Three
Enzo
Punctuality wasas important to me as a pussy to a eunuch.
The only man whose time I respected was my father’s.
Nobody disrespected his schedule. Not me. Not the president. Not the richest man on earth.
Which was why I gave no fucks that I was going to be thirty minutes late to American Gothic Lit. While I had zero interest in pursuing a career in literature or any profession that required a degree, my parents expected one thing from me while I was here: an acceptable GPA.
My father viewed failure as a weakness.
He despised weakness.
He’d never attended college. Nor did my older brother, Benny.
College had never been in the cards for me either until President Byron approached my father four years ago. He gave him an offer that led to lucrative deals, contracts with high-powered officials, and further opportunities for our family’s illegal ventures. It was a deal too good for my father to refuse. It’d also introduced me to a world that changed my life.
Most people feared the Marchetti name. Saint Vale made us even more untouchable. I was here to expand our influence, notfor some shitty-ass, overpriced piece of paper. Running a criminal empire didn’t require a degree.
Cristian Marchetti—my father, who was also known as Monster Marchetti—was the boss of the Marchetti Mafia family. Benny served as his underboss. Our name sat on the top of every Fed’s wish list, but no matter how hard they tried to pin our crimes on us, we were always two steps ahead of them.
I aspired to be as sinister as my father.
As brutal and merciless.
Every day, I got closer.
Professor Nelson glanced up from the whiteboard when the lecture room door opened. Instinctively, he parted his lips, prepared to scold the tardy student. He slammed them shut when he found me.
I gave him a lazy salute, adding a flip of the bird for fun. His glare followed me down the aisle as I walked to the back row.
I had no respect for a man who wore a man bun and had once claimed Melville was superior to Poe. I’d take a lunatic hiding corpses beneath his floorboards over the idiot chasing a whale any day.
Last night, after leaving the wall, I had called Nico and told him to tell me everything he’d found on Blair. Judging from the slapping sounds in the background and the chick whining his name, he was mid-fuck but still managed to explain why she’d been expelled from her last university.
It confirmed what I’d already suspected. I’d chosen well, and she deserved everything coming to her.
I told Nico to hack into Saint Vale’s system and send me her class schedule. After that, I spent the rest of the night stalking everything I could find out about her, though I found very little.
She wasn’t on social media.
If you weren’t on social media, you were hiding something.
That was why I wasn’t on it.
American Gothic Lit had turned out to be the only class we shared, which was unfortunate.
I scanned the lecture hall and spotted her quickly. She sat at a desk in the third row between two morons.
Her back was straight, shoulders square, posture perfect. As Nelson droned about symbolism, she tapped her pen against her temple in sync with his words.
Unlike our classmates, she hadn’t looked at me when I arrived late.
That got under my skin.
I slid into the chair behind her, two seats away from Cedric. He glanced up from his phone, flipped me off, and resumed his texting.
