DIRTY POOL
Copyright © 2019 by Bethany-Kris. All Rights Reserved.
ONE
Michel Marcello liked pressure. He worked best when someone was right over his shoulder, reminding him that time was ticking down. His greatest educational achievements came from times when his life was thick with tension, and he could lose himself in textbooks. His highest test scores came from moments when the pressure was so high that anyone else might have cracked under it.
Not him, though.
He just worked better.
Books weren’t a problem for him—from the time he was young, he found learning was the easiest obstacle he had to face in his twenty years. It helped that he loved to learn, and took joy from understanding something that before, had been entirely foreign to him. It was like a new challenge. Something else for him to master.
But exams?
Fuck.
He found exams boring as hell.
Maybe it was because he’d spent the entire first year of pre-med learning everything in front of him, and he hadn’t struggled with any degree of difficulty to write his final exam on biochemistry. Hell, that had been his favorite subject for the past year.
Around the halfway mark of the final exam, he was already sighing. And fighting a migraine from wishing he could read faster. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers—he knew them too well. It felt like he was just going through the motions, and the exam was never going to be done. His laziness was where he made mistakes despite being as book smart as he was lucky to be.
Except this was what he wanted.
More than anything.
To be a doctor had been Michel’s dream from the time he was eleven. He’d been out with Dante, his father, when a new recruit for a gang from the inner city thought to earn his way in by attacking the infamous Marcello mob boss. Michel’s dad, that was.
It was the first time that Michel truly understood what it meant to be a Cosa Nostra family, and the dangers that came along with it. Before that day, the mafia had never touched Michel in a real way. He heard the whispers in his family about what his uncles and father did, and he thought he knew what it meant.
He didn’t know anything at all.
The stray bullets missed Dante.
They hit the enforcer protecting Michel.
Pandemonium followed utter chaos after the attack. He remembered his father shouting no cops, no cops as the bleeding enforcer was dragged into an alleyway. A car quickly pulled up less than a minute later, and they all piled into the back. It was in the backroom of a Brooklyn medical clinic that he watched a trauma surgeon hired by his father, to stay on call just in case, save the life of that enforcer.
And there Michel was—all of eleven, but almost twelve, tucked away in the corner of the room because his father was busy focusing his energy on making sure his man was saved. He watched the whole thing. The blood … the man on the table, awake without anesthesia, and the doctor, who even terrified, did his job.
He did it with steady hands.
Michel aspired to be that man. He was sure some people assumed, in one way or another, he would take after his mafia Don father and join the family—impossible with his bloodline and history, although the Marcellos would have made room if he truly wanted to become a made man. Or even, maybe he would take after his mother; a Queen Pin who ran the majority of her drug dealing business out of California.
Both things fascinated him. He respected his parents, their lives, and the choices they made. He grew up in the illegal, underground world of the mafia, and surrounded by criminals. That was all he knew. Even his best friends—his cousins, John and Andino—chose to go into the family business as soon as they were old enough to join.
Him, though?
He was going to be a doctor. Specifically, a trauma surgeon if all went well. And it would go well because he would make sure of it. Nothing was going to ruin this for him, not even himself. He wouldn’t let his boredom get to him, not now.
Michel stared down at the exam in front of him, and blinked at the next question. Like the others, he knew the answer, and quickly circled the appropriate dot on the answer card. The promise of a migraine was still fighting its way through the front of his skull behind his eyes even as he worked his way through the next two pages of the exam.
He glanced up, and checked the time on the clock at the front of the room. It rested just above the large white board that the professor liked to use to doodle on as he gave nonsensical lectures—yet another thing that gave Michel the fastest migraines of his fucking life. He was going to be glad to get this first year of pre-med over with, and move on to something a little more challenging.
According to that clock, though, he had another two hours of this. Two goddamn hours, and he was already a quarter of the way through this exam. The only good thing he could see about this situation was the fact he was soon going to be getting to the written portion of this exam, and his brain would have to work a little harder.
He just needed to get to that point.
Slipping his hand into his pocket, he pulled out a bottle of over the counter pain meds, and popped off the cap. He shook the bottle, and two pills fell into his palm. Next to him, the guy raised a brow at him as Michel tossed the pills into his mouth before grabbing the water on his desk to help swallow them back.
The student at the desk next to his shared a look with him that said, I get you, man. The guy looked like he was about to drown, and he could already see his failing grade staring back at him. Hell, maybe he could.
Honestly, all Michel needed to do was take a look around this classroom, and he could easily pick out probably at least twenty percent of the students that wouldn’t make it to their second year. No one truly understood the hell of pre-med until they were in the thick of it, and there was no getting out.
They went in thinking one thing …
And changed their direction after year-one thinking another.
Not Michel, though.
He knew what he wanted.
This.
• • •
“Hey, Ma,” Michel said, shifting the messenger bag on his shoulder as he left the exam room with thirty minutes left to go. He’d actually finished his exam an hour earlier than planned, but the professor required him to wait until that half-hour mark before he allowed him to leave the room, along with anyone else who was done early and felt like taking the risk of not double checking their answer cards and written portions. “You’re calling a bit—”
“Well, how did it go?”
Michel laughed.
Of course, she knew.
Catrina remembered everything.
“The exam went well,” he told her.
“Ah, bambino,” Catrina replied, her Italian accent thicker than anyone else’s in their family because Italy had been her birthplace and where she was raised. “I knew you would do well. My smart ragazzo, yes?”
Always his mother’s baby.
“It was touch and go there for a while,” he replied, “but I got through it.”
“Was it really?”
Michel scoffed. “Not even close.”
It was cake, honestly.
Catrina let out a soft sigh. “I figured as much, but don’t you dare get comfortable or lazy, Michel. You need the best grades you can get if you want to see this through. When it comes to a residency—”
“They’re going to look at everything. I know.”
“Of course, you do.”
Some people thought his mother was cold as hell in a lot of ways. He supposed she could be to people on the outside of their life. She had a persona to uphold, and she presented it first and foremost to people before they ever got a good look at who she really was behind her mask of a mafia boss’s wife and Queen Pin.
To him, though?
She’d always been just his mom.
Well, sort of …
She’d adopted him, and so had his father, but he learned that in his teenage years after snooping through his parents’ shared office. He hadn’t meant to stumble on the falsified paperwork, but when he brought it up to Dante and Catrina, they didn’t lie.
Catrina was, biologically, his aunt. Her sister had been pregnant, and died shortly after he was born because of the man who … impregnated her. Or raped, no one was really one-hundred percent sure on that, or they simply didn’t want to tell Michel the truth.
Either way, that was how his mother and father became, well, his. People liked to assume, or those that knew the truth, that Michel must have some deep-rooted issues with his parents because he didn’t biologically belong to them.
Those people were idiots.
Michel had no issues.
He didn’t know anything but the man and woman who he called mom and dad. They were the only parents he ever knew, and the only ones he wanted to know, too. They gave him this amazing life. They gave him the ability to do whatever he wanted and make his own choices about what direction his life would go.
Without them, he would not be him.
How was that not a parent?
Catrina and Dante were the only people who raised him, and the detail that they didn’t share, blood, never factored into what he knew to be true. He loved them entirely.
And they loved him.
So much.
Michel came out of the corridor exit, and right into the parking lot where his Mercedes waited in the warm summer air of Detroit. He stepped out of WSU School of Medicine and gave it one last look over his shoulder, a sense of pride thickening his blood with every step he took carrying him further away from the walls of the college that challenged him every step of the way for his first year of pre-med.
Yeah, some shit was easy.
Others?
Not so much.
But he liked it.
Respected it.
His parents taught him that, too.
“What are your plans for the summer, then?” Catrina asked, bringing him back to the conversation at hand. “Today was your final exam before break, right?”
“It was.”
“And?”
Michel shook his head, knowing there was no way out of this conversation. “And I haven’t decided yet what I’m doing with my break.”
That was a lie.
He had decided.
He wasn’t going home.
Catrina made a sad noise. “Well, okay.”
