13
MATEO
My mind roams over and over what Carina said this morning. The more I think about it, the angrier I become. That goddamn guy had enough nerve to touch her when she couldn’t protect herself. He had enough goddamn nerve to touch what’s mine, knowing that one day I would find out what he did.
This man, whoever he is, clearly has no value for his life. Because now, he’s a dead man and doesn’t even know it. You don’t touch what is mine and expect to get away with it. I may be an asshole. A bastard. A son of a bitch. But there is one thing that has always been crystal clear when it comes to someone like me.
You do not fucking touch the wife, soon-to-be wife, fiancée, or girlfriend of a made man. Doing that is a death sentence that I fully intend to seek out.
“I know you’re still fucked over Vin, man. But, Jesus, you need to pay attention to this just in case we need to get in his computer again.”
Breaking free of my thoughts, I turn toward the sound of the voice, seeing Dom staring at me. I’ve been a bit scatter brained today, but can you blame me? I lost my brother, got motherfucking roofied, and found out Carina was systematically raped from a young age until we got her out of her parents’ house. I don’t know, but something tells me I’m allowed to be a bit fucked over this situation.
“Let me spell this out to you, Dom,” I say, clearing my throat. “My brother died. We have to find out who this fucking Marco man is. I got motherfucking drugged last night. And now, I need to find someone named motherfucking Rossi because he’s just been added to the shit list of targets I’m going to kill.” Giving him a blank stare, I slowly blink as he tries to process it all.
Disbelief blankets his face before rage shortly takes over. “You were drugged?! What the fuck?! Why weren’t any of us alerted?”
“That would be the only thing you caught.” Rolling my eyes, I glance back over at Giovanni, seeing him fail, yet again, to get into our brother’s computer.
“Answer me.”
Jerking my attention back toward him, my eyes narrow in warning. “You don’t order anyone in this goddamn house around, least of all me. We may be friends, but I’m the boss first and foremost. And yes, you little shit, someone fucking roofied my scotch.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No.”
Giving me a side eye, his dark orbs shooting daggers at me, he sits back in his chair and stews in his anger. “You’re just a bucket of fucking sunshine and rainbows this morning, aren’t you?”
“Seems that way,” I say, clipping my words.
“Quit fucking doing that!” he yells as he jumps up from his chair, his chest heaving with anger. “You’re blowing me off with your short responses and your lack of a … fucking … shit … goddammit, motherfucker. You’re pissing me the fuck off right now! Give me more than what you are!”
“Do I need to leave the room for this lovers’ quarrel?” Giovanni asks, flicking his gaze between Domino and me. Real fucking class clown, he is.
“Just break into the damn thing. Why Vinny insisted on having this thing so protected, I’ll never know.”
Just knowing my brother wanted to hide anything from me hurts. Especially after all we’ve been through. You’d think he would be able to trust me. I’ve been there for him since day one and took care of him when our mother died, and Pop couldn’t bring himself to care about anything other than the familia business and taking Lucio with him wherever he went.
I did anything and everything I could to take care of him, Gavino, and Giovanni, and this is the thanks I get. A fucking locked computer with information on it that could be detrimental in finding out who Marco is, and why he went to John Stewart the way he did about Carina.
For all I fucking know, Vinny could have this entire mess mapped out on his computer from beginning to end, and we would be none the wiser.
Jesus, just thinking about all the shit that could be trapped on this damn piece of technology makes me want a stiff drink.
A stiff drink and a hard fuck.
Preferably at the same time.
With preferably the one chick that drives me blasted insane.
“Mateo, answer me something?” Giovanni asks.
“Sure.”
“What would you do if you had very sensitive information you wanted to protect? Before you answer that, don’t come back with what you know we know because that’s bullshit. I’m talking about information no one can find out.”
Sighing, I don’t even bother replying. Giovanni knows I would do the same Vinny did, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. The one time we actually need to disrespect his privacy, and he’s got this laptop on lockdown.
“Maybe we should call someone that’s a bit more technologically inclined?” Dom asks, finally over his minor hissy fit from earlier.
“I would, but this needs to stay in-house. No one needs to know about the information that’s on this computer other than family and people Vinny trusted,” Giovanni replies, sighing when the error message pops up once more.
Glancing over at the clock above the fireplace, I see we’ve managed to waste the entire day trying to get into Vinny’s laptop. Where our resources could be better used, we’ve been squandering it away on something that seems to be impassable. At least, at the moment.
I just want to know what else Vinny could be holing away on this computer. You’d think if he wasn’t hiding anything from his family he would give, at least one of us the password to all his accounts, laptop, and email accounts. But it seems whatever is on this computer he didn’t want to get into the wrong hands, and that makes me want to get into the son of a bitch more.
All of these secrets are spiraling out of control, and the one thing we need to straighten up a majority of them is a password out of our reach. It’s frustrating, unnerving, and makes me want to pull my hair out.
Turning away from the desk, Giovanni crosses his arms over his chest, regarding me with a stern look.
“What?” I ask
“Now, back to this roofied incident. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but you need to. What if it has a connection to this other stuff?” he asks, gesturing to Vinny’s computer. “If it does, we need to be prepared for anything. The last time we weren’t, someone died—Vinny died. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to lose any more of my brothers to some crazy fucking assassin or whatever the fuck it is. We are so used to being top of the food chain, we’re acting like sniffling cunts because we don’t know how to act when there’s a bigger fish swimming in our pond. Now’s the time for no secrets. So, spill it. What happened?”
