“I tell you the truth, man! Your wife tells you the truth! She loves you, but she never holds her tongue. That’s one virtue she wasn’t blessed with.Silence.If it’s even a virtue.”
“Love is blind, Mitch.”
“Right. If she loves you, she’d never—”
“Women get lonely.”A woman like Scarlett has a red-hot heart, her blood even hotter.My wife scars me in the bedroom, almost kills me.
“You don’t think Luca sent him there? Your wife is on their turf.”
“No.” I shook my head. “There are rules written in blood.”
“You should tell her, Brando. Tell her who Luca Faustireallyis and what he runs. That’s how you knew? By the tattoo?”
A rosary with a lion in its open center—a sacred heart inside the animal’s mane. It stood for all that they did—God, honor, and family. It branded them in this life as a Fausti, a member of the green, white, and red royal family, men that earned their stripes as a solider.
“Yeah, they all have the same one.”
“Fuck.” Mitch turned in a circle for a moment. “So you think this was random? She met him in Italy and they—”
“Close.”Rosaria Caffi orchestrated the meeting. She knew who I was when I first returned to Paris. An eagerness wafting off of her to connect me to that family, knowing that I belonged. More precisely,the manI belonged to—Lucious Leone Fausti.
“Then this dude—” he looked at the man’s face, the man who was looking down at my wife with serious eyes, eyes the color of green sea-glass “—sends Luca the picture?”
“Luca called him Rocco.” The pulse in my neck started to jump. “She has my name. She’s from the same town in Louisiana. When she gets drunk—” No need to repeat myself. “It’s easy to put two and two together. Though Luca was quick to tell me that she didn’t correct Rocco when he called her by her maiden name.”
“Shit. Too bad he doesn’t have any other sons. Then maybe he’d leave you the fuck alone.”
I took a sunflower seed, flicking it around in my mouth. “He has other family—men that do whatever he says.”
“But Luca still wants you.”
“Always has.”
“Tell her, Brando.”
“No point in involving her in the mud. She’ll worry.”
“You don’t think she has the right to know that her ‘father in law’was not only one of the greatest racers, butisstill one of the leaders of one of the most infamous crime families in history? You have dangerous blood, man, blood that she doesn’t know about.”
I shrugged.
“Brando,” he said, more serious than I ever heard him, “what if he sent him there to hurt her, man?”
“Nah, his man is—enamoredwith her—”
Mitch mutteredaren’t we all.
“Luca Fausti doesn’t lie. He swore to me that he wouldn’t put his hands on her. If anything, he’d offer her protection. She is one of his now, hisfiglia, or so he wants. Rocco, whoever he is to Luca, must have explained the circumstances. Puppets.”
“At what cost?”
“Nothing. As much as he fucks with my head, he believes one day I’ll come around. So he lets me be, as long as I come to see him every so often.”
“Ah,” Mitch said, eyebrows rising. “The dawn has shed its light on part of the mystery.”
“A part but not all. I went to see him first. Been addicted to his truth ever since.”
“The guy? Rocco? What if there’s something between him and—”