He knew what his parents wanted—they missed him, and would like to have him home. In a way, he wanted to go back, too, but he’d heard the stories and rumors. Students that went back and got comfortable at home after their first year had a higher chance of not returning for the second. He didn’t think his mother would appreciate him telling her that, though.
But he did miss them.
He missed his family. His cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. All of them. Even his younger sister, as annoying as Catherine could be. Being an Italian through and through meant he grew up in a culture that took family seriously. Large dinners, church every Sunday together, and time spent as a whole unit of one. The closest thing he got to being near his family in Detroit was the Marcello faction of the mafia in the city—the Vannozzo family served his needs when he needed something familiar around him.
They kept him busy sometimes, too.
At least, his dad didn’t mind because Michel was around people Dante trusted, and had some control over being they were an extended arm of his father’s mafia organization in New York. He wasn’t really involved in the Vannozzo’s business here, but they had been hinting lately that if he wanted to get back into a bit of dealing—like he’d done for years in New York throughout his high school years—that they would be happy to provide him with the shit to sell.
Michel was considering it.
He didn’t know what his father would think of that now that Michel was in college, and he was supposed to be putting the famiglia ideals behind him for this doctor dream. He wasn’t really interested in finding out, either.
Catrina hummed under her breath, drawing Michel from his thoughts as she muttered, “Yes, Dante, I’ll tell him.”
Michel chucked. “Tell me what?”
“Your father said you should come home.”
He fiddled with the fob to his Mercedes as he stood beside the car, and then hit the unlock button. The car lit up on all four corners, the black paint job shining in the daylight. He didn’t immediately jump into the vehicle, instead opting to finish his conversation with his mother first.
Now or never.
“I’m not going to come home for the summer,” he said.
Catrina was quiet for a while, and he hoped he hadn’t upset his ma. He loved her, but he also needed this time. As it was, he’d made the move to Detroit a whole year earlier than his first year of pre-med had started. He wanted to settle in, and get used to the city. He was going to be here for a while, right? He might as well learn to love it.
That meant staying.
Catrina relayed what Michel said to his father. In the background, he heard Dante reply, “Well, tell him to stay out of trouble.”
“You heard that, then?” Catrina asked Michel.
He laughed. “I did.”
“Do as your father says, Michel.”
“When do I ever cause trouble, Ma?”
“Define trouble.”
She wasn’t lying.
Michel might not be actively in the life like they were, and yet, somehow he still managed to dip his hands in the waters. As his sister liked to say, there was no such thing as being a little wet where the mafia was concerned. One was either dry entirely, or soaked to the fucking bone.
He wouldn’t look for trouble, though, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t find him. This life was just funny in that way.
“Yeah, I’ll try,” he told his ma.
“You better.”
• • •
Michel walked into Bella—the mob-owned, Italian eatery—and inhaled the scents of mozzarella and pasta. Spices and richness followed, clinging just as firmly to the air as utensils scraped against plates, and laughter lit up the restaurant. Nothing reminded Michel of home as much as a proper Italian restaurant did, honestly.
The fact it was mob-owned probably helped with that, too.
He bypassed the chick at the podium with a Bluetooth speaker in her ear and a tablet in her hands. She barely even glanced at him, recognizing his face and knowing better than to ask if he had a reservation. He didn’t need one—he knew the owner.
Just because he threw all of his attention into that first year of pre-med didn’t mean he hadn’t taken the time to also make friends. In their life, it didn’t matter that someone moved away from family and the business—that shit was everywhere. Michel was still the son of a mafia Don at the end of the day, and he needed contacts. Something his cousins had been quick to point out to him when they figured out he was dead serious about med school, and moving to Detroit.
So, he made friends.
Ones with big names.
His last name probably helped with that, too. Everyone who was anyone in the world of organized crime knew the Marcello surname without further explanation needed. He suspected his father had a hand in putting him in the path of Salvestro Vannozzo, cousin to the Vannozzo boss and a top Capo of the family in Detroit, because Dante wanted to make sure Michel had some kind of clout watching his back during his time there.
He wasn’t complaining.
The Vannozzos reminded him of home, and that kept him from getting too homesick. He also wasn’t exactly good with normal. He could have easily made friends with people at college, and maybe he should have just because, but those people didn’t understand him. They didn’t know what it was like to grow up the way he did, and they would never understand the way he sometimes talked in riddles, or his serious dislike of anything related to authority.
He needed like-minded people.
Salvestro and the rest of the Vannozzo men he made an effort to spend time with gave him exactly those things, and more. Because he came from a familiar background and family, with a last name that afforded him a great deal of respect, Salvestro and the Capo’s men welcomed Michel in as a friend.
Of sorts …
They kept their business guarded, to a point. He didn’t fault them for that, either. He wasn’t a made man—he couldn’t know all the details, and he really didn’t want to. He did get a firsthand look at some of their dealings, but that was far different from being a friend of theirs and just a friend.
One meant he was in.
One meant he was just okay.
Michel was fine with being just okay.
“And there’s the doc!”
Michel chuckled at Sal’s greeting as he stepped into the entryway of the private dining area of the restaurant. Sal preferred to do all his business and meetings out of the sight of the regular patrons. It wasn’t good for business to scare people away with the mob details, after all.
“Not a doctor yet,” Michel reminded his friend.
“Ah, Dio vaffanculo,” Sal replied, flipping a hand in Michel’s direction as he turned to the guy sitting across the table from him. Another familiar face to Michel here in Detroit. David Barese, a bookie for the Vannozzo family doing a good portion of his business in clubs that Michel liked to frequent throughout the city. “Listen to the shit coming out of his mouth, huh?”
David laughed, and passed Michel a grin. “You’re always gonna be the doc to us, kid.”
Michel bristled at the kid comment. He knew they were just fucking with him, and he enjoyed it, really. That was part of their life, and it meant he was welcomed here. They were treating him as one of them. In a way, they reminded him of his cousins, John and Andino.
“What are you doing today, anyway?” Sal asked, flipping through a deck of cards before laying out a spread on the table. “I thought you had classes?”
“Exams,” Michel corrected, “and I finished my last one today.”
“Yes,” David crowed, “that means the doc is free for the summer. What are we going to do with him, Sal? Put him to work, do you think?”
Michel rolled his eyes as he came further into the room. He didn’t pull out a chair to sit with the two men at the small table because he really didn’t plan on staying for that long. He just wanted to see if David or Sal had any interesting plans for the weekend because he felt like celebrating his final exams. All year, he’d been careful not to indulge too much. Sure, he’d go out, but he wouldn’t really party. No heavy drinking, and certainly nothing that was going to mess with his mind like a bit of smoke or a pill.
Well, school was done.
And these men knew how to party.
Sal passed Michel a look, considering David’s statement for a moment before he asked, “Have you ever considered that, cafone?”
“Calling me a fool doesn’t make me want to work for you because I know that’s what you’re asking without actually asking me.”
The man smirked. “You know how it works. But seriously, have you thought about it? I mean, I talked to your cousin—John. I know you used to deal. Had a bit of a touch for it, according to him.”
Michel ran his tongue along his teeth, and sucked in air to make a hissing sound at the same time. “I did.”
“What else are you going to do for the summer?”
“Study. Find a woman to keep me entertained. Sleep until noon.”
“Study, he says,” David grumbled.
Michel flipped his middle finger up at the man, but David only shrugged and went back to the card game with Sal like nothing had happened in the first place. “But yeah, I considered it.”
Sal nodded, looking at the cards on the table as he said, “I could set that up for you. Just for the summer, if that’s what you wanted to do.”
Do I?
That was the better question.
Michel had a bad habit of missing familiar things. Hustling for money—even if he did have more dollars in the bank than he would ever know what to do with—was one of those things that he found familiar, and easy. Like learning, or his family.
He also hated being bored.
This would help with that.
“All right,” Michel said, “just for the summer.”
“Perfetto,” Sal praised, raising a brow to David who was smiling again. “Seems we’ve got a new recruit. What do we teach him first, huh?”
