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“I would never disrespect you, not on purpose, and you know it. And what’s with the language, Cat? You get worse and worse every day. If Gino hears you, he might cut the tip of your tongue.”
“You make me want to curse you out, stronzo. Mi fai Impazzire!” She turned to Italian, and I smiled in the corner of my mouth.
“I might drive you crazy, princess, but you also go crazy for my cock.”
She looked at me with her mouth hanging open and then pealed her eyes away.
“I’ve always wondered, you know?”
“What about, princess?”
“If you speak Italian or not.”
“I understand it, but I don’t speak. It’s not my language.” One of the pile of things that made me so wrong for Catherinelle Nucci. “Your father taught me, actually.”
“Papa? My dad? He actually stayed with you and helped you study?”
“He did.” I was his little pet project. “Your father wanted me to be the perfect human weapon, and he felt that I was at a disadvantage if I couldn’t understand what everyone said around me. So yes, every time you cursed me out in Italian, I heard you, princess.”
Sometimes, when she got mad, it was like her mind switched, and the sweet, New York raised girl was shadowed by the fiery Italian woman who liked to fight.
“Dad never spent that much time with me.” Her voice was suddenly drowned in bitterness, and I hated to see at her like that, but I was relieved that we were finally stepping on smoother territory. “Looking back, I should be happy, right? He was not a good man to have around.”
My hands squeezed the wheel with a smoldering anger that was flowing through my veins. I knew that disappointment she was feeling very fucking well. Umberto Nucci took me from the streets and threw me a scrap when I was on my way to dying of starvation under a bridge. He groomed me; he sharpened my instincts and my mind, and he made me so dangerous, his own people feared me. I put him on a fucking pedestal, only to find out I wasn’t worth shit to him.
When he got murked, Gino and his grandfather uncovered the shitty truth about Don Umberto Nucci and his wicked secret life. He went against the Nucci code: don’t hurt the innocent. The people in the underworld, your enemies? Whoever was in your way was fair game if they hurt the family but not the people in the streets. Umberto went rogue and made a shit ton of blood money on the backs of young girls, selling them like pieces of meat, some even younger than Catherinelle. Only thinking about it brought a bile taste to my mouth.
Sure, the Nucci family had girls that knew how to offer pleasure for the right price; they were in all our clubs, but they were there by their own free will. Gino always made sure they were getting paid and that they were protected. Those women weren’t hurt; they came to our door looking for work, and they got it – waitresses, bartenders, dancers, they were working and making extra money with the patrons. Umberto, on the other hand, took those girls out of their homes and locked them in a fucking basement.
Yeah, it should have been easy to hate him – Catherinelle should have been able to hate him – but it was fucking torture to hate the man that once stood so high.
“No one talks to me about him, my dad,” she finally said after a long minute of silence. “I know what he did.”
Shit.
“How?” Not from Simona or Gino because they decided to keep her away from all of that toxic bullshit and not taint her image of her father, and I knew that no one who was aware of the truth about Umberto would have dared to go against that decision.
“I found his notes in Gino’s office.”
Ah, the fucking notes! He kept a fucking diary, a twisted and fucked up memoire of how he decided to dabble into trafficking girls and every decision he made. It was in those notes he wrote, ‘If the famiglia catches up, I have a few that will stick up for me, for their hands are dirtier than mine. And if the pigs sniff my business and try to throw me in the cage again, I have the Albanian scum to take the fall, for a dog who I fed scraps will be loyal to me forever, or I’ll have him put down’. Black on white, ink on paper, he wrote the truth. I was walking among them, but I would never be them.
“You should have stayed away from that shit, Cat,” I said bitterly.
I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror and saw my face was looking like I chewed on a lemon. If Catherinelle read her dad’s notes, then she’d seen with her own eyes that for her family, I wasn’t worth the dirt on her expensive Prada shoes.
“Hugo, do you think it’s fair that they let me mourn a good father when in reality, he was just a villain and a shit husband to mom. He kept a list of women he’d been with.” She took a little pause then threw me a sharp look. “Including Victoria Tori.”
This girl knew too fucking much. When Gino got back, I had to make sure he changed the entry code for his office.
“Stop with the Tori woman.”
“I’m just saying. It’s disgusting for you, and Roman, and Gino to share the same woman that slept with my dad.” She shrugged casually. “But you don’t mind sharing, don’t you?”
Fuck me.
“Stop with that, Catherinelle.”
“What? I’m just curious. I know you’ve been with sisters, and I know you’ve been with twins, but have you tried triplets?”
