SWNOVELS Dante: Chapter 3
He’s late as usual. It’s one of his many flaws that I despise. His tardiness is yet another one of his mind games.
“Would you like me to wait to serve dinner, sir?” Sophia asks.
I glance across the table at Maximo, who is chewing on a cocktail stick and drumming his fingers on the table. He’s not a patient man, especially when it comes to food, and I feel the annoyance in him crackling through the room.
“We’ll give him a few more minutes,” I say with a sigh.
“As you wish,” she says with a polite nod.
“Has our guest eaten yet?”
“I took her up some food at eight as you requested. She hasn’t left her room since.”
“Okay, good.” I dismiss her with a wave as my thoughts drift to Kat.
I wonder what she’s wearing and if she’s finally changed out of her cleaning uniform that’s too small for her curves. When she was packing her things at her house, I tried not to look at her underwear as she stuffed it into the bag, but there was definitely a pair of panties with tiny pink hearts all over them. She doesn’t seem like a hearts-on-her-panties kind of woman, but then she doesn’t seem like a woman who would quit her dream job to clean office blocks for twenty bucks an hour either.
Sophia comes hurrying back inside. “Your father is here, sir. Shall I put the steaks on now?”
“For the love of God, yes, please,” Maximo groans, but Sophia ignores him and keeps her eyes trained on me.
“Yes, please,” I tell her.
She hurries out again, surprisingly nimble for a sixty-seven-year-old woman with an arthritic hip. She should really retire, but whenever I suggest that, she looks at me like I’ve broken her heart and tells me she has nowhere else to go. We had two housekeepers when my brother and his wife lived here too, but that seems so long ago now. Regret gnaws at the pit of my stomach, or perhaps it’s just hunger.
My father’s incredibly loud voice reverberates around the hallway outside, signaling his arrival. With an inward groan, I brace myself for an evening in his company. He insists on us meeting for dinner once a month, framing his visits as an opportunity to see his favorite son, but we both know neither of those things are true.
When he walks into the room, he opens his arms as he approaches me. “mio figlio.” He smiles widely.
I fake one too and accept his embrace. He pats me on the back. “You lost a little weight, son?” he asks as he steps back a little, his eyes full of mock concern.
He has done this all my life. Preys on what he thinks are my insecurities. I was a scrawny kid until I hit fifteen and he reminded me of it every goddamn day of my life. But I’m not that kid anymore. I’m six-foot-four and two hundred and forty pounds. I train in my gym almost every day. I can bench press one and a half times my own body weight, and I spar with a former heavyweight champion. My suits are custom-made and they still fit me exactly the way they always have, but I’ve lost weight. Right?
“Pretty sure my weight’s the same as the last time you were here, Pop,” I reply.
“Hmm.” He arches a brow as though he doesn’t believe me. “And, Maximo. I might have known you’d be here,” he says it with a smile on his face, but his tone drips with disdain.
“Well, I never could resist a good steak, Sal,” Maximo replies with a well-practiced smile.
My father’s eye twitches as Maximo uses his name informally. He prefers his full title — Salvatore or Mr. Moretti, especially from the orphan he brought into his home, and who he believes owes him a debt. But even my father knows better than to challenge the loose cannon that is my right hand.
“Shall we?” I pull out a chair for him and we all sit at the table.
Maximo pours us all a glass of Chianti.
“So, how is business?” my father finally asks — his usual opener.
“Good.” My standard reply.
“You dealt with the business at the warehouse last week?”
“Yes.” There’s always business at the warehouse.
“And what about Leo Evanson? You got that money he stole from me?”
My insides twist into a knot. Here we go. Leo Evanson really fucked me over when he decided to enter the most lucrative poker game in Chicago. Not only because he cheated and walked away with a quarter of a million dollars that he didn’t earn, but also because one of the men sitting at that table was my father’s old buddy, Constantine.
Now, Constantine Benetti has been a gambling man for as long as I’ve known him. He’s one of the best poker players there is, however, his penchant for women half his age with expensive tastes in shoes, handbags, and cocaine means he spends it faster than he can win it. So, when the big games happen once a month at one of our clubs, my father bankrolls Benetti and takes half of his winnings. So the money that he stole, really belongs to my father — and therein lies my problem.