“Ah, I don’t think he’ll need much training. He is a Marcello, after all. It’s in his blood. As long as he’s not stepping on anyone’s toes or working in the wrong places, he’ll be fine.”
Right.
In his blood.
Michel didn’t correct them.
Blood never mattered to him, anyway.
TWO
“Did you check your sugars, lass?”
“My sugars are fine, Da.”
“Gabbie—”
She popped the small sweet chocolate into her mouth, and turned to face her father, Charles, with a grin. “My sugars are fine.”
Aye, she was going to suffer for that little treat later, no doubt. She would have to check her sugars simply because she broke her diet for one itty, bitty piece of chocolate, but it was worth it. The chocolate melted in her mouth, and slid down her throat like it was pure heaven. She didn’t get sugar very much, if at all.
Her dad raised a brow, and fought the urge to smile. “When you act like this, you remind me so much of your mam, lass.”
“Probably more today, huh?”
He nodded once, and reached out to tuck one of her stray red curls behind her ear. “Today more than other feckin’ days.”
Charles moved to stand beside Gabbie, and then turned to watch the rest of the people in his home gathering around the large table to get their plates ready. Every year on this day, they celebrated a woman who was no longer with them. Her mam. Gabbie didn’t remember very much about her mother—Betha Casey passed on when she was still a young girl from an accident on the highway as she was driving home from a dinner with friends.
The absolute love of her father’s life, next to Gabbie, he’d never remarried, and she was his only child. It showed, too. Like this conversation right now.
“No more sweets,” her father grumbled, giving her a look from the side. “I don’t want a call from the hospital because you didn’t manage your—”
“I’m twenty years old. I can take care of my diabetes, Da.”
Charles sighed.
Gabbie shrugged.
This was the same conversation they had more times than she cared to admit over the last few years. She understood, though. Her father’s greatest fear was that he was going to lose her, too. She was the last person he truly loved in the world. It made him feel out of control because he couldn’t manage her disease like he had when she was younger. She was the adult with the say so about her own body, what she did with it, and the things she put inside it. Like sugar.
He had to trust that she was doing what was right, and he simply didn’t feel like she was doing what she needed to. She was used to him hovering, but lately, it just annoyed her more than it probably should.
As a child, she never understood why her father was quick to bark at anyone who dared to offer her something sweet. She’d been born insulin resistant, and while they were able to manage it for the majority of her childhood, as she slipped into her later teenage years, something changed.
Hormones.
Life.
Who feckin’ knew?
She packed on the pounds—almost thirty in her senior year. People heard type two diabetes and automatically assumed someone was unhealthy because nobody developed type two unless they weren’t taking care of themselves, right?
Wrong.
A very small percentage of people—Gabbie was in that lucky number—could develop type two diabetes because of other health problems, like being insulin resistant. She managed her diabetes with a very strict diet, exercise, and occasionally medications when she needed it.
She’d lost those thirty pounds, but because of the way her disease worked, she was borderline underweight. Something her doctor and father liked to remind her every time she had to step on a feckin’ scale. She’d gone from putting on weight like crazy in a matter of months to struggling to gain any weight for several years.
Yeah, a struggle.
That was the best way to describe this disease.
“Could we not do this today?” she asked, glancing up at her tall father.
Charles stared back at her, unaffected.
She took after a lot of her father’s features—from the red, unruly hair to the freckles that dotted the bridge of her nose and her cheeks … her whole body, really. Even the shape of her green eyes, and the high line of her cheekbones matched her father’s more masculine, stronger features. She was the softer, feminine version.
But her lips?
The small cleft in her chin?
The dimple in her left cheek?
Charles said that was all her mam.
“Today is supposed to be for Ma,” she reminded her da, “not for you to hover and poke at me about what I’m putting in my mouth.”
“But if I don’t do it, who is?”
Gabbie sighed, and crossed her arms over her chest. The people at the table had yet to realize the man throwing this dinner party to celebrate the life of his dead wife had still not joined them to eat. Not that it was stopping them from digging into the food on the platters.
“That’s the point, it’s for me to worry about now.”
“Can’t do that, lass,” Charles said, “that’s not how a father’s mind works.”
She was about to open her mouth and argue further with her father—how was he ever going to learn to trust her if he continued to do this?—when someone at the table saved her from .
“Charles, are you bothering that lass of yours again?” Brennan asked.
One of the men at table grinned at Gabbie. Rather conspiratorially. Like he knew exactly what her father was doing, and he was going to try to save her.
Brennan Brady likely did know, too. Her father’s right-hand man in the Irish mob, Brennan, had been in her life for as long as she could remember. The same way a lot of people at the table were all familiar, comforting faces to her. She hadn’t truly understood that her father was an Irish mob boss until she was thirteen, and couldn’t make friends at her private Catholic high school because the other girls’ parents told them to stay away from her.
Rumors spread.
People whispered and avoided.
High school had been hell in that way.
She learned the truth, though, and that explained a lot about her father and the men that constantly came and went from her life and home growing up. All those late night meetings in her father’s office, and the way everyone in her life hated and distrusted the cops simply because they were cops.
Besides, Gabbie quickly learned that in their life, she didn’t need friends from the outside. She had all the people she needed—friends included—within her own family. They were the only people who truly understood what it was like to be in this family, after all.
What else did she need?
“Aye, lad,” Charles growled, giving his friend a look as he stepped forward to finally take his seat at the table, “you mind your own broad at home, and let me mind mine.”
“Let the girl eat,” Kenneth, her uncle, and another man under her father in the organization said from his seat between his wife and adult children. “She’ll mind her sugars, boyo. You make sure of it.”
“Exactly.” Her father pointed a finger at the two men, giving them a look that told them to shut up. “None of you have to do it—had it been up to you lot, she woulda been shoving all kinds of sugar in her mouth from the time she could chew. Shut the holes in your feckin’ faces, and eat your food before I decide to kick the bunch of you outta my house.”
Gabbie grinned, and shook her head.
What else could she do?
This was her father.
Her life.
It was never going to change.
“Are you going to sit, lass, or stand back there and glare at me head some more?” her father asked.
Gabbie scoffed. “I wasn’t glaring at your head.”
“Be a first, yeah?”
She took her seat at the table next to her father on the left. Across from her sat her cousins, Aine and Aidan.
“Not a first,” she told her father. She made sure to give him the look that he liked to say reminded him of her mother when Betha was mad at him. “Eat your food, Da.”
“Are you coming tonight?” Aine asked Gabbie from across the table.
Charles had a whole mouthful of food as he mumbled, “Going where?”
Gabbie gave her cousin a look, too.
A shut your feckin’ mouth kind of look.
“Going where?” her father asked louder once he’d swallowed his food.
Grand.
This was just perfect.
Now, she was going to have to listen to her father bitch about all the sugar in liquor because her cousin couldn’t keep her mouth shut about hitting up a new club that their family opened the week before.
“A club,” Gabbie said, sighing.
Her father eyed her from the side.
“I know, Da. Check my sugars.”
Charles’ lips flattened into a grim line. “You’re my only one left, Gabbie.”
Yeah, she knew.
It meant a lot of things.
She was respected.
Adored.
Spoiled.
And entirely smothered.
“I won’t drink,” she told her father. “But I want to go have a dance, that’s all. I’m done with classes for the summer, so I don’t have to worry about getting up early, either.”
College was no joke. Especially not for an aspiring criminal defense lawyer.
Charles nodded, believing her innocent smile. Men, even those like her father with darkness in his eyes that hid all kinds of secrets, were still the same in the end. All it took was a smile, and they were done for.
“Grand, lass.”
No, she wouldn’t drink.
Much.
She wouldn’t drink much.
Couldn’t she have just a little fun sometimes?
• • •
“Aidan, could you at least wait until I’m not talking to you to stare at a girl’s arse?” Aine asked, her annoyance clear over the bass of the music in the crowded club. “You’re such a cunt.”
“Can you blame me? Did you see the arse on—”
Aine put her hand up in her brother’s face, effectively quieting him without saying anything at all, and turned to Gabbie with a shake of her head. “Men.”
