“And by the way, I wasn’t completely honest with you before,” Mason said, coming down the steps to stand in front of me, now towering over me. “I knew you’d grown.”
“I...okay?” I said slowly, not sure where this was going, but every instinct in me told me to pay attention.
“I saw you.”
“When?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it would have been about...five years ago?”
I stiffened. “I see.”
“No, no, I was the one who saw. I saw you with a group of guys at this nice restaurant. If you had been laughing like the rest of them, I might not have recognized you, but you were so serious that I did. And then I realized the guy across the table from you had the same look on his face, and the resemblancewas so weird I realized that this was the asshole dad Dom had mentioned you having a few times.”
Ah hell.
“Except the thing is, I’d seen your dad before, and it took me a bit, but all I had to do was a little bit of digging to realize your dad was the leader of the goddamn Marelli Family. And that meant you were his son, and there you were, having dinner with him and a few guys who were also pretty easy to find out were people that worked for him.”
I said nothing, staring back at him, keeping my expression blank.
“And see, I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing, mostly because I didn’t want to even think about what that implied. Especially when I did a little digging on you and realized you had a record. Mostly charges that were felonies and brought down to misdemeanors through the fuckery in a courtroom that only a high-priced lawyer can make happen, but there it was. All the evidence I needed to know what you had been doing.”
I kept my silence even as my stomach twisted and knotted.
“And there was the bitch of it all,” he said. “I had the answer to a mystery I’d given up on ever solving. Now I knew why you left, because you were joining Dad in the family business, or I should sayTheFamilybusiness. And it made me laugh.”
“Why?” I blurted out without thinking.
“Because I realized that I probably knew why you didn’t just dip, but why you had left Dom behind and hadn’t kept in contact. Because even though you ran off to join your piece of shit dad to do whatever fucked up shit you’ve been doing all this time, you were trying to keep him safe,” he said, smirking down at me. “You were making the world’s stupidest decision, and yet you were still trying to keep him safe. It would be kinda sweet if it weren’t so fucking stupid.”
I looked away. “Congratulations, you’ve managed to lay out all my failings and poor choices.”
“I’m good at that sort of thing.”
“Clearly. But the real question is....what are you going to do about it?”
“See, that’s where I’m struggling, because I don’t know what to do if I’m honest. I mean, I don’t really like sticking my nose into other people’s business, especially my family’s. They’re pretty good at handling their own problems. But uh...I’m gonna guess he knows?”
“He knows,” I said softly, not sure if that somehow made it better in his eyes or worse, but there really wasn’t an option to lie.
“Yeah, I figured,” Mason said with a sigh. “I don’t know if I was hoping he didn’t or did...if he didn’t, that meant you were still trying to hide shit from him, keep him away.”
“Which meant it would be easier for you to continue this little speech about how I need to leave your brother alone.”
“Actually, I was going to suggest that you just dip out while the getting is good,” he snorted. “But he knows, huh? Fuck, is that where his ‘bar fight’ wound came from?”
“Mason, get to the point?”
“That’s a yes,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Look, the others don’t know because I haven’t told them. Ward, though, he looked like he was getting close to figuring out who you are.”
“I had the same thought.”
“And he’ll tell Arlo if he ever puts the pieces together.”
“I would assume as much.”
“But Arlo probably won’t tell.”
“But you will?”
