Alex Di Pietro leaned back against the wall and tried not to let his contempt for the fools before him show.
A whole room full of drunks acting like they owned the world. Fucking frat boy douchebags and the idiot chicks trying to get their attention.
Once upon a time, he’d wanted to go to college. He’d loved school and had gotten great grades in every subject without hardly having to work for them. Honors classes and AP, and straight As, right up through his senior year.
Then shit had hit the fan in his family and blown his college plans to dust. It wasn’t about the money; there’d never been any money for college. He’d gotten scholarships, full rides, but at schools too far from home. After what his dad did, he couldn’t leave his mom. She’d have been alone.
If Brown had ponied up, maybe he would have enrolled. But they’d offered him a measly couple grand—hardly enough for textbooks, much less tuition. He hadn’t even applied to URI; it had been beneath his notice until it was too late.
Instead of college, he’d turned to the thing he’d been doing for money and pull since he was fourteen: the Pagano Brothers. First he was just an errand boy, but for the past four years, he’d been an associate, crawling slowly toward the light of Don Nicolo Pagano’s notice, trying to prove his loyalty and his willingness to do what needed doing, hoping he’d get his chance to make his bones soon.
There’d been one bad glitch when he thought he might end up fish food in the middle of the ocean—through no real fault of his own except being a stupid noob—but he’d toughed that out, and since then, the right people were paying attention.
The assignment he had now was his best chance to earn the don’s favor. He was the primary body man for one of Nick Pagano’s own children: his second daughter, Lia. A job like this meant the right people were paying attention and thinking him worth their trust.
So here he was, leaning against a wall in a rich-boy fraternity on the Brown campus, watching Don Pagano’s nineteen-year-old daughter meander through this snake pit.
She’d come with a couple of friends, but they’d paired off with frat boy assholes already, and now she was alone, standing next to the booze table, sipping at a beer in a red Solo cup. He’d been on her for a while, and he’d never seen her drunk. She played sometimes at being a party girl, trying to fit in with her party-girl friends, but she really wasn’t one.
Every now and then, she’d look over and catch Alex’s eye, and that glance always came with a look like she’d smelled a fart.
She didn’t dislike him, nor he her, but she hated having him on her ass all the time. But it wasn’t her he answered to. Lia wasn’t a troublemaker; she tolerated his presence because her father told her to, but she let Alex know how trapped she felt. He took it in stride and did his job.
Overall, this wasn’t a terrible detail. He spent his time—ten-hour shifts, five or six days a week—hanging around the Brown campus, shadowing Lia. Sometimes he sat in on her classes, the ones in lecture halls, where he could blend into the crowd, but most times, he just hung out and tried not to look like a creepy stalker. Lia had introduced him as a friend from home to the people she knew, which allowed him to get close and be places like this to keep tabs on her, but he gave her as much space as he could.
A frat boy asshole—popped collar and all—sidled up to Lia with a grin, and Alex sharpened up. He tried hard to let her have her college deal, her father didn’t want him ruining the experience for her, but if Lia got hurt on his watch, Don Pagano would disassemble him.
He didn’t trust these entitled Sig Rho assholes. He’d done some research on the social situation at Brown, so he knew this was one of those old-money, birthplace-of-the-rich-and-powerful fraternities. Where all the hardcore sons of bitches honed the skills they learned at Daddy’s knee. It was also known as The Place to Be Seen on campus, so every party was jam-packed with tarted-up chicks looking to Be Seen.
Chip or Biff or what-the-fuck-ever grinned a blinding white grin, and Lia flipped her long auburn hair and returned a shy smile.