by Bethany-Kris
They still liked it.
“Well, sit,” Cross told him, sharper the second time with a pointed look at the booth and then Luca, directly.
He did.
Even though he grew up calling this man his uncle—and Cross was also his godfather—the older Luca became, the better he understood that Cross was also more. And he demanded respect because of it, too. His relationship changed with the man accordingly. He was still the guy who took Luca and Naz sledding on winter break when they were kids.
But he was also the same man that Luca watched beat an enforcer to death with his fists because he slighted Cross’s wife, Catherine, and her family—another major crime family based in New York.
Luca never forgot it, either.
Cross grabbed a stack of the money, licking his thumb before he started swiping through the bills, asking Luca at the same time, “You here for Naz?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
A shrug answered him, along with Cross’s chuckled, “Why do you think I’m here? My son took off like a bat out of hell overseas, and then suddenly he’s showing back up much the same way he left. I would like a reason why, but also ... his mother is worried.”
Luca fought a smile. “Yeah, they do that. Mothers, I mean.”
“Hmm. And don’t think I forgot about that mood, either.”
“What?”
Cross grinned. “You know what.”
He did.
Luca had also hoped the man would drop it. He couldn’t be so lucky. “Nothing, really. Just shit in my head that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Since when do you do business in Dizzy’s, anyway?”
“Since I felt like picking up someone’s tab today while I was here and had the time,” Cross replied. “And whenever else I feel like it. We’re busy men, Luca, I don’t expect you to know what a boss does with his days or time.”
He heard the warning.
An unspoken: Don’t question me.
It wasn’t malicious, he knew. Just ... a part of who they were. Or rather, who Cross was. The boss answered nothing and no one.
“Sorry,” he was quick to mutter at Cross’s stare. “Even Dad still has to tell me to watch my mouth every once and a while.”
“That’s what fathers are for. Well, that and driving their sons up the wall like their fathers used to do to them. Tradition, or some shit. We pass all of that on to our boys hoping they push the lines even more than we did when we had the chance with our own way back. Not that we would ever tell you that, mind.”
Luca’s brow dipped. “Were you talking to my father?”
“What?”
He shook his head, replying, “Never mind.”
“I don’t need to speak with Zeke about you to see when you’re struggling, Luca,” Cross murmured, drawing his gaze back to the man watching him from the other side of the booth. “I know things are different between us from when you were a boy, but there is still a part of me that sees and remembers that boy very well.”
Right.
Of course, his godfather would see shit was up.
“I am dealing with it,” he told Cross.
“And what is it, exactly?”
“I don’t really know.”
It was the truth.
Because it was everything.
And nothing at all.
“You know,” Cross said, slapping the stack of now-counted bills to the table and plucking up another, “it is okay to not know things, or even, need time to figure it out. Or if you’re anything like I was as a young man on the cusp of making big decisions in my adulthood ... take a hatchet in swinging and build your own fucking path. No one option is right for every person.”
Luca laughed hard, not expecting that. “I’ll keep it in mind. Do you know what the emergency is? Naz, I mean. Because there’s no way he took off and came back like he did without—”
“Something being wrong,” Cross finished for him. “You’re right. And yes, I know. He at least had enough sense to fill me in.”
But clearly, the man wasn’t going to tell Luca about what.
Well ...
He could wait.
NAZ SHOWED UP AN HOUR late.
Luca didn’t mind. He waited for his friend even after Cross said he had to leave—another commitment he couldn’t put off, apparently.
“Where’s my dad?” Naz asked. The first question out of his mouth when he stepped inside the club. “I thought he was going to stick around to talk.”
“Business never stops.”
Well, that was what Cross told Luca. He was just repeating the sentiment.
“And he said you could catch him up,” Luca added. “What’s up?”
Naz joined Luca in the booth with a heavy sigh. He scrubbed his palms over his face, and rolled his shoulders as he settled in. It was probably the most disheveled his friend had ever looked—his clothes were pristine, of course, but Luca found the truth in Naz’s face. Dark circles under his eyes and stress lines deep between his eyes like he’d been scowling for days.
“Have you even slept?”
“Not in three days,” Naz admitted. “It’s been ...”
“Roz is okay, right?” Luca asked.
He figured she was okay if only because his friend wouldn’t hide that from Rosalynn’s family. If something was wrong with his sister, he would have known about it when Nazio first took off overseas without warning.
“She’s ... great,” Naz settled on saying. “We both are. It’s not her.”
“Then, what’s going on?”
Naz glanced away, eyeing the booth across from theirs while he rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “A girl. Penny.”
“Who?”
“Penny,” Naz said again. “A pianist prodigy Kyle wanted Roz to meet on her way home. He intended for her to maybe mentor the girl or something but, shit didn’t go down that way.”
“Fucking Kyle.”
