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.”
3.
Alessio
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.
And Cree, another high-ranking member of The League.
Alessio was never sure when they found him after his mother’s death, because the days passed by in a confusing blur that he’d rather not revisit, but they were a saving grace for him if there ever was one. Dare, having known Alessio’s mother before Maximo, took him in.
For all purposes, Dare was his family.
The League, his home.
Here, he struggled more. Here, he learned to be something and someone. Behind these walls, he was given a purpose and stability. He was not the forgotten bastard son of a man who he didn’t remember, or the child of an addict who died not knowing her son would be the one to find her cold on the floor the next morning.
Here, he was better.
At seventeen, almost eighteen now, Alessio spent much of his life feeling as though he didn’t belong to any one person or place. Until Dare, Cree, and The League. He held this place so close to that thing in his chest that people called a heart, no one would ever understand. If someone thought to fuck with it, he was going to rip them apart.
And so, it pissed Alessio off to see some privileged prick like Corrado Guzzi walking around the place with a curious eye like he had any business being there in the first place. Sure, Dare was smart enough to explain to Alessio the week before the Guzzis arrival that Gian would be visiting to check out the new complex, with two of his five sons, but it hadn’t bothered him until he saw one of those sons in that training room.
One of many training rooms here, really.
People didn’t get an inside look at The League. If someone was brought in, it was because they were a client using one of the assassins for a job, or it was a prospect who had signed on to be trained.
No one was allowed here.
It was his home.
Except, there came the fucking Guzzis like they owned the place, and that just rubbed him all kinds of wrong. But especially Corrado—who thought to speak to Alessio like the two were on equal footing in some kind of way. Like he wasn’t any different from him.
They were not at all the same.
He doubted a rich, spoiled mafia principe like Corrado had ever understood struggle, and The League certainly wasn’t a place made for someone like him. They weren’t here to coddle men and women—they were here to break them.
So yeah, the guy just rubbed him wrong.
The other thing pissing him off currently?
The fact he found Corrado attractive, and that he might like the guy even more if he could shut him the fuck up by either kissing him, or stuffing something in his mouth. Like maybe his cock ...
“Are we even supposed to be in here doing this?” Corrado asked from inside the boxing ring.
Alessio made a harsh noise under his breath—the only sign of his irritation, really. He suspected Corrado believed it was because he questioned Alessio’s choice to have them spar for fun in the gym section of the complex, but that wasn’t it at all.
It was that he’d interrupted a nice picture.
He wasn’t about to admit that out loud, though. Thing was, just because he felt attraction to someone didn’t mean they felt the same way. Sometimes, it was obvious, and he could tell when a guy liked one thing or the other—or both. Maybe it was the way a guy would look him over, or when a hand on his shoulder lingered a beat longer than a straight guy would when it came to friendly actions. But with Corrado, he didn’t know.
It was fucked up.
He hated him on sight.
And he didn’t hate him at the same time.
It didn’t help that Corrado was attractive in a way most men weren’t. Something that Alessio recognized about him straight away—an air of confidence and cockiness followed him around whether he knew it or not. Like he’d been born with it. Most people had to learn that shit. And that was before Alessio got too detailed in Corrado’s physical features, from the strong lines of his face that made up an angular jaw line, to the dark brown eyes that didn’t seem to give anything away, not even when he smirked.
Classically handsome.
Disgustingly so, really.
Add that to the whole confidence shit and Alessio had a big problem here. Mostly, the fact that he noticed at all.
Dare was always clear when it came to Alessio and relationships or sex. As long as it didn’t fuck up The League and the shit they were doing here, he was free to explore and do what he wanted. He couldn’t remember how old he was when he figured out he liked boys as much as he liked girls—nine, maybe?
He was lucky that he didn’t find confusion or pain in his sexuality swinging both ways like he knew some did when they realized they were bisexual. Here, he had been free to explore and find out what it meant to be a sexual being with varied interests. No one ever stepped in to shame him as long as it was consensual, and he was being safe. That was all Dare ever cared about when it came to Alessio.