Calisto
“Close your eyes,” Calisto said from inside the hallway.
Emma huffed in the kitchen. “Calisto, come on.”
“Do it, or you’ll ruin the surprise.”
“Fine.”
“Are your eyes closed?”
“No,” Emma muttered.
“Emmy, you’re ruining this for me.”
Emma laughed under her breath, saying, “Fine, my eyes are closed. You’re still being ridiculous.”
No, he wasn’t.
“All right, I’m coming into the kitchen. Keep your eyes closed, or else.”
Walking around the corner into the kitchen entryway, Calisto caught the sight of Emma’s smirk. Thankfully, her eyes were closed. It was one thing in his favor today.
He held the small shoebox-sized gift in his hands, trying to keep it steady. He didn’t want to shake the contents up. It wouldn’t be good when he opened the top for Emma to see what was inside.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” Emma said, still keeping her eyes closed. “I told you that I didn’t want anything for my birthday.”
“I know,” Calisto replied. “And I didn’t buy you a thing, Emmy. I happened upon this when I was doing some paperwork up at the club. One of the servers found him out back.”
Emma’s brow puckered in the cutest way. “Him—what?”
Calisto smiled. “Open your eyes.”
He was standing right in front of her. She opened her eyes, and her gaze landed on the box he was holding. It was wrapped in shiny blue paper with a big red bow on the top. He had poked a few holes in the side, just to be safe.
“Go on,” Calisto urged. “Open it up.”
Emma bit her bottom lip. “What is it?”
“I’m not telling you, bella.”
She shot him a look as she reached for the top of the box. Pulling on the bow, the top came away from the gift, exposing the ball of fur sleeping inside on top of a fluffy white blanket. The black ball of fur barely even reacted to the loud gasp Emma let out.
Tiny little ears flicked, and hazy blue eyes blinked up from inside the box. One of Calisto’s workers had found the shaggy puppy hiding under a garbage can in the back of the club. The puppy was nearly frozen to death, as it was the first week of March and still quite cold, and it was young.
Too young to be alone.
Calisto didn’t know where its mother was.
He cleaned the puppy up, took it to the vet to have it checked out, and when he was given the green light, he put it in a gift box in just the nick of time for Emma’s birthday. He knew she was lonely a lot, and that she needed something to take care of. If she hadn’t lost her second child, she would have been carrying around a newborn baby.
Calisto was hoping the puppy would give her something to be happy about.
“Oh, my God,” she mumbled. “It’s so cute.”
“It’s a he,” Calisto corrected, chuckling. “And he likes to chew.”
Emma’s hands trembled as she reached inside the box. She plucked the little puppy out, and the damn thing was small enough to fit inside her palms. “What is he?”
“The vet thinks he’s a mix of many things. She didn’t have a definitive breed. But he is healthy.”
Cooing over the puppy, Emma let the dog nibble on her finger.
“He’s for me?”
“I thought …” Calisto trailed off, unsure.
Emma glanced up at him. “Thought what, Calisto?”
“He lost his mamma somewhere along the way, and you’re missing something, too,” Calisto said, feeling a little lame. “I thought you two might get along.”
Her smile bloomed instantly.
It was bright and beautiful.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yeah, dolcezza. I was thinking maybe he would make you smile more.”
“You make me smile, Calisto,” Emma murmured.
But he didn’t know how much longer that would last.
Affonso would still come home someday. Calisto couldn’t keep pretending this was forever. He didn’t tell Emma any of that, because she looked far too happy as she fawned over her new pup.
“His fur is so soft,” Emma said, grinning.
“I’ve been calling him whiner, because he whines when you don’t hold him.”
She smacked him with her free hand. “Cal!”
“Well, he does.”
“He’s a baby.”
“A baby whiner,” Calisto joked. “What are you going to name him?”
Emma hummed, tickling the puppy’s belly. “Midnight, I think. Midnight is black and dark, like the color of his fur. Do you like that?”
“He’s your puppy. You’re the only one who needs to like his name.”
She met his gaze. “But I want you to like it, too. Do you?”
Calisto nodded. “Yes, Emmy, of course I like it.”
Because she named him.
Calisto liked everything Emma did.
Quickly, Emma leaned forward and pressed a kiss on Calisto’s lips. He felt her smile against his mouth as she whispered, “Thank you.”
