs outsi—”
“No discreet affairs.” I splayed my hands on the table. “I’m coming out. Completely. To the Camorra. The Bratva. The world. No matter the price.”
The room was silent. Achilles and Luca exchanged scowls. Luca was the first to speak again.
“Listen, Enzo, in our line of work—”
“Fuck work! In my line of being… I’m talking about my existence here, for God’s sake.
” I ran a shaky hand over my hair, forcing myself to calm down.
“Besides, I’m the pulse of the operation.
I understand the consequences of my actions.
I’m still moving forward. I will not hide, Luca.
And I will not be ashamed of something I do not control.
It is my ethical obligation to live authentically. ”
“It is my ethical obligation to make sure you live at all,” Luca snapped back. “How’s it gonna work? You gonna tell the Bratva that you’re marrying their baby sister and—”
“I will not be marrying the baby sister,” I said, sitting straighter. “I broke the engagement with Katya.”
“You what?” Achilles roared, shooting up to his feet.
“Motherfucker.” Luca pushed out of his chair, too. He threw a hand into his hair, yanking hard, and started pacing. “Tell me you’re shitting me, Enzo.”
I stared down at my lap. My entire facade was breaking down like ancient walls all around me, and I had never felt more naked, more exposed, more real, in my life.
From my periphery, a cigarette was offered to me. I swiveled to look at its source. It was Lila. She gave me a little nod, her eyes zinging with fierce determination.
Push through, they said.
“We cannot blow up the wedding; it’s four months away,” Luca said around his own cigarette.
“It’s already done,” I said quietly.
“And Alex knows,” Tiernan added. Both my brothers turned to him. He was still sitting next to his wife, aloof and completely at ease.
“Spill it,” Luca ordered him.
“Katya told Alex that she broke things off with Enzo. That she is in love with her professor, Rafferty Pope, and can’t go through with it,” Tiernan announced. “She took the fall.”
I could kiss her right now. Sweet, brave Katya, who had gotten nothing but heartache and rejection from my family and still somehow managed to find it in herself to help me. She’d put her ass on the line for me, for no reason other than because she was a good person. This made my guilt even worse.
“And is he buying it?” Achilles demanded.
Tiernan curved an amused eyebrow. “He says he is tired of diplomacy when the Camorra doesn’t keep its promises. He also seems to know Enzo is gay. Have you told Katya?” He turned to me.
“Well, yes.” I frowned. I doubted she’d told Alex, though. I didn’t know why I trusted her, but I did.
“There you have it.” Achilles was now physically clutching his head. “Thank you, Enzo, for dragging us into a hot war just so you can ride some dude’s ass.”
“You’re welcome,” I said with fake calm. “And for the record, I’m a botto—”
“Is there a way to salvage this?” Luca asked Tiernan directly. “Or is my next step coming up with a game plan on how to wipe the Russians off the map?”
“The latter,” Tiernan said taciturnly. “Lyosha’s pissed. It will be smarter for you to strike and show them that you mean business.”
“Wait. This is not even the worst of it…” I admitted, reluctantly drawing attention back to myself. I wasn’t stupid enough to think this was the extent of their reaction to my sexuality, but they needed to know there was more trouble to come.
Luca stopped pacing and stared at me, wide-eyed. “What could be worse than dragging us into war for dick, Enzo? What?”
“I had an affair with Tom Rothwell. The Tom Rothwell. The FBI agent.” I took one quick breath to let the information sink in.
The room was so quiet that no one else even breathed at this point.
Invisible ants crawled all over my skin.
“And today, he got me arrested so he could offer me a plea deal. He told me he’d stopped working on the Camorra case before we…
um, got together. Turns out it was all a lie.
They’re closing in on us, and they’ve got something planned. A big showdown.”
“Fuck!” Achilles tossed his chair to the other side of the room. It broke in two, the back skidding across the hallway and the legs collapsing against the junction of two walls. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“You. Let. A. Federal. Agent. Fuck. You?” Luca enunciated each word, driving the sheer level of my stupidity home.
I had an eerily creepy feeling that his carefully elegant mask was melting away—for good now—and whatever we were going to find underneath would shock us to our core.
He’d shown more emotions in the span of the last few weeks than he had in his thirty-something years on this planet.
“How… When…” Achilles started, then shook his head, groaning. “Isn’t he a fucking thousand years old?”
“Forty,” I said meekly.
Luca shot him a glare. “Who cares how old the asshole is? We need to kill him, and any evidence of the affair, first thing tomorrow morning.”
In Luca’s world, my sexuality was nothing but a mild inconvenience. It didn’t mean anything, really. He would still marry me off to a woman, shove me into the closet and lock the door, if need be, to keep his business afloat. Well, I wasn’t having it anymore.
I didn’t know how Tom and I had gone from spooning in his bed while he read the New Yorker and I read TMZ on my phone, still soaked in the scent of sex and waiting for our salads from DoorDash, to discussing with my family the prospect of offing him, but here we were.
“You’re not killing him,” I snarled. “We’re already in the hot seat with the FBI. You off him, and they reinstate the death penalty in New York just to fry your fucking brain.”
“This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” Luca growled. “And the list is fucking long, Enzo, so that says something.”
“We need to move past the revelation that Enzo enjoys federal cock,” Tiernan drawled, businesslike. “Because it is not the pressing issue and doesn’t require immediate attention.”
Jesus. Things were bleak when Tiernan was the voice of reason in the room.
Achilles arched an eyebrow, but seemed to take the advice. “Enzo, did your sugar daddy give you any more information about his plan for us?”
Well…at least he was making jokes. That was a good thing, right?
I shook my head. “All I know is that it could happen any day now, and it’s a done deal. They have an informant. Someone from the inside. I don’t know who it is, so everyone’s a suspect.”
Luca mulled this over. He looked…strangely calm. Like he had reached the threshold of excitement he allowed himself to feel and was now back to being the machinelike, rational motherfucker we’d all grown to dislike. “An informant, you say?”
“Yeah.”
“Who could it be?”
“I can think of one person who’d just love to see all three of us behind bars.” Achilles leveled his heated gaze on Luca. I swallowed hard. I knew what he was implying, and I didn’t completely disagree.