Page 7 of Thin Lives

“Is she really as difficult as they say?” Calisto asked, chuckling.

“More so,” Affonso muttered. “She doesn’t seem to understand her place as a woman because she believes her position is just as good as a man’s.”

Calisto frowned at his uncle’s words. “Is that all you have a problem with, the fact she’s a woman in a position you think should belong to a man?”

“Entirely.”

That seemed … wrong.

Considering what Calisto had learned about this Catrina Marcello, she had more than proven she could pull her weight in the drug sector of the crime business.

The fact that she had a vagina hadn’t exactly hindered her.

“Even if she’s good at what she does?” Calisto asked quietly.

“Women are not meant to be in our business, never mind working alongside a man like she’s just as much of a boss as he is while cooking his food and sleeping in his bed,” Affonso replied frankly. “It’s … unnatural.”

Or perhaps Catrina and Dante Marcello’s ability to act as a husband and wife as well as a Don and Queen Pin side by side was just something that was out of Affonso’s realm of understanding. Calisto wasn’t sure if his uncle disapproved, or was simply confused about the dynamics between the man and woman.

It wasn’t like it mattered.

Another man and woman’s choices were not everyone else’s business.

If it worked for them, who cared?

“Do you want me to cancel the meeting tomorrow? I can make some kind of excuse for you that Dante will find acceptable, but only if I give him a bit of notice. That, or I can go in place of you. I’ve known him for years—he would be comfortable with me showing in your place.”

Affonso hummed and hawed before finally saying, “No, he’ll have a fit and say it was disrespectful of me.”

Which it would be.

Dante wouldn’t be wrong to call Affonso out on it.

Shirking a meeting with another boss never ended well, really. It certainly wouldn’t help Affonso’s case, given that Dante was the boss of the Marcello Cosa Nostra, which dominated the streets of New York, and the Commission.

It wasn’t good for a man to piss off a man higher in power than himself, even if that man was twenty years his junior and had a wife he disapproved of.

Sometimes, in Cosa Nostra, it was not all about age and experience, but rather, the amount of power a man had. Dante Marcello had far more pull power in his pinky finger than Affonso had in his whole famiglia.

Calisto respected his uncle as a boss, but bigger families made the calls when the time came for it. And therefore, he had more respect for Dante when he sat down with the man.

“Smart choice,” Calisto said, trying to hold back the amusement in his tone.

“Still irritates me to no end,” Affonso replied. “No bother, that wasn’t my point for calling you this morning.”

“Then what was?”

“Where are you right now?”

Calisto checked the street he’d just pulled onto and rattled it off to Affonso. “Why?”

“Curious.”

“Heading west right now.”

“Why are you going in that direction?”

“I wanted to grab some breakfast and then go chat with Father Day,” Calisto said, hoping his uncle wouldn’t pry more.