Gentle.
“I just feel like there are a lot of outstanding questions,” I said.
“Ah.” He nodded, and his gaze found the ceiling as he slid his free hand through his hair with an exhale. The way he tilted his head up made the muscles in his neck stretch and cord against the tattoos. After a beat, his eyes found mine again.
“Shoot, Maniac.”
“Do you really work for the Mafia?” When he nodded at my question, I followed up. “Have you ever wanted to leave?”
“Every day.”
Our eyes locked, and the heaviness in his gaze made my gut wrench. I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself.
“Why can’t you? Are you, like, I don’t know…” I only knew the Mafia from books, and while there was a lot of variation, a major theme was thefamilies.Was he part of some royal Mafia family?
As if reading my mind, Calder spoke. “Most people in this world are connected to some kind of family. That’s not me. No one else in my family, immediate or extended, is connected. If the Mafia is royalty, my dad was the guy cleaning the driveway outside the palace. His job had nothing to do with themachinations of the Mafia. He cleaned up their domestic messes—affairs, sex workers, he made disappear when they started getting chatty.”
“How did he make them disappear?”
“Blackmail. Threats. Violence.”
I swallowed.
“He wasn’t important,” Calder continued, “but when you’re in, the only way out is a body bag. His death should have been the end of it.”
The only way out is a body bag.
I tensed.
Once again reminded that this was not a book, and I had no guarantee that I would get a happily ever after with the man I loved. That there was a very real possibility he would leave and I’d never see him again.
“Why wasn’t his death the end of it?” I asked quietly.
Calder responded with another long exhale. I felt the rise and fall of his chest against my ear. “It’s a long story,” he said.
I put my hands on his chest and rested my chin on them, looking up at him. “I have time.”
He speared his hand into my hair, gripping my skull and searching my face, the tension in his gaze stretched taut between us.
Then he released me, hand sliding back to my hip.
“My father was abusive,” he said, with an almost robotic apathy. “He beat my mother for years, until one day she was just gone. He tried to tell us she left, but…” His gaze was far away. “She wouldn’t do that.”
He took a deep breath and continued. “Anyway, without my mother to beat, he had to find someone else. He landed on my sister.”
Calder disappeared in a memory, gaze once again far off. The muscles in his chest and arms were wire taut. His jaw flexed, nostrils flared. Wherever he went, it wasn’t good.
I wrapped my arm around him, trying to provide some comfort.
That seemed to pull him back to the present. His stare landed on mine, soft like a sunset.
“I don’t really remember what happened,” he said. “I remember grabbing a golf club when he went for my sister. Then he was on the ground, bleeding. The golf club in my hand.” His grip tightened on my hip. “My brother took the fall. When I tried to say it was me, he told the police I was distraught and not thinking. One of us had to be there for my sister, and since I was the one with good grades and potential, it had to be me.”
His tone was filled with a guilt so bitter it could break rock. My heart split in two, aching for him, his brother, his sister—the life they should have had but didn’t.
I couldn’t imagine not having Lithie.
“But I did my best to be what my brother wanted,” Calder said. “I went to school. I got my master’s. I got a nice, boring job in accounting?—”
