Dante’s hooded gaze blazed with love. “I always knew that.”
“Good. Press pause, yeah? I’ll be right back, and trust me, the only reason I’m opening the door is because she has a goddamn key.”
Sid rose from the bed and left the room, focussing on Anna to dull the fierce arousal burning up his insides. Wishing a boner away was the worst thing he’d ever had to do, but he had faith that it would come back, if not today then another.
He stomped to the front door and threw it open, an affectionate insult hovering in his throat, ready to burst free, but as the door hit the wall behind him, revealing a figure as tall as Sid but with eyes the same honeyed gold he saw in his sleep, he realised with a skipping heartbeat that it wasn’t his sibling on the doorstep.
It was someone else entirely.
26
“You didn’t have to come all the way here.” Dante eyed the side of his brother’s head, transfixed by the scar that made him sick to his stomach. “I’d have called you.”
Luis Pope turned to him, handsome face younger than Dante’s but his gaze somehow older. “No, you wouldn’t. And that’s okay. Most days I don’t want to talk to you.”
“What’s different about today?”
Luis crouched down and scooped a small rock from the water’s edge, the kind most people skimmed into the lake. But he didn’t throw it. He kept it in his palm, rubbing his thumb over the smooth edges, an anxious tic he’d carried since childhood that no one, save Dante, had likely ever noticed. “Everything’s different. What happened with Asa isn’t your fault.”
“Kind of is.” Dante leaned against Sid’s tree. “I made the original link with the Albanians. Without it, he’d have had nothing to worry about.”
“There’s always something to worry about on the road. You know that better than anyone. If it wasn’t the Albanians, it would’ve been something else. Besides, Asa chose that life as much as we did.”
“You didn’t.”
“Not true. I wanted it when we were kids with nothing else going for us. I wanted the money and the girls and the power. You never had to sell that shit to me.”
Dante put his ear against the trunk of the tree. Sid had told him mythical tales of whispering forests, but to him, the tree remained silent. “Forget Asa,” he said. “He’ll be long gone by now.”
He’d already given Luis a redacted version of eventsafterLuis had pressed a phone into his hands and implored him to call Rami at the probation service. “Is that why you came?”
Luis frowned. “Is what why I came?”
“To get me to call Rami. Isn’t it easier for you if I’m inside?”
Luis snorted, unfazed by the shift in subject. “And go through the last six months all over again next time you’re up for release? Fuck that.”
“Fuck what? I don’t understand.”
Luis sighed. “That’s what I can’t get used to. That you don’t know my every thought before I do, and that you just fucking ask me like a normal person.”
“I don’t feel normal.”
Luis stood from his crouch. He was still taller than Dante and meaner looking if you didn’t know him, but loving Paolo had gentled his jagged edges. He had kind eyes now, open and honest, and he was having trouble fixing them on Dante.
Dante gave him an out and turned his own gaze to the water. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”
“Like what?”
“Like find Asa and start beef with him.”
Luis laughed. “Uh, no. I went looking when I realised it was him that had been here, but I wouldn’t have fought him if I’d found him.”
“What would you have done?”
“What I’ve done with him a thousand times before. Talked to him. Martell was going to come with me, though I reckon his fella would’ve had something to say about it.”
“Yours didn’t?”