Gabbie grinned around the rim of her one drink she was allowing herself to have. It didn’t have a high sugar content, and she should be fine. But that also meant it tasted like absolute shite. Win some, lose some.
“Want to dance?” Aine asked.
“Sure,” Gabbie returned. “At least then, Aidan can find someone to take home without you ruining every single one he looks at.”
Aine glowered.
Aidan laughed, and pointed in Gabbie’s direction. “And that’s why you’re my favorite cousin.”
“I’m your only cousin.”
“Yeah, well …”
Gabbie didn’t get the chance to respond because Aine was already dragging her cousin out to the dance floor. They weaved in and out of the sway of sweaty, drunk bodies. She had to give her uncle’s man credit for this new club—it was pretty grand. The music kept them moving, the employees, from the bouncers to the servers, kept everything running smoothly. The whole atmosphere of the club just screamed fun.
A party, really.
She needed that break.
Her black, slinky club dress fell a few inches above her thighs, and glimmered under the flashing lights attached to the ceiling. The swell of people on the dance floor seemed to grow as the song switched to something that had everyone jumping to the beat with hands in the air. Gabbie, having fun and really letting loose for the first time in God knew how long, spun a circle and by the time she stopped to take a breath … well, lost her cousin in the crowd.
Shite.
On another night, she might not have been too worried about losing Aine. Her cousin liked to pick up a guy and take him home sometimes, and Gabbie was more than capable of taking care of herself for the evening.
Except, she was trying to follow her father’s rules. Even if she was twenty, and not a child anymore. It was always easier when she simply fed into her father’s bollocks, and didn’t try to fight him every damn step of the way. One of those rules was for her to stay close to a familiar face tonight since this club was mob-owned by one of her uncle’s men, and that meant business could be happening in the shadows.
She’d not asked what kind of business because she knew better than to do that. It wasn’t like her father would have answered her, anyway. Better to not bother in the first place, and save herself the lecture.
Pushing up to her tiptoes in the high heels she’d put on earlier, Gabbie scanned the crowd. All she could see, however, were swaying bodies and sweaty heads. It probably didn’t help that she was directly in the middle of the club and there was literally so much going on in every corner that everything drew in her attention.
Feck.
She decided to head for the bar—the same place she had left with her cousin. No doubt, if Aine wasn’t there, then Aidan would be somewhere in the fray probably still trying to pick up someone to take home with him.
Gabbie didn’t find either of her cousins at the bar. Oh, it was packed full of people waiting for drinks, and shouting for the bartenders to hurry up, but there were no Caseys in sight. She smiled at the female bartender when she brought over a glass of water for Gabbie—likely recognizing her face—she pushed it across the bar with a wink.
“Taking a break?”
“Trying to find the other two I came with,” Gabbie replied, laughing.
“Oh, they’ll be back around. No worries there.”
Probably.
Sometime.
Instead of going to look for one of her cousins, she figured it was better for her to stay in one place. That was better than the three of them moving around the large venue trying to find one another, right?
She was just taking a sip from the glass of water when a man slid in beside her at the bar. He didn’t look her way, instead his attention focused in on the woman behind the bar working at their end. In a way, she thought it was a shame he didn’t look at her, so she could get a full-on view of those handsome features, but she was loving his slightly turned profile.
Strong jaw.
White teeth bared in his grin.
Brown eyes.
His tanned skin looked almost golden under the lights of the club, and his dark, curly hair tousled down a bit near his ears like he’d been running his fingers through it. The strands couldn’t be contained if the way they fell into his eyes were any indication. He filled out the pair of dark slacks covering a fine arse, not to mention the way the side of his shoulders and part of his back looked covered in a button down, red silk dress shirt.
God.
She loved a man that could fill out his clothes, and she adored it even more when he had wide shoulders, and a back that begged for fingernails to dig in.
“Lambay, three fingers,” the man told the bartender.
Gabbie arched a brow, her mouth working before her brain did. “An Irish whiskey, huh?”
Before the bartender even replied to the man to confirm his order, his gaze turned on Gabbie. She swore in those few seconds, as his profile turned into the full view of his face, the club faded into the background.
It was just her and him.
Green eyes meeting brown.
His profile didn’t do him justice. At all. The curve of his lips when he smiled went a little deeper, showcasing dimples on each cheek. Thick, dark eyebrows lifted slightly, one arching a little higher than the other at her question. Perfect white teeth flashed in his grin, and those intense eyes of his drifted over her quickly, drinking in the dress that looked painted onto her body before his gaze snapped back up to her face.
He really was a handsome lad.
Sexy.
“I prefer it,” the man said, his tone like brown sugar. Dark, deep, and sinfully rich. “If there’s anything the Irish know, it’s their liquor.”
Gabbie flashed him a smile. “Tell me about it; personal knowledge. Isn’t it obvious?”
There was no hiding the lilt in her tone—the hint of an accent that, despite her efforts to try and subdue it, was still there. An Irish accent.
The man winked, unashamed. “Can’t tell at all.”
She laughed. “You’re a horrible liar.”
“I never really need to lie, though.”
Huh.
“Gabbie,” she said.
He put a hand out when she offered hers, and the second his fingers wrapped around hers, she swore the heat that sparked between the two was enough to make her draw in a sharp breath. She couldn’t tell for sure, though, because she was a little too focused on the way he was looking at her.
He liked what he saw.
So did she.
“Michel,” he replied easily.
Gabbie wasn’t innocent when it came to men, but she also wasn’t very forward. Growing up as the daughter of an Irish mob boss meant almost everyone knew who the feck she was in these parts. Just her last name was enough to send a man running away from her lest he find himself in hot water with her family or da.
This man, though?
He was still there. Either he didn’t know who she was, or he didn’t give a feck. She liked that far more than she should.
She really liked the way he was looking at her in that moment, too. Grinning in that way. Like he was the cat looking at a saucer of cream, and he was ready to lap up every single drop of it. She wasn’t going to lie and say she didn’t like it because she sure as hell did. He wasn’t too bad to look at, either.
“I was going to look for my cousins,” she said, “but I was thinking maybe another dance would be good.”
Michel make a noise under his breath, and glanced over his shoulder. “Shit, I … I’m supposed to be working right now.”
“You work at the club?”
And he didn’t know who she was?
Unlikely.
He shook his head, saying, “Not exactly.”
What did that mean?
“But you know what,” Michel said, grabbing the tumbler of whiskey when the bartender slid it over to him, “fuck work. I found something better.”
Gabbie drew her bottom lip between her teeth, asking, “Oh, did you?”
“Looking at her, yeah.”
He offered his hand, and she took it again. The same heat from earlier sparked through her hand, and up her arm. This time, though, it traveled through her body and straight down to the spot between her thighs. She couldn’t take her gaze off Michel, either, or the way he tipped that glass up to swallow the three fingers of whiskey in one go.
He didn’t flinch.
Didn’t make a sound.
She knew that liquor was harsh.
And damn, she liked that, too.
Michel wet his bottom lip, taking away the remaining whiskey with a single, sexy sweep of his tongue. She had the greatest urge to reach up, and see what his lips might feel like when they were pressed against her fingertips.
Or even better, against her mouth.
“A dance?” he asked.
Gabbie nodded. “You got it.”
She slipped off the stool at the bar to follow him, her fingers weaving in with his as she stayed close to his back. She really liked that view—the way his muscles moved under the silk, and the way the lights shadowed his features when he glanced back at her.
Then, the crowd swelled.
Someone hit Gabbie from the side, sending her to the floor. Michel swung around, his strong arms already reaching out to catch her, but he was just one second too late. She hit the floor alongside someone’s glass that shattered as soon as it hit the tile.
“Gabbie,” she heard Michel say.
Concern wrote heavily across his handsome features, and the first thing she wanted to do was apologize for ruining … well, whatever this was. Although, he simply looked like he was more worried about getting her up from the floor. He called her name again, but it sounded faint. It was too far away even though he was right above her.
She knew why, too.
The pain in her arm.
The blood dribbling to the floor.
Feck.
Blood always made her--
Everything went dark.
