shook my head and turned away, heading back towards the cabin to prepare Winter to leave.
This mountain had been my refuge when I needed it most. But it was time to return to the real world.
The long drive back to the city was a quiet one. Angelo or Nicoli as I guessed he still wanted to be called seemed to have retreated into himself and the girl he’d introduced as Winter hadn’t said a single word to me. Not one. I wanted to ask, but the look Nicoli gave me closed the subject for discussion so I guessed my curiosity would have to wait.
I drove through the brightly lit streets of Sinners Bay with my stomach rumbling and music growling through my speakers as some dude rocked out so hard I lost sense of the words. But the beat was good and my fingers were drumming against the steering wheel, so I guessed it was all good.
Winter had curled up on the back seat with her arms around the huge dog my brother had insisted on giving a seat in my luxury SUV about an hour into the journey and I’d been having discussions on and off with Nicoli ever since then. We talked about our family, people he’d heard of and those he hadn’t. He was most interested in hearing personal stories about things me, Rocco and Enzo had gotten up to together over the years, like maybe he was trying to imagine where he would have slotted into them if things had been different.
I cast glances his way when I told them as often as I could, trying to gauge how he felt about all of these stories of three brothers who should have been four. It had to suck pretty hard being invited to join a group which was clearly so close knit already, but we all wanted this more than I could express. Yes, we’d grown up without him and I’d been so young when he’d supposedly died that I had no memory of him or our mamma at all, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t missed him. We’d all felt that hole in our lives where he should have been, all suffered through our papa’s grief and we were all aching to return him to his rightful place amongst us.
“Give it a few months and there will be plenty of stories involving the four of us to laugh about,” I said, wondering if telling him all of this just made him feel worse about everything or what. He was certainly a cagey bastard.
“I’m not really...fun,” Nicoli said slowly. “Not like those stories. When I worked for...your opposition, we were encouraged to conduct business quickly and efficiently. We didn’t do any of that shit you guys do like dress men up as clowns and make them walk the plank with bricks chained to their ankles-”
“I’ll have you know we gave that guy the key to his chains before he jumped in the water. He only drowned because he was a dumb shit. He had a decent chance at saving his ass - even if we did make him wear massive rainbow clown pants at the time.”
“Did it occur to you that those clown pants might have gotten in his way when he tried to unlock the chains?” Nicoli asked, but I swear the corner of his lips twitched as he did. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the movement at all except it was the exact same almost-smirk that Enzo always got on his face when he was trying to pretend he was a straight up psychopath. I mean, sure, he was an occasional psychopath, but I’d call it a killing hobby. He enjoyed taking out garbage when the occasion called for it and yeah he might have dressed the killings up in the odd show of theatrics, but there was really something so much more to that than met the eye.
“Did it ever occur to you that when people read a story in the news about six mobsters being executed in the back of some old warehouse they curl back their upper lip and mutter good riddance beneath their breath then promptly forget the whole thing,” I said slowly, turning off of the road we were on and onto the side street where my apartment was located.
“What’s your point?” Nicoli asked, not brashly, more like he actually gave a shit about where I was going with this.
“Then those same people read a story the next day.