One Breath After Another (The After Another Series #2) - Bethany-Kris Page 0,1

place Luca wanted to be, but especially when nothing he did seemed to please anyone around him. That was never more obvious than when he sat at his family’s dinner table. Even a simple question wasn’t just a question for him to answer regardless of which parent asked it of him.

It was always an opening for a discussion. One of many, unfortunately. Discussions that made it very clear he wasn’t doing what someone thought he should be, but certainly when it came to his life choices.

“How were your classes this week?” his mother asked.

Luca stabbed the waffle on his plate with a fork, hoping that if he shoved the bite into his mouth and chewed for long enough, Katya would forget she even asked in the first place. Highly unlikely.

“All right,” he muttered around chews when she continued staring at him from her spot at the end of the table. “Missed a lecture and my morning classes but—”

“Education is important, Luca.”

Yeah, here we go, he thought.

“And you did want to go to college,” Katya added after a moment. “Why waste time and resources if you’re unwilling to commit to your choice?”

“I’m not wasting anything, Ma.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

Christ.

Maybe he had looked at this all wrong. Instead of using bites of food to deflect his mother’s questions about his failing attempt at law school—every good criminal family needed a defense lawyer, right?—she was using his full mouth as a chance to get her opinion in when he couldn’t talk back.

Sneaky.

But smart.

Also, not surprising.

Wives of made men learned different ways over the years about just how they could get their voices heard when it wasn’t meant to be in the discussion in the first place. His mother might have been given a bit more freedom in her place as his father’s wife—not all made men cared to have compliant, silent, pretty dolls for wives, after all—but she also knew where the lines were drawn when it came to the family business.

While his father watched them from his chair at the head of the table, he knew his mother was toeing the line by even bringing up the fact that his higher education was currently taking a hit as he stepped more and more into Zeke’s business.

The family business.

The mafia.

“I just think—”

“Katya,” his father spoke up, drawing all attention to Zeke when he picked up his coffee mug from the table. “Would you mind pouring me another cup? This one is cold.”

Luca’s mother sighed.

His father would never outright tell her to stop pushing the topic. Zeke wouldn’t shut his wife up just because she asked things that he didn’t like. He would, however, divert her on to something else which was a clear but silent that’s quite enough, darling.

The chair legs squeaked against the tiled floor of the dining room as Katya stood from the table with pursed lips. A good sign of her displeasure, not that she would voice it with Luca there. He couldn’t remember—in all of his twenty-four, almost twenty-five years—a time when his parents fought in front of him or his younger sister, Roz. Hell, his mother never even raised her voice despite the little shit he had been as a kid.

Zeke, on the other hand ...

He didn’t mind being loud.

“Grazie,” Zeke thanked his wife when she took the cup from his hand as she passed.

“You’re welcome.”

“Am I?” his father asked under his breath after his wife had left the dining room entirely. “That’ll be a fun chat later, I’m sure.”

Zeke went back to looking over the newspaper beside his breakfast plate like the entire thing hadn’t happened in the first place. Luca wasn’t quite as willing to pretend.

“You don’t have to do that,” he told his father. “I can handle Ma’s questions. She’s just ... worried.”

“Because you’re doing what you should be doing?”

“Because she’s not sure it’s what I want to do.”

The mafia wasn’t for the faint of heart, but especially not a man who was just beginning to dabble in the business. He was at the beck and call of any man in the Donati crime family who needed or wanted him for whatever they thought would serve their purposes. He barely had time to sleep and feed himself lately, let alone get any of the many papers done for college that had been due ... a long time ago.

He should just quit.

He rarely made it to class anymore. His grades were inconsequential because he wasn’t even doing the work to get a fucking grade.