Copyright © 2019 by Bethany-Kris. All Rights Reserved.
ONE
Michel Marcello liked pressure. He worked best when someone was right over his shoulder, reminding him that time was ticking down. His greatest educational achievements came from times when his life was thick with tension, and he could lose himself in textbooks. His highest test scores came from moments when the pressure was so high that anyone else might have cracked under it.
Not him, though.
He just worked better.
Books weren’t a problem for him—from the time he was young, he found learning was the easiest obstacle he had to face in his twenty years. It helped that he loved to learn, and took joy from understanding something that before, had been entirely foreign to him. It was like a new challenge. Something else for him to master.
But exams?
Fuck.
He found exams boring as hell.
Maybe it was because he’d spent the entire first year of pre-med learning everything in front of him, and he hadn’t struggled with any degree of difficulty to write his final exam on biochemistry. Hell, that had been his favorite subject for the past year.
Around the halfway mark of the final exam, he was already sighing. And fighting a migraine from wishing he could read faster. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers—he knew them too well. It felt like he was just going through the motions, and the exam was never going to be done. His laziness was where he made mistakes despite being as book smart as he was lucky to be.
Except this was what he wanted.
More than anything.
To be a doctor had been Michel’s dream from the time he was eleven. He’d been out with Dante, his father, when a new recruit for a gang from the inner city thought to earn his way in by attacking the infamous Marcello mob boss. Michel’s dad, that was.
It was the first time that Michel truly understood what it meant to be a Cosa Nostra family, and the dangers that came along with it. Before that day, the mafia had never touched Michel in a real way. He heard the whispers in his family about what his uncles and father did, and he thought he knew what it meant.
He didn’t know anything at all.
The stray bullets missed Dante.
They hit the enforcer protecting Michel.
Pandemonium followed utter chaos after the attack. He remembered his father shouting no cops, no cops as the bleeding enforcer was dragged into an alleyway. A car quickly pulled up less than a minute later, and they all piled into the back. It was in the backroom of a Brooklyn medical clinic that he watched a trauma surgeon hired by his father, to stay on call just in case, save the life of that enforcer.
And there Michel was—all of eleven, but almost twelve, tucked away in the corner of the room because his father was busy focusing his energy on making sure his man was saved. He watched the whole thing. The blood … the man on the table, awake without anesthesia, and the doctor, who even terrified, did his job.
He did it with steady hands.
Michel aspired to be that man. He was sure some people assumed, in one way or another, he would take after his mafia Don father and join the family—impossible with his bloodline and history, although the Marcellos would have made room if he truly wanted to become a made man. Or even, maybe he would take after his mother; a Queen Pin who ran the majority of her drug dealing business out of California.
Both things fascinated him. He respected his parents, their lives, and the choices they made. He grew up in the illegal, underground world of the mafia, and surrounded by criminals. That was all he knew. Even his best friends—his cousins, John and Andino—chose to go into the family business as soon as they were old enough to join.
Him, though?
He was going to be a doctor. Specifically, a trauma surgeon if all went well. And it would go well because he would make sure of it. Nothing was going to ruin this for him, not even himself. He wouldn’t let his boredom get to him, not now.
Michel stared down at the exam in front of him, and blinked at the next question. Like the others, he knew the answer, and quickly circled the appropriate dot on the answer card. The promise of a migraine was still fighting its way through the front of his skull behind his eyes even as he worked his way through the next two pages of the exam.
He glanced up, and checked the time on the clock at the front of the room. It rested just above the large white board that the professor liked to use to doodle on as he gave nonsensical lectures—yet another thing that gave Michel the fastest migraines of his fucking life. He was going to be glad to get this first year of pre-med over with, and move on to something a little more challenging.
According to that clock, though, he had another two hours of this. Two goddamn hours, and he was already a quarter of the way through this exam. The only good thing he could see about this situation was the fact he was soon going to be getting to the written portion of this exam, and his brain would have to work a little harder.
He just needed to get to that point.
Slipping his hand into his pocket, he pulled out a bottle of over the counter pain meds, and popped off the cap. He shook the bottle, and two pills fell into his palm. Next to him, the guy raised a brow at him as Michel tossed the pills into his mouth before grabbing the water on his desk to help swallow them back.
The student at the desk next to his shared a look with him that said, I get you, man. The guy looked like he was about to drown, and he could already see his failing grade staring back at him. Hell, maybe he could.
Honestly, all Michel needed to do was take a look around this classroom, and he could easily pick out probably at least twenty percent of the students that wouldn’t make it to their second year. No one truly understood the hell of pre-med until they were in the thick of it, and there was no getting out.
They went in thinking one thing …
And changed their direction after year-one thinking another.
Not Michel, though.
He knew what he wanted.
This.
• • •
“Hey, Ma,” Michel said, shifting the messenger bag on his shoulder as he left the exam room with thirty minutes left to go. He’d actually finished his exam an hour earlier than planned, but the professor required him to wait until that half-hour mark before he allowed him to leave the room, along with anyone else who was done early and felt like taking the risk of not double checking their answer cards and written portions. “You’re calling a bit—”
“Well, how did it go?”
Michel laughed.
Of course, she knew.
Catrina remembered everything.
“The exam went well,” he told her.
“Ah, bambino,” Catrina replied, her Italian accent thicker than anyone else’s in their family because Italy had been her birthplace and where she was raised. “I knew you would do well. My smart ragazzo, yes?”
Always his mother’s baby.
“It was touch and go there for a while,” he replied, “but I got through it.”
“Was it really?”
Michel scoffed. “Not even close.”
It was cake, honestly.
Catrina let out a soft sigh. “I figured as much, but don’t you dare get comfortable or lazy, Michel. You need the best grades you can get if you want to see this through. When it comes to a residency—”
“They’re going to look at everything. I know.”
“Of course, you do.”
Some people thought his mother was cold as hell in a lot of ways. He supposed she could be to people on the outside of their life. She had a persona to uphold, and she presented it first and foremost to people before they ever got a good look at who she really was behind her mask of a mafia boss’s wife and Queen Pin.
To him, though?
She’d always been just his mom.
Well, sort of …
She’d adopted him, and so had his father, but he learned that in his teenage years after snooping through his parents’ shared office. He hadn’t meant to stumble on the falsified paperwork, but when he brought it up to Dante and Catrina, they didn’t lie.
Catrina was, biologically, his aunt. Her sister had been pregnant, and died shortly after he was born because of the man who … impregnated her. Or raped, no one was really one-hundred percent sure on that, or they simply didn’t want to tell Michel the truth.
Either way, that was how his mother and father became, well, his. People liked to assume, or those that knew the truth, that Michel must have some deep-rooted issues with his parents because he didn’t biologically belong to them.
Those people were idiots.
Michel had no issues.
He didn’t know anything but the man and woman who he called mom and dad. They were the only parents he ever knew, and the only ones he wanted to know, too. They gave him this amazing life. They gave him the ability to do whatever he wanted and make his own choices about what direction his life would go.
Without them, he would not be him.
How was that not a parent?
Catrina and Dante were the only people who raised him, and the detail that they didn’t share, blood, never factored into what he knew to be true. He loved them entirely.
And they loved him.
So much.
Michel came out of the corridor exit, and right into the parking lot where his Mercedes waited in the warm summer air of Detroit. He stepped out of WSU School of Medicine and gave it one last look over his shoulder, a sense of pride thickening his blood with every step he took carrying him further away from the walls of the college that challenged him every step of the way for his first year of pre-med.
Yeah, some shit was easy.
Others?
Not so much.
But he liked it.
Respected it.
His parents taught him that, too.
“What are your plans for the summer, then?” Catrina asked, bringing him back to the conversation at hand. “Today was your final exam before break, right?”
“It was.”
“And?”
Michel shook his head, knowing there was no way out of this conversation. “And I haven’t decided yet what I’m doing with my break.”
That was a lie.
He had decided.
He wasn’t going home.
Catrina made a sad noise. “Well, okay.”
