“Your brother is Consigliere. That’s an honor.” I swing my legs off the table and get onto my feet.
“Yes. But fucking your boss’s sister is not.” Cassie walks out of the room, returns with a blanket, and tosses it to me. “God forbid anyone finds out and tells Luca, one of us will be losing a brother.”
“Luca wouldn’t hurt Emilio.” I wrap myself in the blanket.
“You sound so sure of it,” Cassie spit out. “Emilio is all I have left. And if anyone takes him away from me, they will pay for it.”
I thought she was ready to rip my head off. She walks off again, leaving me behind. Cassie scared me. She was a wild beauty, almost the male version of Emilio. I never interacted with her directly; she didn’t care about faking nice. To me, she was intimidating. Cassie wasn’t the kind of girl to fall in line because she was told to.
Walking into Emilio’s room, I get dressed and grab my things. When I walked out, Cassie was still there drinking gin straight. Next to the bottle of gin was wine and a glass.
Cassie nodded her head to the wine, “Want a drink?”
Surprised by her sudden change of mood, I took it as an opportunity to get to know her, but she seemed to have an agenda of her own.
“What’s the deal with this Aria?” she asked as I sat.
I pour myself some wine and reply, “What exactly do you want to know?”
“She’s banging your brother, right?”
I laugh, “That’s a question you need to ask him directly.”
“She gets around,” Cassie said as she downed another shot. “She is good-looking, though; I can see why my husband is attracted to her.”
I remembered what Emilio had said: she was married to the guy who faked his death and became the Consigliere to the Cassariano Family.
“You’re still married to him?” I questioned.
“Well, I thought I was a widow for years until we found out he was alive. My brother said Gio be done for if he stepped foot in Chicago.”
“Wasn’t he here recently?”
Cassie gave me the side eye, “Thanks to that bitch.”
“But Emilio hasn’t…”
She knew what I was implying, “Like I said. Thanks to that bitch. You know how it is—they shoot you with ‘It’s part of the plan’ or ‘We have a deal.’ Blah blah blah.”
I was all too familiar with that. “How did you find out he was alive?”
Cassie downed a shot, “Another story for another day.”
We sat there drinking and just talking about life. Things we wish we did and things we wished we didn’t. Chances we should have taken and ones that were taken from us. She dove into her childhood, and I didn’t realize how rough they had it. One thing we had in common was how we both lost a sibling.
“Emilio was the one to find her. She was in the bathtub,” Cassie recalls choking up. “She was a kid. Emilio always blamed himself. He was a street kid and thinks she wouldn’t have done it if he were home more.”
It was a heartbreaking story. In my opinion, it’s worse than Marco’s death. Being in the lifestyle, there’s the chance you won’t live, but tofind someone who took their own life wasn’t just heartbreaking but a devastating shock.
“How did your parents take it?”
Cassie poured another shot, “What parents? We don’t even know if the three of us have the same father. Our mom was a junkie in and out of rehab. She dropped dead last year; cheers to that.”
We hear the door open, and Emilio appears to find us drunk on his sofa.
“I see you both are having fun,” Emilio walks over and takes Cassie’s almost empty bottle of gin.
“You like them young now, huh?” Cassie spits out with a smirk.
