My boy.
You didn’t train me. I trained myself.
“Are you going to tell the girl about her father’s fate?” I asked, my voice ice cold.
“Who? Ah, yes. Ms. Emily, She’s a big girl now…”
My hand tightened around the handle of my gun, my trigger finger itching with anticipation.
Not now. Wait.
“I've been around for a long time, son. I have ruled over this kingdom since before you were born.”
The way he said it had all my senses on high alert, but I remained a statue, waiting. Watching. Calculating.
A predator never rushed in for the kill.
We waited for vulnerability.
“Tony was my first-born son,” he continued, raising his chin higher.
Your son was a pathetic waste of energy and air.
“He was supposed to inherit all of this.” He waved a hand around aimlessly. “How ironic that he only wanted to play baseball. I thought that if I taught him a lesson by killing that whore, he would learn.”
“He didn’t.”
He smiled. “No, he didn’t. He was addicted to pussy, and that’s what got him killed in the end.”
“You put your trust in the wrong people, sir.” Dean Connors deceived him. Just when he thought he had the best player in the MLB in his grasp…
“That I did,” he responded, his voice harder than before.
My demon smiled. Struck a nerve. “We all make mistakes,” I said simply.
My mistake was thinking I could devote my life to a man like you.
“That we do,” he surmised. “There are new opportunities on the horizon, Collin. Lucrative. There are things I've been keeping you in the dark about.”
I have spent my life in the darkness. Your secrets weren’t hidden, not from me.
“Are you referring to the missing gambling money, or the trafficking?”
He froze, his drink in the air.
I didn’t move a centimeter. If I were to kill him tonight, he would have to make the first move. I was certain my question would break him, but he merely stumbled. Once he cleared his throat, he chuckled. “You always were intelligent.”
The waiter came back then, andthatirritated Romano.
His façade cracked before my eyes. The young waiter, no more than nineteen, was shot in the head before me, his blood splattering on the side of my face.
I didn’t flinch, utterly hypnotized by the man before me and what I saw in his dark, cold eyes. The thing that, years ago, didn’t exist in his world—let alone his vocabulary.
Desperation.
My eyes dropped to his hand, ignoring the gun, only focusing on how the body part shook.
I was shocked, but yet, a feeling of skepticism washed over me.
