on his wife, too, if she were the kind of woman to tolerate it.
Newsflash: she wasn't. She'd cut him up and serve him at the next potluck if he even thought about touching another woman.
"That's crazy," Alfie said, waving that assumption off. "I just play by my own rules."
"You cheat," Johnny said again. "You can't just make up rules as you go along."
"Says who?"
"Says everyone."
"Pfft, and who's going to stop me?"
Alfie laughed, tossing his cards down on the table, face up. Gabriella glanced at them, doing a double take. He had four of a kind, except two of them were exactly the same, both the Queen of Spades.
The men grumbled, tossing their own cards down, as Johnny flicked a card right at him, hitting him in the chest with it: the real fourth Queen.
"So, how you doing, baby girl?" her father asked, not at all ashamed as Johnny crumbled up and discarded the extra spade before sorting through the deck, making sure no other cards had slipped in. "How's that job of yours?"
"Good," she said, shrugging.
"What are you doing these days?" Johnny asked, cocking an eyebrow. "Last I heard you were still off at school in Caldwell."
"I graduated," she said. "Went into nursing."
"She's a city girl these days," her father told Johnny. "Working at a hospital out your way."
"Is that right?" Johnny's eyes flickered to her as he shuffled cards. "Which one?"
"Presbyterian."
"Presbyterian," someone else chimed in, one of the faces she didn't recognize—a cousin of a cousin of someone's brother-in-law or something. "Isn't that where they treated Galante's son?"
Way too many eyes darted straight to her with that question. She stood there, silent, and just shrugged a shoulder. No way was she approaching that topic with those people. HIPPA violation aside, she wasn't interested in breeching his privacy to appease their nosiness.
"Kid got put through the ringer," Johnny muttered as he dealt the cards out to the men. "The kind of hell he went through... I don't think it's the kind you ever come back from."
"Nonsense," a new voice cut through the room. "He seems to have bounced back just fine."
The men didn't give the newcomer a glance, while Gabriella looked at the doorway. Guess the birthday boy decided to come, anyway. He stood there, dressed in a black suit, his dark hair flecked with bits of gray. Gabriella wouldn't call him family. She'd never thought of him that way. He certainly never considered them to be anything more than strangers, like they were living a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, loosely connected through circumstances.
Gabriella's mother had five brothers and two sisters, one of which married the man in the doorway. The family tree she'd scribbled out in elementary school said that made him an uncle, but in her mind, he was just some guy they all called Bobby.
"Is that right?" Johnny asked. "You seen the kid lately?"
"Two nights ago," Bobby said, strolling into the room. "He showed up at my bar."
Someone let out a low whistle, but Gabriella didn't look to see who it was. Her gaze trailed Bobby as he grabbed a chair and joined them at the table.
"You didn't kill him for that, did you?" Johnny asked, snatching up all the cards to start over, to deal Bobby in.
"Of course not," Bobby said. "He had some questions, so I humored him. Besides, you know, he's angry about what happened with his sister."
"Rightfully so," Johnny said.
Bobby's eyes narrowed, but he continued on like Johnny hadn't interrupted. "He's angry, and anger makes people careless. Makes them reckless. Way I see it, I don't have to kill him, because he's already well on his way to being dead, thanks to his own father. Just gotta give him enough rope to hang himself."
Gabriella couldn't take much more of that conversation. It was making her stomach churn, her vision blurring around the edges. She gripped the back of her father's chair, shifting position in an attempt to shake off the dizziness, but all it seemed to do was garner attention.
Bobby gave her a quick once-over before turning to Alfie. "She yours?"
Alfie glanced up at her. "Yeah, you remember my little girl, Gabby."
"Of course," Bobby said. "She's just not so little now."
"They grow up quick," Alfie said.
Johnny cleared his throat. "The ones who get to grow up."
"Speaking of," Alfie said, "any word on Matteo?"
Bobby picked up his cards, sorting through them as he shook his head. "I keep calling, keep asking, and it's always the same answer. Nothing. No sign of