My father doesn’t need the money. It’s pocket change to him, but he doesn’t need his old friend thinking that he’s incapable of getting their money back from a street punk like Leo Evanson.
Their whole arrangement was under the table of course. Nobody knew about it and Benetti’s ego and my father’s paranoia ensured it stayed that way, until now. Now every fucker knows that Leo stole from the Morettis and he is running for his life.
“Leo took off. No one knows where he is.”
“What about the sister? You looked into her, right?”
I sense Maximo’s eyes on me.
“Yeah. He was staying with her, but he bailed. Took her savings too.”
“So, does she know where he is? Have any leads to chase?”
I shake my head and sip my wine. “She didn’t know anything.”
My father frowns at me. “She must have known something.”
“No,” I say firmly, trying to keep the annoyance from my tone.
“How hard did you push her to talk?” He looks at Maximo now because that’s his particular area of expertise.
“Enough,” I reply on his behalf.
“She dead?” he asks nonchalantly as he drinks his wine.
“No.”
“You get any money from her at least?” he asks with a sigh.
“She doesn’t have any.”
That seems to be the final straw, and he turns to face me. “So, you got nothing? That fuck steals a quarter of a million dollars from me and you got nothing? Are you losing your touch, ragazzo?”
My knuckles turn white as I clench my hands.
Maximo catches my eye across the table and gives a subtle shake of his head. My relationship with my father is complex and bound up in so much guilt and regret and anger that communicating with him in any way feels too damn difficult. So I keep it all locked away and deal with him as little as humanly possible, because if I were to ever lift that lid and let some of this rage out of me, I might just fucking kill him where he stands. And despite who I am, killing my own father — the great Salvatore Moretti — is not high on my list of priorities. I force my muscles to relax, curling my fingers around the delicate stem of my wineglass before I take a sip.
“Not nothing. I have his sister,” I say calmly.
He blinks at me, amused. “You have her?”
“Yes.”
“Where? Are you using her as bait?”
“I don’t think he’d take that bait. He doesn’t give a fuck about her,” I say, annoyance prickling beneath my skin again. But this time, it’s directed at Kat’s brother.
“So, what then? You taking your pound of flesh?” he asks with a sly grin, and my stomach churns as I think about the things this man has done. Nothing would make him happier than me telling him I had Kat chained in the basement downstairs where I could torture her or use her for whatever pleasure I wanted to take. That is the kind of man he’d be proud of.
“No. She’s working for me,” I grit out as I await the inevitable disdain that’s about to spew from his mouth.
“Working for you?” he snorts. “As what? Your personal whore? You’re Dante Moretti, you don’t pay women for that, mio figlio. It’s beneath men like us.”
“No, we just fuck them anyway, right? Regardless of who they are and whether they want it?”
“She’s a nurse,” Maximo interrupts our heated exchange, and my father’s gaze shifts to him instead.
“A what?”
“A nurse. She can remove bullets. Stitch wounds. Help a man live after he’s been tortured for days. Stop him bleeding out too soon,” Maximo says with a shrug.
“So, she’s your little pet?” my father asks with a scowl.
“Maybe I’ll train her to be my assistant?” Maximo laughs darkly, and that seems to appease my father a little.
“And what about my money? What about that piece of shit who stole it?”
“We’ll find him,” I assure him.
“Just make sure you do,” he hisses. “Because it makes you look weak when you bring home strays instead of putting them down.”
“Weak?” I snarl at him. “Who are you to call anyone weak? The man who let his wife die alone in agony because he was too busy fucking his whore?”
“Watch your goddamn mouth. I should have known you wouldn’t be able to handle this responsibility. I should have let Lorenzo…” He shakes his head, and a whisper of regret flickers over his face.
I think that must be the only thing in his whole life he feels any regret over. He made me head of the Cosa Nostra to punish my older brother and to drive a wedge between us that could never be healed. Lorenzo and I were unbreakable when we stood together, and he hated that. He thought the threat of losing his legacy would be enough to bring my older brother back to his side.
