Page 178 of Alessio

He hadn’t.

“Do you want to get your ass kicked?” Corrado asked. “Because that’s what’ll happen if we spar.”

The man laughed.

And all Corrado could think was that he looked fucking amazing doing it. That smirk on his face? Entirely bad for him given the way his chest tightened at the sight of it.

Oh, yeah.

He was in a lot of trouble here.

It all started and ended with Alessio.

He knew it by the annoyance still trickling through his bloodstream, but also the humming that continued to buzz over his skin. A part of him wanted to tell his guy to fuck off somewhere, and another part wanted to find out all he could about him. He had a feeling the more he learned about Alessio, the less annoyed Corrado would feel, and the more interesting the man would become.

All it took were a few words, and blue eyes. Something about Alessio Sorrento drew Corrado in and made every single one of his nerves turn on in a good and bad way. He wanted to run away as much as he wanted to stay right there and do it all over again.

Was this what the priest meant?

Was this koi no yokan?

Because it felt like something.

It felt like change.

It felt important.

Well, fuck that noise.

Corrado didn’t like it at all.

“Guess we’ll see what you can do, principe,” Alessio said, grinning just enough to show off his white teeth. “Or, I’ll have a lot of fun watching you try.”

By the age of ten, Alessio had learned the most important lesson he figured life had to teach him. It wasn’t an easy one, or even nice. Very little about life was easy or nice, though. That lesson was simple, too.

Blood didn’t always make family.

When he was two, his father died from a heart attack. A man he never really remembered, and only vaguely knew from the stories of others. Maximo Sorrento—mafia Don to a Cosa Nostra faction controlling Vegas, who also seemed to have a taste for women who were a fraction of his age. Like Alessio’s mother, Elizabeth.

His father dying wasn’t the memory that stood out to him the most, but rather how everyone else treated his mother, the man’s mistress, after the fact. She’d lived comfortably, Alessio had been told, cared for and kept because she was a favorite of Maximo’s, and she had given him a son, even if the boy was illegitimate.

Then, he was no more.

No, Alessio didn’t remember his father dying, and he didn’t have many feelings about it, but he vividly recalled the years that followed the death. Like how his mother spiraled, her young life wasted with every pill she popped, and every needle she put into her veins. Empty bottles littering the floor and the faint smell of old cigarette smoke accompanied Alessio’s dreams every time he closed his eyes.

That was how he remembered his mother.

And that he never mattered to her.

Whether it was because she was so entirely heartbroken that she had lost Maximo, despite the fact he was three times her age, or because she had lost her status and importance without him there to give it to her … she forgot about Alessio in the process.

He was ten when his mother overdosed.

Ten when he buried her.

Yet, it felt like he’d been in the process of burying her for years before that. Life had a funny way of reminding the forgotten and the neglected at the worst of times that they weren’t worth very much to the people who weren’t faced with their struggle every single day. That had never been more apparent to Alessio than after his mother’s death.

That was when Dare came in.