right? You were Dad’s project and I was Mom’s.” He smiles softly. “Don’t deny it, Dani. It’s not a bad thing. I think it worked for us. You and Dad going to the race course together, me and Mom going to those gym shows. But we did family stuff, too. Do you remember the time Rex kept bringing that chewed-up old tennis ball back to the porch?”
I laugh sadly as Wyatt tugs on my hand. I slide onto the bed next to him, wrapping my arm around him like I did the day we learned the news about our parents. He hasn’t let me hold him like this since then.
Rex was our dalmatian who died a couple of years after Mom and Dad did. One summer, when we were staying at a rented lake house in Maine, he kept bringing this tennis ball back to the porch, no matter where we hid it. We even went as far as to hide it in the woods, in a tree. Nothing fazed him. So from then on, if somebody was being really stubborn—like if Wyatt wouldn’t budge on wanting pizza—we’d just say, “Tennis ball, Wyatt.”
Everybody who didn’t know about Rex would just look at us like we were crazy, but we’d get the message: calm down, psycho.
“Do you think Mom would still be proud of me?” Wyatt whispers. He’s crying, but I know better than to acknowledge it in any way. I just stroke his hair. “I mean, shit, the worst thing she ever saw me take was a painkiller.”
“You’re at college,” I say. “You have friends. You’re a smart kid—a smart man. Of course she’d be proud. And she’d be proud that you still watch Countdown and yell at the contestants for screwing it up.”
He laughs through his tears. “Do you miss Dad and the cars?”
I swallow hard at that, remembering me and Dad in the rented rally cars speeding around the course, passing each other by, the thrill as the tail whipped out and mud splattered the air.
I’m feeling really sentimental right now. I have to blink back a tear.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course I do.”
We sit there in silence for a few minutes, saying nothing and everything.
“Sorry, Dani, do you mind turning up the TV?” he asks a bit later. “I wanna watch the rest of this. Will you play it with me, like Mom used to?”
I’m in danger of outright bawling. I just about manage a nod as I climb from the bed in the corner and go to the wall-mounted TV. I turn up the volume, British voices filling the room, and then return to the bed.
“I love you, sis,” Wyatt says.
Maybe it’s the dehydration, or the drugs, or the fact that he’s been through a traumatic experience. But I don’t care.
Because I love him, too, more than anything.
I kiss the top of his head. “Come on, Einstein. Let’s see those math skills.”
11
Angelo
Two weeks drift by and there isn’t a peep from the Albanians about the man we dumped—beaten, bloodied, but, despite my better instincts, still breathing—in the alleyway.
That’s strange for their organization. Dujar might be a bizarre freak of a man, but he’s not known for accepting slights well.
Father doesn’t mention anything about them either, and as I walk through the club this evening to my office, I can almost believe we’ve gotten away with it. Levi has lectured me several times on what a mistake it was, on how I need to handle my temper.
I reply that he ought to focus on handling his chain-smoking habit, which has begun to spiral wildly out of control. He is perpetually sucking on a cigarette, as if he’s hoping to hasten the end of his life. As much as he grates on me sometimes, he is still my ally and confidante, and I have no desire to see him drop dead.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much I think of Dani, which is, frankly, absurd. The time that has passed since I last saw her is longer than we’ve known each other, and yet several times I wake up thinking of her blue eyes gazing into mine.
I think of her in other ways as well. I put out a warning to all my dealers at her brother’s college not to deal to him, or there will be consequences. “Do not sell to him. Do not talk to him. Do not even fucking look at him. Am I clear?”
The yes, sir that echoes at the end of each