Page 98 of Dirty Pool

“I wouldn’t know,” Michel replied.

He wasn’t lying.

Not that it mattered.

The Irishman scoffed. “I doubt that. See yourself out, lad.”

Michel did.

But not before looking back to see Gabbie still staring at him. Now, though, her father was distracted by watching Michel leave his house.

She mouthed, “I love you.”

He only nodded.

Because yeah, he knew.

• • •

“Son, how’re things?”

Michel’s gaze drifted to the phone on the edge of the pool table. He’d put it on speaker simply because he didn’t want to talk at all, but that would be the first sign to his father that something was wrong. Once Dante found a bone to dig, he’d keep going until the entire skeleton was revealed under the dirt.

He was in just the right state lately—one of pure desperation—that he very well might spill his guts to his father about everything happening here in Detroit, and how this last year had fucked him straight up. Everything from the snakes running the Italian organization here to the Irish family that didn’t seem to give a single shit.

Michel didn’t understand how to fix this.

He also knew he couldn’t tell his father. Dante would have one, and only the one, goal where Michel and Detroit were concerned. It would be a simple one, too. Get Michel as far away from that city as possible. His father knew how this kind of thing worked, and there was no way Dante, even heading an organization as large as the Marcellos, would make his way here just to insert himself between the war of two families.

It wouldn’t happen.

Because Dante was smart.

Fuck.

Michel used to be smart once, too. Or he thought so, anyway. Last year, he’d been at the top of his class at the end of the final semester. Top five. And now, even his schooling was suffering because of the hell that was going on all around him. He couldn’t focus, and his grades showed it. Sleep was an evasive bitch, and his professors were pointing out his distraction more and more often.

He mostly ignored the issue of school simply because he knew at some point, he could fix that. If he needed to do a year over because things got to be too much, and he let his grades slide terribly, then that was fine. He didn’t like it, but he would do it.

School was something he could fix.

Gabbie being out of reach was not something that was as easily corrected. It had never been more apparent than now. He was dying. There had never been another time in his life when Michel felt so entirely useless.

“Are you coming home at the end of the month?”

Michel looked up from the shot he was prepping to take, and stared out the window of the bar. Heavy, white flakes drifted down in front of the glass, and he let out a sigh. December came before he even knew what happened—he’d spent almost a whole month in a daze that he couldn’t break free from no matter what he tried to do.

He stared at his phone.

No call from Gabbie.

He watched the news.

More violence from the Italians.

He went to school.

He thought about her.