“Want to try?” Alessio asked, holding out the knife for Corrado to take.
He didn’t move.
His body hurt too much.
“What happens now?”
Alessio arched a brow. “Phase two.”
“What is—”
“Recovery for a short bit, then the tests begin to find where you excel the most, so they can focus, and hone your skills.”
“Well, all right.”
What could he say to that?
“Corrado.”
He looked up, meeting Alessio’s gaze across the room. “Yeah?”
“You did well.”
“I feel like death.”
Alessio grinned. “You look like it, too.”
He cleared his throat. “I spent my eighteenth birthday in those rooms.”
Silence coated the space between the two of them. Not for long, though.
“I spent mine watching you,” Alessio returned.
“Oh.”
Alessio offered the knife again. “You’re probably too weak, but you can try, if you want.”
“I thought rich hands weren’t meant to touch those, only pay someone else to do it.”
“I can be wrong sometimes.”
“Can you?”
Alessio gave him a look.
“Can you really?” Corrado pressed.
“Don’t get used to it,” Alessio told him.
Corrado smiled. “Good to know.”
9.
Alessio
“I know what you said. Eighteen, Dare.”
The current source of Alessio’s irritation—although if he were being an honest man, he had a lot of those annoyances lately—didn’t turn away from the electronic map that covered the touchscreen on his office wall. He waved a hand over his shoulder, like Alessio was a fly he was trying to bat away.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Annoying, isn’t it?” Dare returned. “You do the same thing to literally everyone else, Les. If you don’t like when people ignore you, perhaps you should attempt to stop doing it to us. You’re beyond the annoying stage where I can use your age as an excuse for your bad fucking attitude. Besides, what I need more than you out on an assignment is for you to listen.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t all get what we want.”
“Keep thinking that way, and see where it gets you.”
Alessio glared at the back of Dare’s head, willing the man to combust right on the spot. Sometimes, it was the little things that inspired the worst kinds of reactions in him. This was certainly one of those things.
Again, if he were being honest, there were many.
This was a big one, though.
“I went through all that training for you to keep me—”
“I have several job offers on the table right now,” Dare interjected, still seemingly unwilling to turn around and face Alessio in the doorway. “And while some will go to others, because they have the specific skills for those assignments, I am deciding which one might be best for you. I don’t take every job that comes in from clients who don’t have a contract with a specific League member, and a lot of these are exactly that.”
“So, I’ll have an assignment soon, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Fuck.
Frustration slipped through Alessio’s bloodstream, heavy and thick. Like every other conversation he tried to have with Dare, he suspected this one was going to end the same exact way as it always did. Dare talking him in circles, Alessio getting pissed, and after he’d walked away, he would realize he didn’t get shit that he wanted.
“I want an assignment,” Alessio said.
“And you will get one when you are ready for one.”
“I’m ready now!”
Dare pointed at the map he’d been surveying since the moment Alessio came to his office. “That’s a mountain range there—do you think a complex within a mountain would be a possibility? A back up, we’ll call it. Just in case something happened, and I needed to move out the main area of operation for safety reasons.”
“I ... what?”
“A complex inside a mountain range.”
“What does that have anything to do with the fact I want to go out on an assignment?” Alessio demanded.
Dare glanced over his shoulder, his brow furrowing. “Oh, I thought you realized I was done with that conversation. So, if you don’t want to indulge these new plans of mine, you don’t need to keep standing there.”
Alessio balked.
It took him entirely too long to come up with a suitable response to that, and it wasn’t nearly as insulting as he wanted it to be. Shame, really.
“You’re impossible,” he snapped at Dare.
“But am I really, though?”
“Yes.”
“And you wonder where you get it from, no?”
The two of them stared at one another for a spread of time, neither of them moving an inch or giving a damn inch. Finally, Alessio’s irritation spilled over as he made a disgusted noise under his breath and turned to leave the office.
At his back, Dare called, “And don’t bother the trainees today, Les, they need to focus.”
“I want an assignment!”
“Soon.”
Yeah, right.
To Dare, that could mean months.
Fuck it.
He’d go to Cree.
• • •
Prospects for The League were given one week to recover after phase one before phase two began in full force. A single week with whatever medical care they needed, all the rest that would put them mostly back on their feet again, and then it was back to business as normal.
If intensive, seven-day-a-week training was normal.
The prospects were shoved from one thing to the next—tested on every skill The League could throw at them within a few weeks, and once they figured out where someone really excelled, then that’s where they started to focus.
For himself, it had been weapons.
Knives, guns, and more.
Any weapon they put in his hands, he could use. And he could probably use it in several different ways to kill someone, if that was the need. He could also make a weapon out of just about anything because to him, everything was dangerous enough to kill. He just needed to figure out he wanted to do it.
Corrado and Chris were still in their second week of skill testing. Which was why he wasn’t very surprised to find Cree hanging a few steps back from the mats set out on the gym floor where the twins were currently working with a League member who excelled in weapons, and specifically, fighting with weapons.
“What do you need?” Cree asked before Alessio had even spoke behind him.
He sighed. “I hate when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Know where I am.”
“Yes, it’s a terrible thing that I concern myself with your whereabouts so that I can make sure you’re not finding some trouble when I’m not looking.”
Just like Dare.
Alessio decided he wasn’t falling down this rabbit hole again today. He’d done that already with Dare, and he wasn’t doing it with Cree. It would end worse than the first time, that was a fucking guarantee. Cree was even less likely to take his shit.