Page 14 of Be With Me
My jaw clenched. Damn that girl for sending me down memory lane. It was an ugly place I had no interest in revisiting.
Shaking off the tension in my shoulders, I got to my feet.
The thrum of music filtered into the house through the open windows along the hall. I was about to turn the corner when another sound caught my attention—a movie playing in the background.
Taking a detour through Messeros’ living room, I smirked when I saw who it was. “Lasted all of two hours, huh?”
Alessio was sprawled on the sofa, a remote dangling loosely from his tattooed hand, the last few minutes ofGood Will Huntingplaying on the TV. “I needed a break.”
My brother hated socializing. He usually skipped out on these things, but Mother had insisted he show up today.
“Shove over,” I said, sitting down beside him. I fucking loved this film. “Did you figure out why Mother was so adamant about having you here?”
“Yeah. Something with Aunt Lisa. Mom told herI’m getting into plants.”
“Weed?”
“No, regular plants.”
I glanced away from Chuckie on the screen who’d just realized Will left. “Are you?”
He gave me a look like,what the fuck do you think?“Nero’s wife gave me a cactus for the palace. When Mom stopped by the other day, she saw it. Now she’s making out like I’ve got a green thumb or something. Told Aunt Lisa she should come by to drop off some trimmings and give me tips.”
I huffed a laugh, imagining Aunt Lisa—best known for her baked ziti and her love for gardening—showing up at Alessio’s “palace,” a twenty-thousand-square-foot warehouse decked out with every torture device imaginable.
Alessio was the family’s enforcer, responsible for the darkest parts of our business. The parts most of the family liked to pretend didn’t exist—especially now that we’d gotten so big, so legitimate on the surface. My uncle was a CEO, my cousin a COO, and so on and so forth.
Some of them could almost pretend they weren’t criminals.
Almost.
But no matter how buttoned-up we got, our empire was built on crime, and we’d never hesitate to commit more of it to achieve our goals.
“And what’s Mother’s aim with all this?” I asked as Sean—Robin Williams’s character—pulled out Will’s letter from the mailbox.
“You know her and Aunt Lisa never got along. Mom isn’t happy with how her and Uncle Mario have been running the packaging business. She probably figured if Lisa got an up-close-and-personal reminder of how I handle those who get on her bad side, they’d hustle a lot harder.”
That would probably work. That was the thing about my mother’s plans—most of the time, they worked. And in this business, the ends justified the means. No matter how ugly those means were.
We sat there and watched the last minute of the movie. When the credits started to roll by, Alessio tossed me the remote. “See if you can find anything good.”
I flicked through the channels.
“Look who it is,” he said when I hit the news. “Another day, another fucking rally.”
It was the mayor-to-be.
The camera zoomed in on Morales as he droned on about how my father deserved to be behind bars.
I swore under my breath.
“Still nothing?” Alessio asked.
“No.”
“If you elect me as the mayor of this great city, I promise to dismantle the organized crime networks that have plagued our community for far too long.”
“He’s a fucking broken record,” I muttered.
