Page 336 of John + Siena: The Complete Duet

“I don’t play, John.”

Well …

“Yeah, that’s fair,” John replied. “You’re still welcome to join me, though.”

Michel made a noise under his breath. “Probably will. I have nothing better to do.”

Exactly as I thought.

John didn’t say that out loud, however.

“Careful with that,” Andino decided to speak up. Once again sharing a warning he’d already said more than a dozen times to Michel and John since the two started doing business together after he took over the Marcello faction. “You start stepping into a famiglia, Michel, and people might think you want to stay there. Don’t get your place confused unless you’re ready to change it in this business, you know?”

Michel passed John a look.

He said nothing to his cousin.

Shit, he’d been telling Michel this for a while, too. After years of saying he didn’t want to be a made man, it seemed Michel did find something he enjoyed doing in the mafia. That just happened to be running interference between people or showing up in places where John didn’t want to be when the time called for it.

A lot like a consigliere.

Did it mean something?

Maybe.

“We got time to figure it all out,” John said, standing from the table, “but I need to leave, or I’m going to be more than late. You coming?”

Michel nodded at the question, also standing.

Pink stayed sitting.

This time.

Another meeting or situation, and he probably would have got up and went with John, too.

“If you’d just pick an underboss and consigliere from the family,” Andino murmured, picking up his own coffee after letting it cool for most of their breakfast like he usually did, “then you wouldn’t need Pink and Michel to be your go-between, man.”

John gave Andino a look. “It’s handled. It always is.”

“Right. That’s what you keep saying.”

“Because that’s what it is, Andi.”

And that’s how it would stay.

John would make sure of it.