His sister’s mentor was something else sometimes. The man had been beneficial for Roz’s career, but he was also one of those most annoying human beings on the earth. His music over everything philosophy didn’t exactly jam with their family values, either.
“Kyle’s not important,” Naz muttered, waving a hand. “The girl is.”
“Right. Penny, you said?”
“Penny Dunsworth.”
Why did that name sound familiar? It took him a minute to connect it to someone he knew—or rather, a man he knew of.
“Like the New Jersey family—that Dunsworth? Guy’s a multi-billionaire from overseas investments, right?”
“Also a fucking pedophile, apparently.”
Luca stiffened in the booth. “What?”
“She’s sixteen, almost seventeen,” Naz explained. “And in a bad way with an equally bad history, man. She tried to hang herself while Roz was there with Kyle. That kind of bad, Luca. Anyway, after that happened is when I showed up. They committed her, but Roz got it in her head how she wanted to help.”
That sounded like Roz.
But ... “Help, how?”
Naz chuckled sadly. “I guess they got her talking in the institution when the topic came up about sending her home to Jersey. She’s got proof of what her father’s been doing to her for years ... there was no way Roz was going to let her go back there. They’re just waiting for the American officials to take over the investigation at this point because ... well, it’s a whole mess.”
Shit.
As sick as he felt, Luca knew what his friend was trying to say without just saying it outright. “Roz wants you guys to bring her home.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
Naz shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know how to tell her it’s a bad idea ... I’m also not sure that it is. The girl needs help. Real help and not just for the shit that’s happened to her in private but also her. She needs people to help her.”
“You wanna be those people?”
“Roz does,” Naz murmur
ed. “I want what Roz wants.”
Just like that.
Simple.
Luca respected it, even. It was why he never had an issue with his best friend dating his sister because the guy was gold. Good. Naz treated Roz like a fucking queen, and everybody knew it. What more could they want?
Hell, this situation would probably uproot his friend’s entire life, but Naz just looked ... ready for it. Ready to do whatever Roz wanted.
“How can I help?” Luca asked.
It only seemed right.
Naz grinned. “With the girl? Not much. She’s like a baby deer—scared of everything. And mean sometimes, or that’s what Roz says. But you can help me.”
“Anything, man.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why you’re here. I’m going to be busy for a while to make this work and do everything to get it moving forward for Roz, so we can get Penny home and settled in with us. You could handle some things for me with la famiglia, right? Keep an eye on my guys and keep up with whatever my father has going on so nothing gets behind. Shit like that.”
“I got that, no worries,” Luca replied.
Naz sat a little straighter in the booth, his gaze less worried than before. “I figured.”
“Some people might not like it, though. Some made men from the family, I mean, but—”
“Fuck them,” Naz interrupted, his hand cutting between them to end the subject right then and there. “It’s been you and me. Always was, always is. You know?”
Luca nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
Some things never changed.
He was okay with that.
2.
Penny
THE reflection in the windowpane of Penny’s therapist’s office in uptown Manhattan was far more interesting than the conversation she was trying to not engage. Not that her efforts to ignore the doctor’s questions did her any good.
“You’ve been living with Rosalynn Puzza and Nazio Donati for almost two months now, right?” her doctor asked. “How’s that going?”
“Fine.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” the therapist questioned, raising a brow behind Penny.
She could see that in the reflection of the glass, too. As clear as she could see her own, ghostly pale, heart-shaped face. The white-blonde hair that she hadn’t washed in more days than she cared to remember curtained her face more than it framed it. She didn’t mind. It was easier not to be seen.
Penny didn’t want to be looked at. Not by anyone. If only everyone else felt the same way as her. Things would be far easier.
“Your life has been significantly changed in just two months,” the therapist said. “You went from living overseas and attending a prestigious private school for the musically inclined to returning back to the states with new guardians. All during handling the police’s investigation of your father. It isn’t surprising if things are a little ... overwhelming for you, Penny.”
“And it’s fine.”
Usually, but she didn’t add that out loud. It would only encourage the therapist to ask more or probe into the topic, and Penny didn’t want to talk in the first place. She was only here doing this because it was a demand made by the social worker that regularly showed up to check in on her and her new guardians.
Roz handled the bitch with grace.
Penny couldn’t say the same.
“How about the pregnancy? I understand you have no siblings, so Rosalynn—”
“I call her Roz. It’s what she likes.”
And since Penny liked Roz, she tried to do what the woman wanted. Like calling her by the name she preferred. It was a simple thing, sure, but if it was anyone else and she didn’t like them ... well, their life would be a far more miserable place.
“Roz, then,” the therapist was quick to say behind her, the scratching against paper telling Penny that the woman was writing on her notepad. “How do you feel about Roz’s pregnancy? Are you excited for the baby?”
She only shrugged.
“Miss Dunsworth, I don’t know what shrugs mean.”
Oh, yay.
She got the last name.
