Page 2 of Dirty Pool

Honestly, all Michel needed to do was take a look around this classroom, and he could easily pick out probably at least twenty percent of the students that wouldn’t make it to their second year. No one truly understood the hell of pre-med until they were in the thick of it, and there was no getting out.

They went in thinking one thing …

And changed their direction after year-one thinking another.

Not Michel, though.

He knew what he wanted.

This.

• • •

“Hey, Ma,” Michel said, shifting the messenger bag on his shoulder as he left the exam room with thirty minutes left to go. He’d actually finished his exam an hour earlier than planned, but the professor required him to wait until that half-hour mark before he allowed him to leave the room, along with anyone else who was done early and felt like taking the risk of not double checking their answer cards and written portions. “You’re calling a bit—”

“Well, how did it go?”

Michel laughed.

Of course, she knew.

Catrina remembered everything.

“The exam went well,” he told her.

“Ah, bambino,” Catrina replied, her Italian accent thicker than anyone else’s in their family because Italy had been her birthplace and where she was raised. “I knew you would do well. My smart ragazzo, yes?”

Always his mother’s baby.

“It was touch and go there for a while,” he replied, “but I got through it.”

“Was it really?”

Michel scoffed. “Not even close.”

It was cake, honestly.

Catrina let out a soft sigh. “I figured as much, but don’t you dare get comfortable or lazy, Michel. You need the best grades you can get if you want to see this through. When it comes to a residency—”

“They’re going to look at everything. I know.”

“Of course, you do.”

Some people thought his mother was cold as hell in a lot of ways. He supposed she could be to people on the outside of their life. She had a persona to uphold, and she presented it first and foremost to people before they ever got a good look at who she really was behind her mask of a mafia boss’s wife and Queen Pin.

To him, though?

She’d always been just his mom.

Well, sort of …

She’d adopted him, and so had his father, but he learned that in his teenage years after snooping through his parents’ shared office. He hadn’t meant to stumble on the falsified paperwork, but when he brought it up to Dante and Catrina, they didn’t lie.

Catrina was, biologically, his aunt. Her sister had been pregnant, and died shortly after he was born because of the man who … impregnated her. Or raped, no one was really one-hundred percent sure on that, or they simply didn’t want to tell Michel the truth.

Either way, that was how his mother and father became, well, his. People liked to assume, or those that knew the truth, that Michel must have some deep-rooted issues with his parents because he didn’t biologically belong to them.

Those people were idiots.