But his plan backfired in every possible way and Lorenzo has barely spoken to him ever since. While I never wanted this legacy, it’s mine now. For the first few years after he retired, I was so desperate to prove myself that I killed and tortured anyone who even dared to look at me the wrong way. Maximo and I tore through Chicago, leaving a trail of bodies in our wake that would rival the bubonic plague. And that was the side of me that my father admired. A part of me craved his approval until I realized I no longer needed it. And now time and experience have taught me there’s a better way to do business than the one he showed me.
“Whatever you wish you’d done, Papá, it’s too late now. You made me the head of this family, so you will hold your tongue before you ever dare to call me weak again.”
He narrows his eyes at me, and his face softens a little. “You are so much like your mother. She was a good woman. But you can’t be both — a good man and the head of this family. Those two things are mutually exclusive. You cannot be one if you are the other.”
He has drilled this into me from the moment he handed over his mantel to me. “I am not trying to be a good man, Papá.”
“No, but it’s inside you anyway. You have to suppress that part of yourself to be the man you are. For Lorenzo, it comes easily to him. He got none of your mother’s compassion.”
I shake my head and sigh. “How can you be our father and yet know so little about either of us?”
He frowns like he has no idea what I’m talking about. And before the conversation can continue, Sophia walks into the room with dinner.
The atmosphere remained awkward and we made limited, stilted conversation throughout dinner. My father eventually left and now I feel like I can breathe again as Maximo and I nurse a glass of Scotch in my study.
“You need to stop letting him get to you, D,” he says as he takes a sip of his whisky. “He rattles your cage like no one else can.”
I scowl at him. “Is that really surprising, Max?”
“No. But unless you’re ever going to confront him about everything you know, you need to find a way to not want to rip his head off every time you see him. It’s been six years.”
“I can’t confront him. You know I can’t,” I snap at him.
“Yeah,” he adds with a nod of his head.
“Anyway, it’s more than just that. It’s everything else,” I say with a heavy sigh. “He’s… a lot.”
“I get it, D. He’s the great Salvatore Moretti.” He smirks at me, and it breaks the tension.
My shoulders relax, and I sink back into my chair, letting my head fall back to ease the dull ache between my shoulder blades.
“You seen your guest since this afternoon?” he asks.
“No. I don’t think she’s left that room all day.”
“Maybe she’s plotting your demise?” He chuckles darkly.
“Maybe,” I laugh too, thankful for the change of subject. Kat Evanson is a much less frustrating subject to talk about. She makes my blood pressure spike for an entirely different reason.
“Any thoughts on what she’s gonna do around here?”
“Not yet. I’m working on it.”
“Well, I’d work fast because if she has too much time on her hands, she’ll be able to think of really cool ways to kill you. You might wake up one morning, step out of bed and” — he signals his hand slicing across his throat — “straight into a booby trap that slices your head clean off.”
“You been watching Indiana Jones again?”
“It’s a classic,” he says with a shrug before he downs his whisky. “Anyway, I gotta go. I want to stop by and see Fred and make sure they’re not running into any more trouble.”
Alfredo Farina has worked for me for six years, and he runs the warehouses for me. We own enough legitimate businesses to justify the lifestyles we live and to keep the IRS off our backs. However, if anything illegal comes into this city, then it goes through me and I take a percentage. In addition, we take a cut from the casinos and the strip clubs in return for our protection. It’s a lucrative business, but one that people always want a piece of.
“They had more trouble?” I ask with a frown.
“Nothing serious.” Maximo shakes his head. “They dealt with it, but Fred thinks there’s something going on. The Russians have been a little too quiet like maybe they’re moving operations elsewhere to keep us out of the loop.”
I scrub a hand through my beard. I don’t trust my Russian counterpart. Never have. But he had an alliance with my father, so we have an uneasy truce.
“While things are quiet, I don’t want to start a war for no reason, Max. Tell Fred to keep his eyes open and keep us informed.”
“Will do, D,” he says before disappearing out of the door and leaving me alone to go over the events of the day.
My father’s reaction wasn’t entirely unexpected, even if it did seem a little over the top. Mostly I think about Kat and the fact that she is lying alone in one of my beds upstairs. I brought her here to work off her brother’s debt, right? So why can’t I get the image of me crawling over her and spreading her thighs wide open until I can sink inside her out of my head?