“You pay their contracts, right? You sign off on these guys as the owner?”
“Ultimately, yes,” he says. “The GM does most of the negotiating and sends everything up to me for approval. Why?”
“Well, you act like they’re worthless, but if you own the team and their contracts, it seems like you could make adjustments if you were unhappy.”
Vince scoffs. “It’s not like hiring and firing in a corporation, Leanna.”
“Isn’t it?” I counter. “There are trades all the time. Guy isn’t performing; trade him for a higher draft pick or another player. That’s the business. So why complain, especially when you’re the one pulling strings behind the scenes and ordering the coaching staff to throw games?”
“Leanna, Jesus…” my brother Ezra says, shaking his head.
“What?” I ask. “Like it’s a secret?”
Vince bares his teeth at me like a feral animal and mimes punching me. My dad smacks Vince on the back of the head in response, and my thirty-year-old brother’s face goes red like he’s about to throw a toddler-sized tantrum.
And this right here? This is why my father wants me to take over the family business when he retires or passes away.
I am intelligent and educated. Inconveniently curious. My dad always jokes that my first word was “why,” and honestly? It might be true.
My father did not amass the level of power he has by allowing people to question him. But with me, he’s always made an exception.
Maybe it’s because I’m his only daughter. Or perhaps it’s because I look like my mother—the one person he revered. She didn’t die in some mafia crossfire, no dramatic hit job, just a quiet, brutal war with cancer.
She was his queen. His rock. His conscience. The one person he actually listened to.
And somewhere along the way, I became a stand-in for that last part as his moral compass.
“It seems kind of unfair,” I say. “They’re competitors. They want to win. It’s got to suck to have to go down on behalf of the owners’ wallet.”
“Not just my wallet,” my dad says. “We’ve got a business to run, pumpkin, and it includes a wide array of sports betting. Betting is an addiction, and it’s spurred on by a big win here and there. If you lost all the time, you might walk away, right? But if you winbig every so often, just enough to keep you thinking you can win like that again, then you keep coming back.”
“And thosecoglionesdon’t know shit,” Vince scoffs. “They get their teeth knocked out for a living. There’s no intelligence to it.”
“I don’t think they’re all dumb,” Ezra offers. “Some of them go to college.”
“They’re not,” my dad cuts in. “But they don’t know the games are rigged. It’s not like boxing, where you tell a guy to go down in the fourth. In team sports, it’s more subtle—coaching decisions, refs on your payroll, strategic calls that tilt the game. The players still hustle. And when they screw up? That’s on them, whether rigged or not.”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I mean it. “I feel kind of bad for these guys. They’re not playing under fair circumstances.”
“Don’t cry for these guys,” my dad says. “They make plenty of money. Get plenty of women. Drive fast cars. They’re fine.”
I shrug and stand up to take my plate to the kitchen. I rinse my plate and put it in the dishwasher.
When I turn around, Vince is there.
He creeps up like a shadow I can’t shake.
“Move it,” I say, brushing past him.
His fingers dig into the back of my arm and pinch hard.
Oh, that’s going to leave a bruise.
But I refuse to cry out or show pain or anything else that will make him satisfied that he’s hurt me.
Instead, I just stare him straight in the eye. He hates that, and usually looks away first.
“Stop asking stupid questions, you cocksucking whore,” he hisses, low enough so Dad won’t catch it.