He returned her smile. “You’re welcome.”
Straightening, Emma’s attention was back on the pup. “Best birthday gift ever, Cal.”
“You think?”
“I know. He’s perfect.”
“As long as you think so, then that’s all that matters. I still think he’s a whiner.”
Emma’s gaze narrowed. “A baby, I said.”
Calisto laughed, put his hands up, and stepped away. Clearly, Emma’s mamma bear had come out to play with her new companion. “I concede. By the way, there’s a whole box of dog things for him in the hallway.”
Squealing with happiness, and flashing another one of her beaming smiles, Emma was already passing Calisto by before he even finished his sentence. The very sight of her excitement and happiness made the puppy worth it.
But he still wasn’t cleaning up after the puppy.
Nope.
“You’re much taller than they said you would be, Calisto Donati.”
Calisto shoved his hands in his pockets, keeping a calm demeanor as he approached the dark-dressed man sitting in the front pew. “And who is this ‘they’ exactly?”
“People,” the man said, smirking just a little. “Sit, young man.”
Calisto took a seat in the pew, and crossed his left ankle over his right knee. His posture screamed relaxed and trusting, but his eyes swept the familiar church, looking for any trouble that might find him.
“Which do you prefer,” Calisto started to ask, “O’Neil, or Connor? I’ve been told you go by both.”
The Irish boss chuckled deeply.
“Mostly, people call me ‘boss,’ Calisto. But since you’ve gone as far as arranging this meeting, and inviting me here,” the boss said, waving at the church, “… I will be amicable to you using my given name.”
“Connor it is,” Calisto murmured.
“Beautiful place,” Connor noted, glancing around the church.
“It is. I’ve attended this parish since I was a boy. It’s a peaceful, safe place for me.”
Connor nodded once. “I hear you. You would never ruin this place with violence or shame, certainly not by causing some trouble inside. Am I right?”
“Exactly right.”
“I appreciate the trust you’re handing over,” Connor said. “I assume you have men hiding outside.”
Calisto shook his head. “Not one. I fully intend for this meeting between you and I to remain peaceful, and for it to end with both of us walking out of here alive, happy, and amicable to making all of our problems go away.”
Connor’s mouth drew into a thin line. “Is that so?”
“Is that not what you want?”
“I didn’t say that, Calisto. I just find it hard to believe. It seems like every time I try to mingle business with the Italians, they’ve found a way to fuck me over right and proper. Or rather, your uncle did.”
Calisto cleared his throat. “I am not Affonso.”
“Good thing. I would have spilled your blood all over this beautiful hardwood floor.”
“I’ve thought about doing the same a few times to the man,” Calisto admitted.
Connor laughed loudly, the sound bouncing off the walls. “I like you. An honest man is a hard man to find in this business.”
“There are more of us around than you think. You simply have to look.”
The Irish boss nodded. “Point taken. Shall we get down to the dirty details of it all?”
“Let’s do that,” Calisto agreed. “One of your men beat my uncle’s wife nearly to death.”
“She was a mistake,” Connor said quickly. “I apologize for that. My man was told to only take out the enforcer, and not to touch the woman. He said she had seen his face, and made a decision. I didn’t approve of it.”
Calisto’s throat tightened and his body heated with anger. “A mistake?”
“Yes.”
“Was your man properly punished for his mistake?”
Connor glanced down at his hands. “Not yet, Calisto.”
Jesus.
That pissed him off even more.
“I—”
The Irish boss held up a hand, stopping Calisto from saying anything else. “First, I would like to talk about why all of this happened, Calisto, and then maybe you can understand how such a mistake could come about.”
“I doubt it,” Calisto bit out. “Nothing you will say can justify the attack on Emma Donati. She was an innocent woman who had her face beaten by one of your men’s fists for no other reason than she walked out the back door and the man she was forced to marry is someone who wronged you. Do not tell me that a scuffle over territory, or business gone badly, justifies her beating. It doesn’t. It never will.”
“I agree,” Connor said quietly. “You’re surprising me. I assumed that at your age, you would be more hotheaded than you are. I can see you’re angry, but you’re still calm. It took me years to learn how to do that, and by then, I had been a boss for a decade or more.”
