“Give you something?” His gaze travels over me, and my skin feels suddenly hotter. Tighter. “What is it that you want?”
“I want you to let me contact my mods onCute Crims, like I said before. Let them know I’m out of office for a while.”
For a moment, he says nothing, and then he gives a short laugh. “You have yourself a deal.”
* * *
“This is pointless,” Alessandro snaps. We’re in the security room, and secretly I was pretty blown away with the level of tech they had here. But we’ve been here alone, together, for hours, and while I managed to talk a few of my online friends—with Alessandro hovering right over my shoulder as I messaged them—into giving me access to their tunnels, we haven’t found much useful stuff.
Alessandro wanted to see what the FBI and others had on his father’s murder, but I don’t have access to their most secure systems, and everything we’ve looked at so far suggests that they know even less than he does, anyway.
“If you tell me what you know, we might be able to figure out—”
“You do what you’re told, and you don’t ask questions.”
I sigh. “Fine,” I mutter. “But it would be easier—”
“Why are you so obsessed with the Mafia?”
The question, abrupt and loud, comes out of nowhere. I look over at him, surprised, and see him glowering at me. “I just find it interesting.” A thought from earlier recurs. “Um. You didn’t read my private messages onCute Crims, did you?”
“What’s so interesting?” he asks, ignoring my question. “You enjoy tales of torture and murder?”
I look back to the screen while I think about it. I’ve wondered myself sometimes when I imprinted so hard on the Bad Boy type. I’ve traced it back to a few things in my life; one, for example, was when I was the new kid in fourth grade, just transferred. There was one kid in the class, Marty Gargiulo, who was kind of a loner, didn’t have any friends, but didn’t seem to want them. No one picked on him because he was bigger than the rest of us—he’d repeated a grade, I later found out.
That day, Braeden Harris pushed me over in the playground, and he and his friends formed a circle around me, chanting names at me, kicking at me. I was too scared to move, to call out, to try to fight back. There were too many of them, and I was a skinny little weakling—still am, really. But then, suddenly, Braeden disappeared from the circle.
The other kids all took a step away from me, and I pushed myself up on my elbow to see what was going on. Marty had yanked him away from the other kids and thrown him onto the ground a few yards away. “You like that?” he asked him, standing over Braeden. He put his foot in the middle of Braeden’s chest when he tried to get up. “No, you can stay down there for a while, if you like it so much.”
The other kids tried to regroup, even started heading over there to help, but they all froze at one glance from Marty. “Come on over, you can join this loser right here.”
Marty had never hurt anyone before, but he had this aura around him that meant no one ever messed with him. Rumor was, his daddy was a big-time crook. Later, I learned that it was true. Marty was the son of a high-ranking Capo in the Esposito Family.
That day, Marty made Braeden lie there in the dirt until the bell went, and even the teachers on duty all looked the other way. Braeden wasn’t allowed to get up until he apologized to me and promised to leave me alone.
And Braedendidleave me alone, him and all the others who liked to pick on kids for fun. No one ever touched me again. It was like they all knew I had protection.
Then in high school, I found myself in detention with Marty once after school. It was just the two of us, so we were sent to clean out the janitor’s closet. He was friendly with me, joking, but nice jokes, not the kind that made me feel bad about myself, and I even managed to talk back once I’d relaxed a little.
The closet was small. Hot. And I kept thinking about the time he’d stood up for me against all those jerks. I don’t know what came over me…but partway through, when we were jammed up against each other reaching for the same bucket, I asked if he wanted to kiss me.
“Oh,” he’d said, surprised. Then: “I’m flattered. And you’re real pretty. But I like girls.”
“You could pretend I’m a girl.”
He gave a soft smile. “That wouldn’t be fair to you, Teddy.” And then we went on cleaning out the closet, and even though I felt awkward, he made itnotawkward, somehow. When we were done and released from detention, he stopped me outside the school.
“You ever kissed someone before?”
I shook my head at the ground.
“Take it from me, Teddy. That first kiss should be special. You’ll be glad one day you didn’t waste it on me.” He’d grinned as he said it, patted me on the shoulder, and headed off.
That was the last time I spoke to him. A few years later I’d heard he was killed in a shoot-out down at the docks. I’d cried when I heard he was dead. Cried a lot, remembering the kind boy that he’d been. It didn’t seem fair that someone so kind had left the world so soon.
“Well?” Alessandro demands again. “Why are you so interested?”
He’s so close to me, his eyes so intense…
