Smoke (The Carelli Family Saga #1) - Eden Butler Page 0,26

to my chest, finally realizing what that sensation inside had been, hating that I recognized fear for what it was.

I shook my head and she moved back down, snuggling closer, her fingers smoothing over the crucifix in the center of my chest.

“I’ll meet you in half an hour.”

“Yeah, boss.”

Maggie looked up at me, touching my forehead, rubbing her thumb between my eyebrows.

“And Rickey?” I said, taking Maggie’s hand from my face to kiss the center of her palm. “Watch your back.”

He hung up and she opened her mouth, readying a million questions for me she knew I wouldn’t answer.

When I shook my head, Maggie smiled, like she expected an excuse from me and was already fine with whatever it would be.

I hoped she’d be just as fine with what came next.

“Maggie, you and me, we’re gonna need to have a conversation…”

This is what came of my gray business. This is what happens when you have something to lose.

“Yeah?” she said, sitting up.

She wasn’t mine. Neither was Mateo, but soon, I’d make sure they both were.

8

Maggie

“No, asshole…give that to me!”

“I can manage. I’m not a fucking idiot…”

“Yeah? Then why the hell are you trying to put a metal pin in that shit when the instructions say a wooden dowel?” Dante waved the paper at his brother, top lip curled up and nose flaring. “You big chooch, see?”

“Give me that!” The paper ripped, the corner falling to the floor as Dario grabbed it, then held it in front of his face, his big eyes moving as he focused on the instructions.

The mess the two Carelli brothers had made of my living room was ridiculous. There were slats of wood spread out across the floor, some only half-secured to a metal frame. Others still piled in a haphazard stack against the sofa. It killed me to ask these knuckleheads for help, but since Smoke was keeping a low profile—worried about everyone’s safety since Dino had been shot—there had been no one, other than his brothers to help with things I, begrudgingly, had to admit were beyond my physical control. Like lugging in the massive box Mateo’s new toddler bed had come in into our apartment.

Despite my vow to only outfit my kid’s life with things I’d purchased myself, Vi had ordered the bed a week ago when my boy had figured out he could shimmy from his crib by kicking his leg over the railing and slipping down the side. It had nearly given the poor woman a heart attack to find him mid-slide two weekends ago when she went in to check on him during his nap.

“He’s a wild child,” she’d proclaimed when I came home after my shift. “We have to prepare.”

But preparing for whatever Mateo had in store for us meant more than buying a new bed. It meant we’d have to figure out how to put it together. We were capable. But when that box came and we couldn’t even manage to push it from the hallway into our apartment, Vi reasoned we had to admit our limitations.

“We can do a lot of things for ourselves, sugar, but picking that up? No way. We need some muscle.”

But the muscle I wanted, if I was honest, was attached to the one man who wasn’t around. Not since Dino had been shot two weeks ago and Smoke took him from the Cuoricino hospital, which he claimed wasn’t fit to help his man, to the hospital in Edgemont, an hour away. But Smoke hadn’t gone silent.

In fact, I felt more protected now than I had in the last seven months.

“I hate this,” Smoke had promised, his voice low over the phone. “I’m sending some of my boys to help you with the bed.”

“No, you’re not. We can manage.”

There’d been three of his boys roaming the halls of our apartments and two outside Carelli’s since the night Dino was shot. Unmarked SUVs were camped out near the restaurant and at his parent’s building. Two were parked in front and at the back of mine and two more sat in the park on the edge of town.

The protection, Smoke reasoned, was necessary, though he wouldn’t say why. Still, that didn’t mean I wanted his men inside my home.

“You stay with Dino,” I’d told him, on the verge of asking him what he’d wanted to talk to me about. That conversation had never happened after we had sex on his desk and there hadn’t been time since, but everything about Smoke had changed from how