Angelo screwed up his face for a second as he thought it over. “I don’t like Greco for this. It’s not his style, freezing someone to death just to leave them in the desert. He’s practical. He’s notcreative. This doesn’t feel like the work of your standard Mob hitman. It feels like…anassassin. An assassin with an artistic bent.”
Without thinking, I said, “I know what you mean. Thefeelof it—it reminds me a little of your early kills.” His face closed off. “Shit, I mean…I’m sorry. I just meant—”
Angelo reached over to put his hand on mine. “I know what you meant, Bax,” he said softly. He wasn’t pissed, I saw; it was just that he had a difficult relationship with the past. And being on the run wasn’t conducive to him seeing a therapist regularly.
Not that he would ever agree to something like that.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “That wasn’t fair. Plus, you know I’m a dumbass.”
“All those braincells you’re killing at the gym.” He gave me an affectionate smile as he linked his fingers through mine, his thumb caressing my palm in an intimate gesture.
He’d been teasing me for a while now over the amount of muscle I’d packed on. I just wanted to make sure I could protect both of us, though I’d never dared tell him that. In my view, Angelo had already taken enough bullets for other people. He’d taken one for me, and I never wanted him to have to do that again. The nights I couldn’t sleep I replayed that scene over and over in my head, cursing myself for being so slow, for being so green that Angelo had had to put himself in front of a gun formysake.
And when I did sleep, some nights I dreamed about him bleeding out in the back of that car. I dreamed that I couldn’t save him, that the river of blood wouldn’t stop flowing, that he’d sacrificed his life for mine.
So I’d made him train me. And I’d worked out harder and harder to make sure that anyone taking a glance at the two of us together would think twice. I knew Angelo could take care of himself. But I didn’twanthim to have to take care of himself.
And I never, ever wanted to relive that night when he’d been shot.
“Ididunderstand what you meant,” Angelo assured me, raising a finger for the check. “Whoever killed Ricky Fiori was sending a message. We need to find a way to interpret it.”
A waiter dropped off the check, which Angelo paid in cash with a generous tip.
“I love you,” I blurted out as we left the table together. “You know that, right?” Ineededhim to know it. I was afraid of the future once more, now that I’d brought up the past.
He took my hand and gave me a wistful, lopsided smile. “Know it, Bax? I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. What is it that’s bothering you so much these days? I wish you’d tell me.”
I could only shake my head. “Not—not now.”
He thought I meant notthere, with people surrounding us. “Okay,” he said. “Then let’s get out of here.” But as we walked down the stairs, his phone pinged. “Well, well,” he said, as we made our way out. “Ciro Castellani wants another conversation.”
“A setup?” I wondered. “Maybe Cirowasthe one behind our ice block. Could have been a warning for us to forget Greco and get out of town.”
Angelo took a long look at me, stashed the phone back in his inner pocket and took my hand. “You know what, kid? We’ve been hanging out with mobsters too long. Let’s forget all that for a night and just enjoy ourselves, eh?”
I let him lead me down toward the beach, which was flooded with the bright neon lights of the Santa Monica Pier. Screams and laughter carried over the air toward us as we wandered along.
“Wait,” he said before we got too far. “I’m not sure Ferragamo leather will do all that well in sand. Let me take my shoes off.”
As usual, Angelo was dressed in an expensive suit and shoes. Clothes seemed to unwrinkle themselves just for the chance to be worn by him. I’d worn a lot of suits as a junior FBI agent, but these days I stuck to jeans and hoodies.
“Let me,” I said, kneeling down right there in the sand before him. Red and magenta lights from the pier played across his face when I looked up to see him looking down at me. “What are you thinking about?”
The slight crease between his brows disappeared. He reached out a hand to my face, stroking down my temple to caress my cheek. “You, Babyface. Always you.”
I fumbled with his laces, trying not to tangle them into knots. We were a great team. We understood each other and when we moved together we had an instinctive rapport, like champion doubles tennis players. But in our other lives, my heart still missed a beat sometimes when I looked at him, my fingers would stumble over themselves when I undressed him—just like then, on his shoelaces.
“What areyouthinking about?” he asked, when I finally got both shoes untied, and was pulling down his socks. I bundled them together, put them into the shoes, and got to my feet, dusting my knees off. Angelo watched me closely as I toed off my own boots and socks.
Don’t say it, I told myself. But sooner or later, we were going to have to talk it through. “Do you miss New York?”
“New York? Not really.” He gathered his shoes in one hand, took my hand in the other, and led me further onto the sandy beach.
But missing New York wasn’t the question I really wanted the answer to. “I meant—the Family. Do you miss them?”
He gave a smile, and when I glanced at him, the lights tinted his teeth red. “Of course I miss them,” he said. “They’re my Family.”
I looked out over the dark ocean. “Of course. Yeah.”