Calisto swallowed back his irritation. “I don’t want to be the boss.”
“Yet, here you are.”
“Affonso didn’t give me a choice. He was tired of it all.”
Connor laughed darkly. “Seems the man has a thing for shaking his responsibilities.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A little over a year ago, I was approached by your uncle with a business proposition,” the Irish boss murmured, never looking up from his hands.
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“He did it on the low, the meeting was very quiet with little men between us both, and it was over quickly.”
Still, Calisto wondered why Affonso would go behind his back to meet with the Irish boss in Jersey. It was the sort of thing that he should have been involved in, being Affonso’s consigliere.
“Affonso was interested in some of the underground trades we have a hand in—importing, exporting, and that sort of thing,” Connor continued.
“He has a hand in all of that,” Calisto said, confused.
“I think he was interested in merging a few of our trades to maximize the profits,” Connor explained. “I was agreeable, but I wanted an insurance, so to speak.”
“Which was what?”
“He promised to hand me over some of his territory, and he did for a while.”
Calisto sighed. “Would those be the streets where the first soldier was killed?”
“Ah, yes. Sorry about that, but it was bound to happen after several scuffles.”
“He was seventeen,” Calisto said.
“This life is a hard one,” Connor replied, unaffected.
“Keep going. I don’t see how this justifies anything, or why it continued to grow into this huge of an issue between our families.”
“At our second meeting, I had invited Affonso to my home,” Connor said, smiling sadly. “Again, he came alone. I didn’t think much of it as our dealings were working out just fine. That time, my family was involved. When I have business dinners, they usually are.”
A heaviness settled on Calisto’s shoulders.
“And?” he asked.
“Affonso met my daughter,” Connor said, eying Calisto from the side. “She’s just nineteen, beginning college, and a dancer. She caught his eye, and I thought …”
Calisto practically forced the words out, “You thought what?”
“The man needed a wife, didn’t he? I knew his had died the year before, and the Italians favor bosses to be married when running their organization. My girl, as young as she is, seemed to get on quite well with Affonso. He came over to Jersey several times to take her out and make her feel special, I suppose. She was agreeable in the end.”
“And my uncle?” Calisto asked. “What of him?”
“He thought a marriage would be a good thing between our families.”
Calisto was stunned.
Speechless.
He could do the math in his head perfectly fine. The time when Affonso was running back and forth to Jersey to woo Connor’s daughter and the idea of a marriage with the girl, he had already agreed to a marriage with Emma’s family. It had already been set in stone.
Calisto couldn’t understand why his uncle would do that. Double playing two families in the business of marriage was a dangerous game to be mixed up in. Affonso would have had to know that. It was downright stupid.
Why would he even bother?
Unless …
Calisto clenched his hands, his thoughts running wild.
Unless Affonso meant for an issue to be caused close to home, one that would put his family in danger and make his seat as the boss look bad to his men. It would be yet another way to force Calisto to protect his family, step up the way Affonso wanted him to, and be the man he intended for him to be.
A man Calisto didn’t want to be.
“And then what?” Calisto asked, managing to keep the anger out of his tone.
“Affonso didn’t answer my calls for about a week,” Connor replied. “I did a bit of checking. It was about that time that I found out he had taken a trip to Vegas.”
“When he came home, he brought his new wife with him,” Calisto finished.
“Yes.”
“And so you began attacking us in little ways, wanting to cause an issue for his betrayal.”
“No,” Connor said quietly.
“I don’t understand. Other than him screwing you on the marriage deal, I don’t see what other problems he caused you, Connor.”
The Irish boss dug in his pocket, and pulled out a phone. Turning it on, the man swiped his finger over the screen a few times, bringing up a gallery of pictures. Soon enough, he found the one he was looking for.
A young, pretty woman with red hair was smiling tiredly at the screen. In her arms, she held a dark-haired, black-eyed baby swaddled in white.
“He was born just a few months ago,” Connor said. “My daughter—Ciara—named him Dylan. He’s five months old now.”
Calisto stared at the picture of the baby boy, seeing his family features reflected back at him, and feeling like he couldn’t breathe with every passing second. Everything that had happened finally started to make sense to Calisto.
