children—the girls especially. You cannot fathom what it’s like to be a woman in the world. But we can’t hide away. It’s the world we all have to live in. Lia learned something last weekend. She shouldn’t have had to learn it, it’s not fair, and it makes me sick, but at least she learned it without getting hurt. And that’s because you’re her father. It’s not a lesson she’ll forget, Nick. She’ll be more careful now. You have to trust her to take care of herself, too.”
Every time they spoke directly of last weekend, a vein in Nick’s temple vibrated like a live wire. He rubbed at it now.
Tony Cioccolanti, his head enforcer since he’d lost Angie, had managed to do both too much and not enough to that Crenville stronzo. The beating, the dosing, stapling his dick shut—worthy punishment for what the boy had planned. The tattoo was showy but worthy as well, and had the potential benefit of protecting other women in the future—at least until he had the ink removed.
Taping him naked to the frat house flagpole, however, was far too much flash. Word tore across the campus like wildfire, and then caught in the tinder of Providence itself. Crenville Senior was a powerful man, someone on a level with Nick, or at least near it. They had a business relationship, and Nick would have preferred a more subtle way of dealing with father and son. As it stood, he’d had to devote some time this past week to situation management.
He didn’t like drawing attention. Power was best wielded in silence.
Then again, considering the depth of his rage upon hearing the news, Nick wasn’t sure he would have been capable of handling it himself. He would likely have done all Tony had done and more.
He likely would have killed the boy, and that would have caused problems he couldn’t afford. Not to mention being an unjust answer to a threat that had been averted.
Where his wife and children were concerned, he struggled to maintain his cool—or even to bother to try.
Which was why he needed to be able to rely on his enforcer. Tony was generally an excellent enforcer and had a sharp head on his shoulders. He would make a good leader, and Nick was considering bringing him up to his left hand and offering him Angie’s office as Chief Operating Officer of PBS. But Tony had some polishing to do. He was a blunt, brutal instrument. That was good in the field, but he needed to learn some finesse and control.
Angie had been much the same at that age, and he’d matured into a true leader, an indispensable advisor, and a friend of his heart.
God, he missed Angie.
Everything seemed to be unraveling in his fingers lately.
He was tired and didn’t want to continue this debate any longer. “I need her home, bella. I just need her home.”
His beautiful wife reach over and set her hand on his. He felt her light warming the touch. “I know. Me too.”
~oOo~
He knocked on the closed door.
“Who is it?” Lia called from within. Her voice was flat and featureless.
“It’s Papa, gattina. Can I come in?” There were no locks on the children’s doors, but he rarely forced himself in when he wasn’t wanted.
“Yeah.” The word was hardly a sigh.
He opened the door.
She sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, her laptop open before her, as he came in and closed her door, she kept typing, her focus on the screen.
Snuggles lay on the carpet beside the bed; his tail thumped a welcome. Like his predecessor, the dog had a keen sense for when he was needed. In his younger, spryer years, he’d have been up on the bed, curled around Lia with his head in her lap.
“What are you working on?”
“A paper for American Lit. I have to compare the personal narratives of Cabeza de Vaca and Columbus.”
The rhetoric of her work and her description of it thundered between them. He didn’t want her to go back to Brown, yet here she was, working on an assignment for a course he intended her to drop out of.
This was Lia’s way. She didn’t make a fuss, and she usually did what her parents wanted. But she chose her battles, and when she picked one, she simply carried quietly on, doing things her way, hoping she wasn’t noticed.
She was noticed. Nick and Beverly both saw her do it, and they spoke about it together. But usually, unless it was