Alesso used to joke that Ranieri was a used car salesman in the body of a mafioso.
Hells, I was pretty sure if he set his mind to it he could sell me a Kia without batting an eyelid.
“I know what it means,” he said, returning our pack mate’s eye roll. “I taught you that word, remember?”
“I remember,” Nico chimed in, ever-eager to be a part of the conversation. Being the youngest in our group and the only one not raised full-time in the Amante crime family came with its own challenges. He was always trying to fit in and the rest of my pack had welcomed him as one of our own because I was one of them, so he was always trying to find his place amongst us. “You said it to describe Dante’s general vibe.”
“Very good, young padawan, and for being such a good student there’s a beer with your name on it once we get back to the house,” Alesso said, reaching back to boop the younger alpha’s nose, chuckling when Nico batted his finger away with a glare.
I let the rest of the pack, sans the ever silent Dante, continue to chatter idly as I fell back into my own thoughts. Suddenly I was a million miles away from them, thinking about how Iwas supposed to tell Alesso about what happened with Cini and whether or not my passport was up to date in case I needed to flee the country.
Then, almost too quickly, we reached the drop point: a lookout point showed off the glittering city in the distance.
Once upon a time, I was sure that horny teens came here to sit in their T-Birds or their Wildcats and have illicit sex until the cops came to break it up.
Unfortunately for us, our business here was even less savory than teenage fornication. We were here to break the law.
“Jeez, this place always creeps me out,” Ranieri muttered, wrapping his suit jacket tighter around his body as we got out of the car in order to wait for the Russians to show up. “Couldn’t Volkov have picked somewhere more, I don’t know,cheerful?”
Alesso reached behind the other alpha’s head and gave his dark blond hair a playful ruffle. “Sorry, Rani, theChuck-E-Cheesewas booked out for the night with a drug deal, so I’m working with what we’ve got.”
“Don’t do that,” Ranieri huffed, whipping out his phone to check his hair in the camera. “You know I hate when you do that.”
“C’mon, no one here cares what your hair looks like,” Alesso continued to tease, clearly enjoying himself as he ducked so he could see Ranieri’s disgruntled expression. “Unless… you want to look pretty for good old Vladdy?”
Ranieri’s green eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened as he glared at Alesso.
I opened my mouth to tell Alesso to knock it off, worried that he was going too far and the two were going to end up in a brawl—it had happened before and it would probably happen again—but I never got the chance because our guests seemed to have arrived.
“I see that I have come too early,” a voice thick with a Russian accent made all of us tense up as we whirled in the direction it had come from.
Dante, who had been leaning against the door of the SUV watching Alesso and Ranieri argue, put a hand to where his gun was concealed under his jacket, ready to pull it and defend our pack.
Then, out of the mist that seemed to suddenly be gathering around us, Vladimir Volkov stepped into view surrounded by his men.
The Volkovs and their men were, in a word, off-putting. The entire lot of them felt odd to me—like there was something in my instincts telling me that they were dangerous and I shouldn’t mess with them.
And, if it wasn’t a direct order from the boss, Iwouldn’thave been here in the first place.
Where Ivan Volkov was old and nearly bed-ridden, his only son was the opposite. Vladimir exuded the sort of threatening strength that one would expect when you came face-to-face with a Russian mobster. His pale hair was slicked back out of his severe, chiseled face as he took the five of us in with a pair of icy blue eyes that seemed to be able to look right through me.
His gaze made me feel like I was a little boy caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be rather than the twenty-four-year-old man that I was.
I looked away from the group entirely and I heard the man huff a satisfied laugh. We had just been playing a game of eye-contact chicken, I realized with a sinking feeling, and I had lost.
Alesso seemed to recover from the shock of Vladimir’s sudden appearance first, his shoulders rolling back as he straightened and slipped into the role of the Amante family heir. Confident and cold.
“Actually, Volkov,” Alesso began with all of the swagger that he could muster as he stepped into the head position of our group and we fell in seamlessly, creating a V-formation around our leader. “By my calculations, you’re late.”
Alesso, as if we weren’t faced with fifteen men to our five, held up his Rolex in the dim light like he was reading the time off of it and shot Volkov a bored expression.
“But I suppose better late than never,” Alesso continued airily and I watched as the men behind Vladimir shifted uncomfortably at the blasé way that Alesso seemed to address their boss.
Technically they were both on the same level in the grand hierarchy of the five families.
They were both heirs to their family—and the only other person in the city who even came close to them were Shuuhei Saito of the Japanese and Edison Keane of the Irish.
But Alesso, at twenty-four, was the youngest of that grouping and Vladimir was the oldest. That held a weight in and of itself and now my best friend seemed to be disregarding the difference in status in order to push the other alpha’s buttons.
