isn’t that much younger than me. I was seventeen before he got caught, and then he picked them.”
He’d told her a little bit of that story before, but not so much detail.
“Wow,” she said. “And you never had any idea?”
“I feel like a total sfigato, but no. It was just life, you know? My dad was away a lot, my mom was here with me, my grandpa was here to do the man stuff. That was just normal for me. When my dad was around, he acted like a dad. It didn’t occur to me to think he wasn’t doing what he said he was doing.” He felt stupid even making that confession, so he repeated, “It was just my life.”
“I understand,” Lia said and wove her fingers with his. “How’d you find out?”
“His oldest kid from the other family. A daughter. She broke everything open. She was about fourteen or so, and she was a lot more suspicious than I ever was. She did some digging and found out about us. When it all broke open, he chose them, even though my mom and me were first. He cleaned out the accounts on his way, too. Mom was too shook to fight him before it was too late, so we sat here with nothing. My grandpa had passed the year before. I was a senior in high school. I’d gotten full-rides to six schools, but they were all far away, and I couldn’t leave my mom all alone. Brown didn’t give me enough, so I didn’t go.”
“You went to my father instead.” Her fingers tightened around his.
He stared at a photo of him and his mom at his high school graduation, right in the darkest aftermath of it all. She still looked shell-shocked, and Alex still looked pissed as fuck. “We never had much money, because I guess it costs a lot to keep two lives going. To help out, I found the work I could as soon as I could, and a smart kid who knew to keep his mouth shut could make good coin with the Paganos. I was already an errand boy since I was fourteen. It wasn’t much to go all in when my college plans fell apart.”
“Do you think you’ll ever go to college?”
“Nah. That ship’s out of the harbor. I’m a Pagano man now.”
He could feel Lia’s eyes on him, but he felt awkward about meeting her gaze right now, so he focused on the family gallery. Photos he’d seen so many times they’d become invisible. But there was a story here. His mom’s story, and his.
Needing the heat off him, he asked, “What was it like, growing up like you did?”
“You mean with my dad? Or with money?”
Now he faced her. “Both.”
Lia shrugged. “I don’t know how to answer that. Easy, I guess. And hard, too. But like you said, it’s just my life.”
He chuckled darkly and opened his mouth to say he got it, but she wasn’t finished.
“My dad tries hard to keep all that stuff out of our house, and I guess he does an okay job of it. We have bodyguards and a panic room, and big men all around us carry guns, and I know that’s weird now, but I didn’t then. I didn’t know we weren’t exactly like everybody else until fourth grade, when some kids on the playground were chasing me around yelling ‘rich bitch, rich bitch’ at me. They knocked me down and I got gravel in my knees and had to go to the nurse and have my mom pick me up. I heard my parents talking in Papa’s office after dinner. My room is over his office, and a little bit of sound comes up the vents sometimes. I couldn’t hear all the words, but they sounded tense. Not yelling, my dad never yells and my mom never yells at him, but they were both upset. Then the next school day, all the kids who chased me came over in a group and apologized, and one of them started crying and asked me to please not let my daddy kill him.”
She shuddered softly, shaking the memory off, and Alex pulled her in close, tucked her under his arm.
“That was the first time I’d seen anybody afraid of my father. I was in middle school before I’d heard anyone refer to him as a mobster. It took me a while to believe that enough to think hard about it.” A small smile, tight and