He knew what his parents wanted—they missed him, and would like to have him home. In a way, he wanted to go back, too, but he’d heard the stories and rumors. Students that went back and got comfortable at home after their first year had a higher chance of not returning for the second. He didn’t think his mother would appreciate him telling her that, though.
But he did miss them.
He missed his family. His cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. All of them. Even his younger sister, as annoying as Catherine could be. Being an Italian through and through meant he grew up in a culture that took family seriously. Large dinners, church every Sunday together, and time spent as a whole unit of one. The closest thing he got to being near his family in Detroit was the Marcello faction of the mafia in the city—the Vannozzo family served his needs when he needed something familiar around him.
They kept him busy sometimes, too.
At least, his dad didn’t mind because Michel was around people Dante trusted, and had some control over being they were an extended arm of his father’s mafia organization in New York. He wasn’t really involved in the Vannozzo’s business here, but they had been hinting lately that if he wanted to get back into a bit of dealing—like he’d done for years in New York throughout his high school years—that they would be happy to provide him with the shit to sell.
Michel was considering it.
He didn’t know what his father would think of that now that Michel was in college, and he was supposed to be putting the famiglia ideals behind him for this doctor dream. He wasn’t really interested in finding out, either.
Catrina hummed under her breath, drawing Michel from his thoughts as she muttered, “Yes, Dante, I’ll tell him.”
Michel chucked. “Tell me what?”
“Your father said you should come home.”
He fiddled with the fob to his Mercedes as he stood beside the car, and then hit the unlock button. The car lit up on all four corners, the black paint job shining in the daylight. He didn’t immediately jump into the vehicle, instead opting to finish his conversation with his mother first.
Now or never.
“I’m not going to come home for the summer,” he said.
Catrina was quiet for a while, and he hoped he hadn’t upset his ma. He loved her, but he also needed this time. As it was, he’d made the move to Detroit a whole year earlier than his first year of pre-med had started. He wanted to settle in, and get used to the city. He was going to be here for a while, right? He might as well learn to love it.
That meant staying.
Catrina relayed what Michel said to his father. In the background, he heard Dante reply, “Well, tell him to stay out of trouble.”
“You heard that, then?” Catrina asked Michel.
He laughed. “I did.”
“Do as your father says, Michel.”
“When do I ever cause trouble, Ma?”
“Define trouble.”
She wasn’t lying.
Michel might not be actively in the life like they were, and yet, somehow he still managed to dip his hands in the waters. As his sister liked to say, there was no such thing as being a little wet where the mafia was concerned. One was either dry entirely, or soaked to the fucking bone.
He wouldn’t look for trouble, though, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t find him. This life was just funny in that way.
“Yeah, I’ll try,” he told his ma.
“You better.”
• • •
Michel walked into Bella—the mob-owned, Italian eatery—and inhaled the scents of mozzarella and pasta. Spices and richness followed, clinging just as firmly to the air as utensils scraped against plates, and laughter lit up the restaurant. Nothing reminded Michel of home as much as a proper Italian restaurant did, honestly.
The fact it was mob-owned probably helped with that, too.
He bypassed the chick at the podium with a Bluetooth speaker in her ear and a tablet in her hands. She barely even glanced at him, recognizing his face and knowing better than to ask if he had a reservation. He didn’t need one—he knew the owner.
Just because he threw all of his attention into that first year of pre-med didn’t mean he hadn’t taken the time to also make friends. In their life, it didn’t matter that someone moved away from family and the business—that shit was everywhere. Michel was still the son of a mafia Don at the end of the day, and he needed contacts. Something his cousins had been quick to point out to him when they figured out he was dead serious about med school, and moving to Detroit.
So, he made friends.
Ones with big names.
His last name probably helped with that, too. Everyone who was anyone in the world of organized crime knew the Marcello surname without further explanation needed. He suspected his father had a hand in putting him in the path of Salvestro Vannozzo, cousin to the Vannozzo boss and a top Capo of the family in Detroit, because Dante wanted to make sure Michel had some kind of clout watching his back during his time there.
He wasn’t complaining.
The Vannozzos reminded him of home, and that kept him from getting too homesick. He also wasn’t exactly good with normal. He could have easily made friends with people at college, and maybe he should have just because, but those people didn’t understand him. They didn’t know what it was like to grow up the way he did, and they would never understand the way he sometimes talked in riddles, or his serious dislike of anything related to authority.
He needed like-minded people.
Salvestro and the rest of the Vannozzo men he made an effort to spend time with gave him exactly those things, and more. Because he came from a familiar background and family, with a last name that afforded him a great deal of respect, Salvestro and the Capo’s men welcomed Michel in as a friend.
Of sorts …
They kept their business guarded, to a point. He didn’t fault them for that, either. He wasn’t a made man—he couldn’t know all the details, and he really didn’t want to. He did get a firsthand look at some of their dealings, but that was far different from being a friend of theirs and just a friend.
One meant he was in.
One meant he was just okay.
Michel was fine with being just okay.
“And there’s the doc!”
Michel chuckled at Sal’s greeting as he stepped into the entryway of the private dining area of the restaurant. Sal preferred to do all his business and meetings out of the sight of the regular patrons. It wasn’t good for business to scare people away with the mob details, after all.
“Not a doctor yet,” Michel reminded his friend.
“Ah, Dio vaffanculo,” Sal replied, flipping a hand in Michel’s direction as he turned to the guy sitting across the table from him. Another familiar face to Michel here in Detroit. David Barese, a bookie for the Vannozzo family doing a good portion of his business in clubs that Michel liked to frequent throughout the city. “Listen to the shit coming out of his mouth, huh?”
David laughed, and passed Michel a grin. “You’re always gonna be the doc to us, kid.”
Michel bristled at the kid comment. He knew they were just fucking with him, and he enjoyed it, really. That was part of their life, and it meant he was welcomed here. They were treating him as one of them. In a way, they reminded him of his cousins, John and Andino.
“What are you doing today, anyway?” Sal asked, flipping through a deck of cards before laying out a spread on the table. “I thought you had classes?”
“Exams,” Michel corrected, “and I finished my last one today.”
“Yes,” David crowed, “that means the doc is free for the summer. What are we going to do with him, Sal? Put him to work, do you think?”
Michel rolled his eyes as he came further into the room. He didn’t pull out a chair to sit with the two men at the small table because he really didn’t plan on staying for that long. He just wanted to see if David or Sal had any interesting plans for the weekend because he felt like celebrating his final exams. All year, he’d been careful not to indulge too much. Sure, he’d go out, but he wouldn’t really party. No heavy drinking, and certainly nothing that was going to mess with his mind like a bit of smoke or a pill.
Well, school was done.
And these men knew how to party.
Sal passed Michel a look, considering David’s statement for a moment before he asked, “Have you ever considered that, cafone?”
“Calling me a fool doesn’t make me want to work for you because I know that’s what you’re asking without actually asking me.”
The man smirked. “You know how it works. But seriously, have you thought about it? I mean, I talked to your cousin—John. I know you used to deal. Had a bit of a touch for it, according to him.”
Michel ran his tongue along his teeth, and sucked in air to make a hissing sound at the same time. “I did.”
“What else are you going to do for the summer?”
“Study. Find a woman to keep me entertained. Sleep until noon.”
“Study, he says,” David grumbled.
Michel flipped his middle finger up at the man, but David only shrugged and went back to the card game with Sal like nothing had happened in the first place. “But yeah, I considered it.”
Sal nodded, looking at the cards on the table as he said, “I could set that up for you. Just for the summer, if that’s what you wanted to do.”
Do I?
That was the better question.
Michel had a bad habit of missing familiar things. Hustling for money—even if he did have more dollars in the bank than he would ever know what to do with—was one of those things that he found familiar, and easy. Like learning, or his family.
He also hated being bored.
This would help with that.
“All right,” Michel said, “just for the summer.”
“Perfetto,” Sal praised, raising a brow to David who was smiling again. “Seems we’ve got a new recruit. What do we teach him first, huh?”