“Affonso didn’t know about the baby,” Connor said. “He wouldn’t answer my calls, or the attempts my men made to talk to him. He even went as far as killing my men, which started the back and forth on the streets. He did it first, not me. I only wanted him to know what he had left my daughter with, and nothing more.
“I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t sit down with me again,” Connor continued when Calisto stayed quiet. “I didn’t expect anything from him as far as my daughter and the child went. I understood he had married another woman, and his focus was there. I only wanted to let him know that he had a child, should he want to be involved with the boy. We Irish keep family very close, and I assumed the Italians would be no different. Clearly, I was wrong.”
“You’re not wrong,” Calisto admitted, “but Affonso is not like most Italians.”
Connor shrugged. “I know that now. Nonetheless, the more pressure I put on Affonso, the more he pushed back on me. Before I knew it, there was a mess everywhere and the bodies were piling up. My last hope was the night his wife was attacked. I only meant to show how close I could get to him, and then his wife got in the way.”
“She was going home, actually,” Calisto said.
“I see. I apologize. It never should have happened.”
Calisto willed his sympathy away. He couldn’t afford to feel for the Irish boss in this situation. He still had a famiglia to protect. Still, as he stared at the picture of the baby, he felt a kindred connection to yet another one of his siblings.
Affonso just kept making children.
All over the fucking place.
He never cared for them.
“You’re telling me that he still doesn’t know about the boy?” Calisto asked.
Connor shook his head. “No.”
“I assume, guessing by the way you talk fondly of your daughter and her child, that you love her a great deal. Am I right?”
“Don’t you love your children?” Connor asked.
Calisto’s heart ached and he said coldly, “I have no children.”
“My mistake. I do love my daughter very much.”
“Then your best effort would be spent doing the exact opposite of what you have been doing.”
Connor’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“Protect your daughter and her child from the awfulness of my uncle—make sure he never knows that baby boy exists. If he does know, he’ll stop at nothing to have the boy as his and his alone. Make no mistake about it, he would let the baby watch its mother die, if that meant Affonso could raise the boy on his own and by his terms.”
“Why would you say that?”
Calisto wet his lips, and forced himself to look away from the picture. “Because he did it to me, but it was my father that he killed. I would hate to see him do it again, Connor.”
The Irish boss grew silent for a long while. He put his phone away, rested back in the pew, and said nothing. Calisto let the man absorb their entire conversation, and he did the same.
“I’ll allow you to continue the business on the Brighton streets,” Calisto said. “I don’t see the problem, but I will ask that you keep your men away from mine and make sure they understand the Italians own the majority say there.”
“I’ll accept that,” Connor replied.
“I would also appreciate an update every once in a while.”
“On what?”
Calisto nodded at Connor’s pocket. “The child. He’s my family, after all.”
“I can do that as well.”
“Thank you.”
“I have something else for you,” Connor said, pulling a folded up paper from his inner suit jacket pocket. He handed it out to Calisto. “Here, take it.”
Calisto did, opening up the paper slowly. A picture of an unknown man with reddish-brown hair and green eyes stared back at him. Freckles dotted the man’s sharp cheekbones, and a large, rounded scar was under his right eye. On the bottom left-hand side of the page, a name and information was provided about the man in the picture.
Aiden Allen.
Thirty-four years old.
Single, no family.
An address was also listed, as well as the man’s favorite places to hang out when he wasn’t working.
“My man was not punished as he should have been because I thought I owed the Donati family a bit of retribution for the beating Affonso’s wife suffered,” Connor explained.
Calisto’s rage was spilling into his throat again like bile. He barely kept control, and his hand shook as he clenched the paper into a crumpled ball.
“And this is him?”
“Yes,” Connor answered instantly.
The man would die before the fucking night was out.
Calisto would do it himself.
“After this man is gone, no more bad blood between us, yes?” Calisto asked.
“No more,” Connor confirmed.
“It will not be an easy death.”
Connor nodded, and stood from the pew. “I wouldn’t assume differently, Calisto. I don’t imagine the young woman’s beating was an easy one, was it? Please make sure my man understands that when you find him.”
“Absolutely.”
The Irish boss stepped out into the aisle. “It was good to meet you, Calisto. And I hope we don’t find ourselves having another one of these.”
Calisto didn’t respond.
He figured that he didn’t really have to.
The entire meeting had been enough.