Page 4 of Loyalty

“How close did my father keep me when he let me be carted off to prison for three years?”

“You didn’t give Lucian a choice. You were running crazy, John, doing stupid shit. The faster you ran, the more frenzied you became. You were refusing to work with your father or the people set up for you. On more than one occasion, you put everyone in terrible situations that could have cost us all a lot. You were self-medicating between chemicals and prescriptions. Cristo, John, you went missing for two weeks!”

He had.

He had done all of that.

“I thought I had it under control,” John said.

“That was your first mistake because clearly you were lost. Everybody was trying to help you, but you just kept pushing us away until we couldn’t even see you anymore.”

Not one word was a lie.

John wouldn’t deny it.

His last manic episode had begun shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday, and the cycles of the disorder went on for weeks at a time, and lasted for over a year. It almost mirrored his first episode from his teenaged years when his family had finally gotten a diagnosis for what was wrong inside his head.

Chemical imbalances.

Bipolar.

John’s biggest mistake back then was thinking he could manage his mental health without medications. Those pills labeled him crazy. He didn’t need them. He was wrong, and the longer he was without them the more manic he became in his daily life. He’d go from stealing because of the rush, fighting because of the high, using substances to manage the highs and the lows, to fucking any female within arm’s reach just to feel.

When he was in a high cycle of the mania, he’d be up for days, running non-stop, and obsessive to an extreme. When the lows of the cycle hit, he would do anything just to get out of it, if he could even manage to function.

Yeah, he’d lost that battle with a bang.

Literally.

His parents hadn’t been able to step in like they had when he was a teen because he was an adult the second time around. When his episode came to a head and John finally hit bottom, he nearly killed his cousin, Andino, during an argument over territory and men on the streets. It should have been a simple discussion between Capos. John was far too lost in his own nonsense to fully understand what he was doing when he pulled that gun on his cousin in a busy restaurant.

How Gio was even sitting in a car with John after what he’d almost done to the man’s son, John didn’t understand.

Well, truthfully, he did know how.

Family first.

“I’m good,” John said firmly.

“Now,” Gio agreed.

John decided right then and there to end the conversation. He didn’t want to talk about his mental health with his uncle, or anyone for that matter. He had a fucking doctor for that shit. Or he’d had before.

“Drop it, Zio,” John said.

“You brought it up first.”

“And now I’m done.”

Gio glared at the highway they were driving down. “Your crew has been divided between a few of the family Capos.”

“Better than Dante handing my position and men off to someone else entirely.”

“You could say that.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

John could hear the hesitance in his uncle’s tone, which wouldn’t lead to anything good.