Recanting everything that happened the night before, horror etches across both their faces as I pour more salt into the wound stupidity made. I tell them about Carina coming to check on me. About me falling apart in the aftermath of our brother’s death. I let them in on the fact that Carina said I was her target to kill, but that she sees my family as the ones that need protection.
I spill every ounce of information I have, pushing through the nausea and anger that someone is specifically targeting my goddamn familia.
Slipping into our native tongue, I allow what happened this morning between Carina and me to become more than just a thought in my mind, but a puzzle piece added to the board. “She said she was continuously raped by some dipshit named Rossi. That she refuses me the motherfucking right to kill, even though I have every right to. Just because we don’t have to get married because of my father’s asinine wishes doesn’t mean I don’t want to align myself with someone like her. She’s fucking fearless. Strong. Proud. Intelligent. Loyal. She’s every damn thing someone like me needs at their side.”
“Do you believe marriage will help matters? It could just make it worse,” Dom utters with Giovanni nodding his agreement.
“I know it will make it worse, that’s the problem.” I sigh, falling back into my chair. “But I can’t stop the fact that I need that connection to her. Don’t fucking ask me why, either, because I don’t even know the answer to that. I don’t love her. We clash heads more than we get along. Hell, most of the time I’m sure we want nothing more than to slit each other’s throat just because we can’t stand the sight of one another.
“But … there’s just something about her. Something I can’t explain. If I had to put words to it, I’d say it’s because she reminds me so much of myself. I can see the strength in her, the wildness, and it’s hotter than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s like this untamed mustang, and I’m the handler that wants nothing more than to train her. She’s a blazing fire on a cold night. The smell of fresh grass after a spring shower. But fuck, just the thought of her pisses me off. Makes me into this complete asshole that both of you know I’m not.
“Yes, I like things the way they are. I don’t go for change. I hate the thought of something new coming in to mess up the equation. But the thought of not being tied to her infuriates me more than having her here. I realize that’s a complete contradiction, but goddamn, I have no idea how to explain it other than that.”
Both sit as silently as they can, roving over my words. Words I know to be true, but they’re confusing as fuck. I’ve always been a straight shooter. A man of very little words and more action so things will run how I want them to run. But it seems just from her being here that everything is crumbling around me. My skin-tight, bomb resistant wall is crumbling, and I’m scattering to pick up all the pieces.
It’s the reason I was pissed at her last night. The reason I deemed Vinny’s death her fault when everyone can attest that it wasn’t. She makes me feel things I’m not familiar with. And I can’t explain what that feeling is. I know it isn’t love, because I have that for my brothers, father, mother, and Dom. And this gut-churning, heart-stopping, lung-squeezing feeling isn’t love. Not by a long shot.
Giovanni clears his voice before leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he delves his fingers through his long tresses. “Mateo, have you stopped to consider that maybe the reason you’re feeling like this is because you feel more for her than what you even considered feeling?”
“Impossible. It’s all laid out in black and white, G. Marry Carina, solidify the connection to Reap—which we all know we don’t have to do now, then have Reap at our familia’s beck and call whenever we need a clean up job. This is no place for emotions. No place for what ifs. This is how it has to be to get shit done. We’re putting everything on hold because of the shit that happened, and every day we go without getting in contact with our clients is another day the Calvetti name gets dragged through the mud.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Teo,” Dom says quietly as if he’s talking to himself more so than me. “You just haven’t accepted the fact you feel something for Carina. You haven’t accepted the fact she’s been the only one to break past your barrier, and you’re squirreling around trying to glue the pieces back together by yourself. You’ve been this way since your mother died, man. Enough is enough. Stop trying to plan everything. Stop trying to make everything have a reason. It’s okay to let yourself feel. It’s okay to backtrack on how far you’ve come since your momma died—that just means you haven’t been completely broken.”
The stubborn part of me wants to balk at what Giovanni and Domino are saying, but a small part—a part deep down in the very pit of me—knows what they’re saying has a ring of truth in it.
I have been closed off since my mother died. Any person would be when seeing their mother slowly dying in a pool of her own blood, seeing the vacant look in her eyes as a stray tear runs down the side of her cheek.
Any person would lose that part of themselves that kept them alive, happy, and enjoying life. How can someone enjoy life when a special person in their life had theirs stolen from them? How can someone live on without being able to properly grieve the loss of the person they were closest to? How am I supposed to want happiness whenever my mother didn’t get the chance to have hers?
Of course, I harbor these feelings of resentment toward myself for moving on after her death. It’s not because I got to live life and see where the wind takes me and my familia. It’s because I had to grow up a lot faster than anyone should be forced to. I had to be both mother and father to three boys who were supposed to be brothers. I had to teach them right from wrong when our father couldn’t be bothered to take the role.
Instead, he galivanted across town with my younger brother, Lucio, in tow. That has always been something I couldn’t grasp. Lucio shouldn’t have been any more special to him than my other brothers and me. I was the next in line to take over the family business. If anything, I should have been the one to get my father’s attention, while Lucio was stuck at home tending to my younger brothers.
All of these questions bounce around in my head, and I know, without a doubt, I’ll never be able to get the answers. The only person that would be able to give me the insight I’m looking for has kept this shit under lock and key since the moment it happened. There’s no way he will give me the information I’m seeking.
Anjelo Calvetti will take his secrets with him to the grave.