“Ah, I don’t think he’ll need much training. He is a Marcello, after all. It’s in his blood. As long as he’s not stepping on anyone’s toes or working in the wrong places, he’ll be fine.”
Right.
In his blood.
Michel didn’t correct them.
Blood never mattered to him, anyway.
TWO
“Did you check your sugars, lass?”
“My sugars are fine, Da.”
“Gabbie—”
She popped the small sweet chocolate into her mouth, and turned to face her father, Charles, with a grin. “My sugars are fine.”
Aye, she was going to suffer for that little treat later, no doubt. She would have to check her sugars simply because she broke her diet for one itty, bitty piece of chocolate, but it was worth it. The chocolate melted in her mouth, and slid down her throat like it was pure heaven. She didn’t get sugar very much, if at all.
Her dad raised a brow, and fought the urge to smile. “When you act like this, you remind me so much of your mam, lass.”
“Probably more today, huh?”
He nodded once, and reached out to tuck one of her stray red curls behind her ear. “Today more than other feckin’ days.”
Charles moved to stand beside Gabbie, and then turned to watch the rest of the people in his home gathering around the large table to get their plates ready. Every year on this day, they celebrated a woman who was no longer with them. Her mam. Gabbie didn’t remember very much about her mother—Betha Casey passed on when she was still a young girl from an accident on the highway as she was driving home from a dinner with friends.
The absolute love of her father’s life, next to Gabbie, he’d never remarried, and she was his only child. It showed, too. Like this conversation right now.
“No more sweets,” her father grumbled, giving her a look from the side. “I don’t want a call from the hospital because you didn’t manage your—”
“I’m twenty years old. I can take care of my diabetes, Da.”
Charles sighed.
Gabbie shrugged.
This was the same conversation they had more times than she cared to admit over the last few years. She understood, though. Her father’s greatest fear was that he was going to lose her, too. She was the last person he truly loved in the world. It made him feel out of control because he couldn’t manage her disease like he had when she was younger. She was the adult with the say so about her own body, what she did with it, and the things she put inside it. Like sugar.
He had to trust that she was doing what was right, and he simply didn’t feel like she was doing what she needed to. She was used to him hovering, but lately, it just annoyed her more than it probably should.
As a child, she never understood why her father was quick to bark at anyone who dared to offer her something sweet. She’d been born insulin resistant, and while they were able to manage it for the majority of her childhood, as she slipped into her later teenage years, something changed.
Hormones.
Life.
Who feckin’ knew?
She packed on the pounds—almost thirty in her senior year. People heard type two diabetes and automatically assumed someone was unhealthy because nobody developed type two unless they weren’t taking care of themselves, right?
Wrong.
A very small percentage of people—Gabbie was in that lucky number—could develop type two diabetes because of other health problems, like being insulin resistant. She managed her diabetes with a very strict diet, exercise, and occasionally medications when she needed it.
She’d lost those thirty pounds, but because of the way her disease worked, she was borderline underweight. Something her doctor and father liked to remind her every time she had to step on a feckin’ scale. She’d gone from putting on weight like crazy in a matter of months to struggling to gain any weight for several years.
Yeah, a struggle.
That was the best way to describe this disease.
“Could we not do this today?” she asked, glancing up at her tall father.
Charles stared back at her, unaffected.
She took after a lot of her father’s features—from the red, unruly hair to the freckles that dotted the bridge of her nose and her cheeks … her whole body, really. Even the shape of her green eyes, and the high line of her cheekbones matched her father’s more masculine, stronger features. She was the softer, feminine version.
But her lips?
The small cleft in her chin?
The dimple in her left cheek?
Charles said that was all her mam.
“Today is supposed to be for Ma,” she reminded her da, “not for you to hover and poke at me about what I’m putting in my mouth.”
“But if I don’t do it, who is?”
Gabbie sighed, and crossed her arms over her chest. The people at the table had yet to realize the man throwing this dinner party to celebrate the life of his dead wife had still not joined them to eat. Not that it was stopping them from digging into the food on the platters.
“That’s the point, it’s for me to worry about now.”
“Can’t do that, lass,” Charles said, “that’s not how a father’s mind works.”
She was about to open her mouth and argue further with her father—how was he ever going to learn to trust her if he continued to do this?—when someone at the table saved her from .
“Charles, are you bothering that lass of yours again?” Brennan asked.
One of the men at table grinned at Gabbie. Rather conspiratorially. Like he knew exactly what her father was doing, and he was going to try to save her.
Brennan Brady likely did know, too. Her father’s right-hand man in the Irish mob, Brennan, had been in her life for as long as she could remember. The same way a lot of people at the table were all familiar, comforting faces to her. She hadn’t truly understood that her father was an Irish mob boss until she was thirteen, and couldn’t make friends at her private Catholic high school because the other girls’ parents told them to stay away from her.
Rumors spread.
People whispered and avoided.
High school had been hell in that way.
She learned the truth, though, and that explained a lot about her father and the men that constantly came and went from her life and home growing up. All those late night meetings in her father’s office, and the way everyone in her life hated and distrusted the cops simply because they were cops.
Besides, Gabbie quickly learned that in their life, she didn’t need friends from the outside. She had all the people she needed—friends included—within her own family. They were the only people who truly understood what it was like to be in this family, after all.
What else did she need?
“Aye, lad,” Charles growled, giving his friend a look as he stepped forward to finally take his seat at the table, “you mind your own broad at home, and let me mind mine.”
“Let the girl eat,” Kenneth, her uncle, and another man under her father in the organization said from his seat between his wife and adult children. “She’ll mind her sugars, boyo. You make sure of it.”
“Exactly.” Her father pointed a finger at the two men, giving them a look that told them to shut up. “None of you have to do it—had it been up to you lot, she woulda been shoving all kinds of sugar in her mouth from the time she could chew. Shut the holes in your feckin’ faces, and eat your food before I decide to kick the bunch of you outta my house.”
Gabbie grinned, and shook her head.
What else could she do?
This was her father.
Her life.
It was never going to change.
“Are you going to sit, lass, or stand back there and glare at me head some more?” her father asked.
Gabbie scoffed. “I wasn’t glaring at your head.”
“Be a first, yeah?”
She took her seat at the table next to her father on the left. Across from her sat her cousins, Aine and Aidan.
“Not a first,” she told her father. She made sure to give him the look that he liked to say reminded him of her mother when Betha was mad at him. “Eat your food, Da.”
“Are you coming tonight?” Aine asked Gabbie from across the table.
Charles had a whole mouthful of food as he mumbled, “Going where?”
Gabbie gave her cousin a look, too.
A shut your feckin’ mouth kind of look.
“Going where?” her father asked louder once he’d swallowed his food.
Grand.
This was just perfect.
Now, she was going to have to listen to her father bitch about all the sugar in liquor because her cousin couldn’t keep her mouth shut about hitting up a new club that their family opened the week before.
“A club,” Gabbie said, sighing.
Her father eyed her from the side.
“I know, Da. Check my sugars.”
Charles’ lips flattened into a grim line. “You’re my only one left, Gabbie.”
Yeah, she knew.
It meant a lot of things.
She was respected.
Adored.
Spoiled.
And entirely smothered.
“I won’t drink,” she told her father. “But I want to go have a dance, that’s all. I’m done with classes for the summer, so I don’t have to worry about getting up early, either.”
College was no joke. Especially not for an aspiring criminal defense lawyer.
Charles nodded, believing her innocent smile. Men, even those like her father with darkness in his eyes that hid all kinds of secrets, were still the same in the end. All it took was a smile, and they were done for.
“Grand, lass.”
No, she wouldn’t drink.
Much.
She wouldn’t drink much.
Couldn’t she have just a little fun sometimes?
• • •
“Aidan, could you at least wait until I’m not talking to you to stare at a girl’s arse?” Aine asked, her annoyance clear over the bass of the music in the crowded club. “You’re such a cunt.”
“Can you blame me? Did you see the arse on—”
Aine put her hand up in her brother’s face, effectively quieting him without saying anything at all, and turned to Gabbie with a shake of her head. “Men.”
