crucially important she obey, they left her to her small rebellions. The other children took so much active parenting, but Lia had not. She’d earned a chance to go her own way once in a while.
This time, though, it was crucially important she obey.
Nick adored all four of his children, but he held an extra puff of affection for Lia for being so easy. She was a respite amidst the storms of her siblings. Now, however, with Beverly’s concerns about her weight chiming in his ears, and the near-miss of the weekend before, and her obvious unhappiness, he wondered if they hadn’t let their second daughter slip through the cracks.
He moved her tote bag from the flowery chair beside her desk and sat down. “Lia.”
She stopped typing. A second later, she lifted her eyes to him. But she didn’t speak.
“I’m sorry I was unkind downstairs. I didn’t mean to be. I didn’t expect you to resist me, and I suppose I leaned on my habit of being obeyed. I am truly proud of you, and I want you to have your dreams and hopes.”
She sat quietly, motionless except for the occasional blinks of her eyelids.
“I need you home, gattina. I need to keep you safe. But only until things calm down again. Your mamma is right—you should be able to have the life you want, and I won’t try to keep you from that indefinitely.”
“I don’t understand, Papa. This war thing or whatever that’s going on with you has nothing to do with what happened last weekend. Whether it calms down at some point or not is irrelevant.”
Nick had worked hard to keep his family and his work separate. He wanted his children to have the most normal life they could, and largely he, and Beverly, had succeeded in that. None of his children truly understood what went on when he was away from home. Beverly understood more, but with one horrific exception—after the Bondaruk attack he supposed the exceptions now numbered two—he’d managed all these years to keep the real darkness from her as well. He was proud of that accomplishment.
But it did mean that the children he’d protected from his bloody, violent business sometimes made dismissive statements that clenched his jaw—like, for example, this war thing or whatever. Lia had no real sense of the danger around her. Only Pagano men truly understood. His children resented his protection, dismissed the danger.
All but Elisa, whom he’d lost.
“Let me play out a scenario for you, Lia. Imagine that last weekend, while you were at a frat party, full of strangers and loud music, but with a bodyguard on you, one of the frat boys tried to put Rohypnol in your beer.”
Lia’s jaw slid sideways, and she sucked her teeth. Nick nearly smiled; he liked this glimmer of the sassy imp she’d once been. Before she’d felt lost in the chaos.
“In this scenario, let’s imagine that your guard was on the ball and saw what was going down. He stopped it, and then he had a would-be rapist on his hands and had to deal with him. But that’s okay—we’ve got a system in place. He does what he’s supposed to and takes the would-be rapist out to hand him off to other men for justice. So far, does that sound like something that could realistically happen?”
Still sucking her teeth, Lia crossed her arms.
Nick leaned forward and went on. “Now, in this scenario, the guard is outside for, say, three minutes or so. Maybe as many as five, since there are people around outside and he has to be discreet. Where are you during these three to five minutes, Lia? Who’s watching you then?”
Her eyes flared, and she squirmed a little, but still she kept her mouth shut.
“Imagine there’s somebody else in that loud crowd of strangers. Somebody looking to hurt me in the way they know will hurt me most—by hurting what I love most. Maybe somebody who’s been looking for a shot for a while but he can’t get close because there’s always a guard on you. Maybe he’s been waiting for a chance like a frat party to make his move, hoping the crowd will give him an opening. And then he sees your guard handling trouble, going out back and leaving you there all alone.”
A dawning had broken in her eyes. Nick stood, went to the bed, and sat at the foot, facing her. He held out his hand, resting it between them on the comforter. She