Page 138 of A Lick and A Promise
“And he told you to back off my family.”
Oh God.
I was seeing this honesty thing was going to be a pain in my ass.
“Yes. He told us that. He also said…” Goddamn it! “Gypsy’s been in touch. She’s worried about you, and she wants a sit-down.”
Knox didn’t move.
“I did inform Dimitri that I’m not Gypsy’s go-between, but?—”
“She’s worried about me?” he asked.
I couldn’t get a handle on how he was taking this, so it was hesitant when I confirmed, “Yeah.”
He turned away from me and shifted to sitting.
But he did this only, it seemed, so he could stare across the room and say nothing.
“Honey?” I called, pushing up to rest on my ass beside him.
“They’ve fractured,” he said to the far wall.
“What?” I asked.
He turned his head to me. “Gypsy and Rocco and Dad, Crew and Poe. They’ve fractured. Gypsy and Rocco tried to talk Dad into stepping down. He refused. Like I told you, he’s gotta be the big man. The problem is, Rocco has got this shit down. He’s a criminal mastermind. And Dad, Crew and Poe’s bumbling, small-time shit is fucking with his ambitions. He needs them out. They’re messing with his rep. The big men he needs to impress know what Dad, Crew and Poe are worth to an operation, and it’s not what Rocco can offer, and the longer he stays tied to them, the longer they hold him back.”
“Okay,” I said when he stopped talking.
“So they’ve fractured,” he repeated. “Gypsy and Rocco told Dad the way it was going to be, Dad lost his mind, and since they have no minds of their own, except Dad’s, Crew and Poe lost theirs, and my family is at war.”
It felt like my lungs froze because that was really bad.
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“And so the sit-down with Rocco…” I let that trail off.
“For me, it was to get him, once and for all, to get off my fuckin’ back. For him, it was to convince me, once and for all, I needed to take my sister’s side in this mess. Shit got heated. Honestly, I don’t think Rocco would ever harm me. If anything would lose him Gypsy, it would be that. But he had some gung-ho piece of shit with him who didn’t like we’d started shouting at each other, and the only thing I’ll cop to with that is that it was getting heated, but not that heated, but the motherfucker did something about it.” He blew out a disgusted breath. “It was Rocco who drove me to the fucking hospital.”
And now the flesh had been put on the skeleton of my understanding of this, and I liked it even less.
“Since I’ve been shot, she’s tried to call and text,” he said. “Gypsy,” he explained. “I’ve blocked her.”
“Understandable,” I replied cautiously.
“So now she’s got some fuckin’ mobster passing messages to my woman?”
I could tell things were deteriorating with how rough his voice was getting, how close the air in the room suddenly seemed, and how green his eyes were becoming.
“I don’t think she’ll do that again,” I said, though I wasn’t sure, since Dimitri had decided he’d soften my return message to Gypsy.
It might be time to find out if I liked borscht.
He twisted to reach an arm to grab his phone from the nightstand.
Oh shit.
