them crazy.”
I mutter, “This is why blowup dolls were invented.”
“I’m only getting started. We could be on the phone all night.” He pauses. “Maybe I should just email you a list.”
“What I’m hearing you say is, in a nutshell, don’t be me.”
“Exactly. Be anyone else but you. Be…Ryan Reynolds. Women seem to like him. He’s funny, charming, and self-deprecating.” Snicker. “I know those words are unfamiliar to you, but you can Google them to see what they mean.”
I stop pacing long enough to drag a hand over my face and sigh. “I’m so glad I called.”
“Me, too. I thought I’d never see the day when my hardass brother exposed his soft underbelly.”
I say flatly, “I don’t have a soft fucking underbelly. Good night.”
As I’m disconnecting, he’s saying loudly, “Remember—Ryan Reynolds!”
It must be so nice to be an only child.
15
Jules
I wake when it’s still dark out. My first instinct is to go to the window, but I take a shower and eat breakfast instead.
Then I sit at the kitchen table and do something I rarely allow myself to do.
I think about my father.
My mother was twenty-five when she married him. The same age I am now. He was already notorious, the youngest of four sons and by far the most ambitious. And the most violent. According to the stories, when my grandfather wanted to send a message to a rival family that wouldn’t be ignored, it was Antonio he’d send to do the job.
My grandfather was a mafioso, too. Capo dei capi, boss of all bosses. Just like my father.
This shit runs in my veins.
When the bomb meant for my father took my mother instead, I was twelve years old. I had just gotten my first period. I had no friends outside of the family, no female I could talk to who wasn’t a cousin or aunt. My grandmother was still alive—my father’s mother—but she was a dour old woman, frighteningly religious, always dressed in black even in the deadening heat of summer. The only two pleasures in her life were cooking and god.
Intensely introverted, I lived my life inside the safety of books. The trifecta of homeschooling, security training, and the closed circle of my family made me extraordinarily distrustful of strangers and awkward to the extreme. I had no idea how to operate in the “real” world.
Then my mother was killed, and the real world came knocking on my door. I was sent away to a boarding school in another state.
At the time, my father explained that it was for my own safety. Now, I think that with my mother gone, he simply didn’t know what to do with me. His only child. A pre-teen girl.
So off I went to a private school for rich kids in Vermont.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I met Fin and Max and had friends for the first time in my life.
My mother didn’t have any friends. She wasn’t allowed to have them. Originally from California, she met my father during a vacation to Manhattan. After knowing him only a week, she gave up her entire life to go live in New York with him. That’s how in love she was.
Or how lonely.
If she didn’t know what he was before she moved there, she certainly found out fast.
He was a king. Wealthy. Proud. Charismatic. Both feared and respected, and known by all for his commitment to his honor but especially for his thirst for violence.
Exactly like Liam Black.
“Killian,” I say aloud, correcting myself.
Killian. Not a nickname, not a middle name, not a name he’s called by anyone else. It makes no sense that he would demand I call him that. It irks me.
What irks me more is that I haven’t told Fin and Max about it. I’ve always been good at keeping secrets, but not from them. This name thing, though…I’m still working it out. There’s something important there. A clue. But to what, I don’t know.
The last time I spoke to my father was seven years ago. I’d been arrested for shoplifting. It was the only time I’d seen the inside of a police station, before or since. The bail was only five hundred dollars, but I had no money of my own. I didn’t have a job. My father paid for everything. It was the day after graduation, and I was scheduled to return to New York within the week.
But that phone call with my father changed everything.
In the mafia, a thief is the lowest form of