Gabbie grinned around the rim of her one drink she was allowing herself to have. It didn’t have a high sugar content, and she should be fine. But that also meant it tasted like absolute shite. Win some, lose some.
“Want to dance?” Aine asked.
“Sure,” Gabbie returned. “At least then, Aidan can find someone to take home without you ruining every single one he looks at.”
Aine glowered.
Aidan laughed, and pointed in Gabbie’s direction. “And that’s why you’re my favorite cousin.”
“I’m your only cousin.”
“Yeah, well …”
Gabbie didn’t get the chance to respond because Aine was already dragging her cousin out to the dance floor. They weaved in and out of the sway of sweaty, drunk bodies. She had to give her uncle’s man credit for this new club—it was pretty grand. The music kept them moving, the employees, from the bouncers to the servers, kept everything running smoothly. The whole atmosphere of the club just screamed fun.
A party, really.
She needed that break.
Her black, slinky club dress fell a few inches above her thighs, and glimmered under the flashing lights attached to the ceiling. The swell of people on the dance floor seemed to grow as the song switched to something that had everyone jumping to the beat with hands in the air. Gabbie, having fun and really letting loose for the first time in God knew how long, spun a circle and by the time she stopped to take a breath … well, lost her cousin in the crowd.
Shite.
On another night, she might not have been too worried about losing Aine. Her cousin liked to pick up a guy and take him home sometimes, and Gabbie was more than capable of taking care of herself for the evening.
Except, she was trying to follow her father’s rules. Even if she was twenty, and not a child anymore. It was always easier when she simply fed into her father’s bollocks, and didn’t try to fight him every damn step of the way. One of those rules was for her to stay close to a familiar face tonight since this club was mob-owned by one of her uncle’s men, and that meant business could be happening in the shadows.
She’d not asked what kind of business because she knew better than to do that. It wasn’t like her father would have answered her, anyway. Better to not bother in the first place, and save herself the lecture.
Pushing up to her tiptoes in the high heels she’d put on earlier, Gabbie scanned the crowd. All she could see, however, were swaying bodies and sweaty heads. It probably didn’t help that she was directly in the middle of the club and there was literally so much going on in every corner that everything drew in her attention.
Feck.
She decided to head for the bar—the same place she had left with her cousin. No doubt, if Aine wasn’t there, then Aidan would be somewhere in the fray probably still trying to pick up someone to take home with him.
Gabbie didn’t find either of her cousins at the bar. Oh, it was packed full of people waiting for drinks, and shouting for the bartenders to hurry up, but there were no Caseys in sight. She smiled at the female bartender when she brought over a glass of water for Gabbie—likely recognizing her face—she pushed it across the bar with a wink.
“Taking a break?”
“Trying to find the other two I came with,” Gabbie replied, laughing.
“Oh, they’ll be back around. No worries there.”
Probably.
Sometime.
Instead of going to look for one of her cousins, she figured it was better for her to stay in one place. That was better than the three of them moving around the large venue trying to find one another, right?
She was just taking a sip from the glass of water when a man slid in beside her at the bar. He didn’t look her way, instead his attention focused in on the woman behind the bar working at their end. In a way, she thought it was a shame he didn’t look at her, so she could get a full-on view of those handsome features, but she was loving his slightly turned profile.
Strong jaw.
White teeth bared in his grin.
Brown eyes.
His tanned skin looked almost golden under the lights of the club, and his dark, curly hair tousled down a bit near his ears like he’d been running his fingers through it. The strands couldn’t be contained if the way they fell into his eyes were any indication. He filled out the pair of dark slacks covering a fine arse, not to mention the way the side of his shoulders and part of his back looked covered in a button down, red silk dress shirt.
God.
She loved a man that could fill out his clothes, and she adored it even more when he had wide shoulders, and a back that begged for fingernails to dig in.
“Lambay, three fingers,” the man told the bartender.
Gabbie arched a brow, her mouth working before her brain did. “An Irish whiskey, huh?”
Before the bartender even replied to the man to confirm his order, his gaze turned on Gabbie. She swore in those few seconds, as his profile turned into the full view of his face, the club faded into the background.
It was just her and him.
Green eyes meeting brown.
His profile didn’t do him justice. At all. The curve of his lips when he smiled went a little deeper, showcasing dimples on each cheek. Thick, dark eyebrows lifted slightly, one arching a little higher than the other at her question. Perfect white teeth flashed in his grin, and those intense eyes of his drifted over her quickly, drinking in the dress that looked painted onto her body before his gaze snapped back up to her face.
He really was a handsome lad.
Sexy.
“I prefer it,” the man said, his tone like brown sugar. Dark, deep, and sinfully rich. “If there’s anything the Irish know, it’s their liquor.”
Gabbie flashed him a smile. “Tell me about it; personal knowledge. Isn’t it obvious?”
There was no hiding the lilt in her tone—the hint of an accent that, despite her efforts to try and subdue it, was still there. An Irish accent.
The man winked, unashamed. “Can’t tell at all.”
She laughed. “You’re a horrible liar.”
“I never really need to lie, though.”
Huh.
“Gabbie,” she said.
He put a hand out when she offered hers, and the second his fingers wrapped around hers, she swore the heat that sparked between the two was enough to make her draw in a sharp breath. She couldn’t tell for sure, though, because she was a little too focused on the way he was looking at her.
He liked what he saw.
So did she.
“Michel,” he replied easily.
Gabbie wasn’t innocent when it came to men, but she also wasn’t very forward. Growing up as the daughter of an Irish mob boss meant almost everyone knew who the feck she was in these parts. Just her last name was enough to send a man running away from her lest he find himself in hot water with her family or da.
This man, though?
He was still there. Either he didn’t know who she was, or he didn’t give a feck. She liked that far more than she should.
She really liked the way he was looking at her in that moment, too. Grinning in that way. Like he was the cat looking at a saucer of cream, and he was ready to lap up every single drop of it. She wasn’t going to lie and say she didn’t like it because she sure as hell did. He wasn’t too bad to look at, either.
“I was going to look for my cousins,” she said, “but I was thinking maybe another dance would be good.”
Michel make a noise under his breath, and glanced over his shoulder. “Shit, I … I’m supposed to be working right now.”
“You work at the club?”
And he didn’t know who she was?
Unlikely.
He shook his head, saying, “Not exactly.”
What did that mean?
“But you know what,” Michel said, grabbing the tumbler of whiskey when the bartender slid it over to him, “fuck work. I found something better.”
Gabbie drew her bottom lip between her teeth, asking, “Oh, did you?”
“Looking at her, yeah.”
He offered his hand, and she took it again. The same heat from earlier sparked through her hand, and up her arm. This time, though, it traveled through her body and straight down to the spot between her thighs. She couldn’t take her gaze off Michel, either, or the way he tipped that glass up to swallow the three fingers of whiskey in one go.
He didn’t flinch.
Didn’t make a sound.
She knew that liquor was harsh.
And damn, she liked that, too.
Michel wet his bottom lip, taking away the remaining whiskey with a single, sexy sweep of his tongue. She had the greatest urge to reach up, and see what his lips might feel like when they were pressed against her fingertips.
Or even better, against her mouth.
“A dance?” he asked.
Gabbie nodded. “You got it.”
She slipped off the stool at the bar to follow him, her fingers weaving in with his as she stayed close to his back. She really liked that view—the way his muscles moved under the silk, and the way the lights shadowed his features when he glanced back at her.
Then, the crowd swelled.
Someone hit Gabbie from the side, sending her to the floor. Michel swung around, his strong arms already reaching out to catch her, but he was just one second too late. She hit the floor alongside someone’s glass that shattered as soon as it hit the tile.
“Gabbie,” she heard Michel say.
Concern wrote heavily across his handsome features, and the first thing she wanted to do was apologize for ruining … well, whatever this was. Although, he simply looked like he was more worried about getting her up from the floor. He called her name again, but it sounded faint. It was too far away even though he was right above her.
She knew why, too.
The pain in her arm.
The blood dribbling to the floor.
Feck.
Blood always made her--
Everything went dark.