That usually meant the therapist was starting to catch on that Penny was going to spend their entire hour—one of three every week until the doctor and social worker believed she wasn’t a danger to herself anymore—deflecting everything she asked.
“You know,” the woman said, not unkindly, “the longer you drag on actually talking to me about certain things, the more time you’ll spend with me, Penny.”
Well ...
She had a point.
Not one Penny particularly liked. Then again, what did she like?
“I don’t know how I feel about the pregnancy,” Penny said, not bothering to respond to the obvious. “Roz is happy. She and Naz are planning a bunch of stuff. A move, and other shit. They don’t forget about me, though. It’s like ... not here, I guess? I can’t feel something for someone that’s not here, can I?”
She didn’t know the unborn baby; didn’t even know the gender or a name yet. She did enjoy watching Naz and Roz together, but especially when they didn’t know she was watching, because she couldn’t remember seeing two people who treated each other with such love and care before. Her mother and father had never been like that ... more transactional. Everything was an equal give and take or even a negotiation. All business.
She hadn’t realized relationships weren’t really like that, but she wasn’t surprised to learn something else about her parents’ marriage had been manufactured.
“Your father isn’t here. Do you extend the same lack of emotion to the man who raped and sold your body because he isn’t present, either?”
Fuck.
Nice segue, Penny thought. The therapist wasn’t getting smarter about how she did that. The entire reason she was sitting in this office and the one thing she didn’t want to talk about was the sexual abuse she suffered through with her father.
Hadn’t she talked enough?
She was silent for years.
Then, all it took was the mental ward overseas suggesting that she would be transferred back to the care of her mother and father for the floodgates to open. No way in hell was she going back to them. She had finally been free, for all purposes. Her parents were satisfied to send her brand of trouble all the way across the world, far away from them.
She liked that fine, too.
Except once she started talking about the things her father had done to her from the time she was two ... well, it didn’t stop. A doctor turned into another doctor that wanted to take notes. And then a bobby arrived because the doctors had to report it. One officer turned into two, and then the Americans got involved because the majority of abuse took place in Jersey.
She thought one person would be enough, but no. Penny couldn’t be so lucky. Now there were fifty hours or more of videotapes with recordings of her speaking in detail about the abuse she suffered for years. Videotapes that they planned to show at her father’s trail—if she wasn’t called to testify herself.
Christ.
She talked enough.
Penny didn’t want to keep doing it.
“Penny?” the therapist asked softly. “You’re very tense over there. Can you let go of your hand for me? I can see the way you’re digging your fingernails into the side of your palm. Take a second if you need it.”
She needed far more than a second.
A million minutes.
A new memory.
A whole new life.
Except that wouldn’t happen.
She was who she was.
Fucked up.
Broken inside and out.
Tired of all of it.
Eventually, Penny did let go of her hand, ignoring the three, deep red crescent marks she had damn near cut through the skin that were left behind. Thankfully, the therapist didn’t continue pressing the topic of Preston Dunsworth. Instead, she moved onto something else that was just about a
s bad on Penny’s fuck no radar.
“How do you feel about your mother—Allegra—not attempting to gain custody of you back from your current guardians? I hear you got the news about that development recently, right?”
God.
The woman was a dog digging for a bone. And any bone would do even if it was one she bit out of Penny’s body to gnaw on. Because that’s exactly how this felt. Yet another reason why she hated therapy with Dr. Tangler. The only reason why she continued returning was the fact that she didn’t hate the doctor personally.
Only what she was trying to do—fix Penny.
She couldn’t be fixed.
“Penny, how do you feel—”
“I don’t,” she snapped.
“Don’t feel, you mean?”
“Not for her.”
She wouldn’t even say her mother’s name. Couldn’t. The pressure in her chest became painful along with the swell of memories that were now ever constant and always on replay in the back of her mind. All these people wanted her to do was remember.
Penny needed to forget.
“She’s your mother. You’re her only child. And you’re not at all affected that she’s effectively orphaned you to the state?” the woman asked.
“No.”
And if Penny were considered mentally stable enough for a proper emancipation, then she would have tried for that, too. That was that. What else needed said?
Penny continued staring at the reflection in the glass, comforted more by the sight of her wide, haunted blue eyes than anything else. You look like an angel, her father would tell her. People pay for the way you look, Penny. She didn’t see that at all, only pain.
At least, her stare didn’t lie. Everything anyone needed to know was always staring back at them. She was happy, at least, that the last bit of yellowish bruising on her neck had finally disappeared over the last week. It had been the only reminder of her last suicide attempt.
One of many.
This time would have worked if not for Roz ... and Kyle, too, a mentor who had been trying to help Penny overseas. He was long gone, though, back to wherever he spent his days. And she was left with Roz and Naz while the bruises faded from the rope she had tied perfectly.
Penny didn’t know whether she was happy or not that they saved her. Everybody says a person only wants to die until they are dying, but she didn’t remember it that way.
