Prologue
Peter
Several Months In The Past…
Gino and I have been working out together more lately. He’s a couple dozen pounds lighter than I am, but he’ll put on muscle quickly judging by the discipline I’ve seen so far. Our new partnership in the family developed naturally because even if he’s far younger than me, we’re both single and neither of us have kids.
My cousin Gino and I look different enough that nobody compares us when we’re out together. I also don’t have the weight that comes with being the underboss’s brother tagging along with me when I’m trying to get a simple workout in. Everything about us looks physically different, so you can barely tell that we’re cousins.
He has black hair, blue eyes. My hair is like Michael’s, maybe a touch lighter – somewhere between brown and blond. My eyes are distinctly green and rare enough that people stop me tocomment on them. Gino still has a softer body than I do, but that won’t last long with the discipline I’ve seen from the kid so far.
He’s just about to turn twenty-eight and unlike his brother, Gino has a good head on his shoulders. He found it hard to hit his macros in Italy because of all the bread, wine, and cheese, but after six months of training together, the kid finally looks like something. He’ll get stronger over time and in the time we’ve worked together already, I’ve come to trust him. The kid is very different from his creep brother… I like that Luigi makes Renzo his problem and his problem only.
Belladonna’s, a bar downtown that used to be lowkey, isn’t the same without my cousin Nicki working behind the bar part time. She’s pretty easy to manipulate for free drinks. I don’t like paying for the shit they have on tap, but it still gets me drunk. Tonight, I’ll have to fork up some cash. I won a pretty hefty sum betting on the last Syracuse Salt Potatoes minor league baseball game, so I might as well burn it all up on booze since it’s all ill-gotten gains in the first place.
I need to relax tonight. All the shit going down with the family has me on edge and the type of work I do for them doesn’t exactly make it easy for me to chill the fuck out. The bullshit that went down in Pittsburgh is only a small sliver of the tectonic shifts happening in our family power structure.
The best part of being a kid right in the middle is you learn that staying away from extremes is a much safer place to be than people give credit. I would much rather survive in this family than die in a quest for useless power. Scanning the bar, I witness no threats for the time being, but I still can’t relax. Most likely because my cousin is making an ass of himself instead of ordering us pints.
Gino leans over the bar with his eyes widened like goddamn Pepé Le Pew staring at the black chick just trying to do her job. I shift bar stools and tune into their conversation, expectingflirting but only hearing young people arguing over politics with a fury that should be converted into more useful and pleasurable sexual energy instead of rage.
I’m about to chime in and ask for my own beer when Gino makes another misstep, causing the dark-skinned beauty to raise her eyebrows and launch into another lecture. Telling her that a certain politician was “just trying his best” appears not to have been the best move. Young men are so… foolish. Most of us squander the opportunities we have with our youth. I know that I did. Luckily, I don’t crave any power within our family, so I graciously lick my wounds and accept that money is a fairly decent consolation prize.
There’s a break in the conversation, and I hope that Gino breaks the younger generation’s curse of involuntary celibacy. It would be easier for men if they learned something so simple it’s surprising that it works – Shut the fuck up if you’re trying to get laid.
Especially talking about politics. It’s easy to stay quiet, especially since whichever dickhead sits in the White House doesn’t affect my bank account. The mayor of Buffalo? That’s an election I give a shit about. I guess that makes me a fucking idiot, but at least I’m not getting yelled at over a flat napkin-flavored IPA from a local brewery.
Gino breaks free from the conversation, red in the face and armed with three tequila shots that I just saw him pull out a fifty dollar bill for. Unbelievable. He slides into the stool next to me, shaken up like he just watched me run over a deer or something. It’s hard not to laugh at the kid.
“Why are they so scary?” Gino mutters.
“Who? Bartenders?”
Gino glares at me, completely missing the fact that I’m pulling his leg.
“Black women. I don’t get it, man. I don’t think I could be in the position to tame one,” Gino says, possibly thinking of the situation his brother got into with Delphine. I would say Delphine must have come to him pretty tame or she would have scratched his eyes out.
I chuckle and correct Gino’s misguided opinions. “They’re not animals, Gino. They’re women. They’re the same as other women.”
Gino can’t contain his doubt.
“Have you ever had a white girl hustle you out of fifty dollars for a simple comment on politics?” Gino says with very real offense and confusion at the situation. I won’t pretend I have some special understanding of women either. They just happen to all be equally confusing.
I change the subject from the missing money. “Where’s your brother?”
He somehow knows I mean his twin brother and not Luigi. They pretty much came as a pair most of their lives. Pretty sure they resent it but… It makes it easy for me to keep track of Renzo without having to talk to him. I keep hearing stories about a situation with Nicki that sounds a lot like what Michael had to put up with when dad put him in charge of CC.
Gino shrugs and then dramatically tongues out the last drop of tequila from the shot. The bartender shakes her head and pours us new shots without us needing to ask.
My cousin finally kills the slow suspense. “He’s up at his place with Nicki. She’s gone off the rails, last I checked. Why?”
Nicki crashing out doesn’t surprise me. All the women in our family are crazy. I internally debate the situation we find ourselves in all the time. Did our fathers make them this way, or did the Italian men in our family become this way as a reaction to the scheming, conniving women who share our blood…
“Your father wants me on a job and I thought your brother might be a good option to take with me to Pittsburgh.”
It’s not the complete truth. Renzo might be better at cold-blooded murder and purely logical calculations, but I might enjoy pushing Gino to a more complicated task than whatever Michael has him working on these days. Gino seems surprised that there’s more work for us to do across state lines.
“I thought Pittsburgh was quiet,” he says, considering it thoughtfully, and not entirely disinterested. He studied finance and politics in Italy just like his brother, and while he might not make any outward grabs at power, Gino certainly understands thebalance.
