“Are you supposed to be in this area?” he asked, taking a little drag of the cigarette, watching her cute nose wrinkle.
“I’m hiding from my friend,” she told him, her eyes drifting to the ground. “I think I should go now. Bye.”
Surprised at the abrupt change, Dante threw his smoke to the ground. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up, squirt.”
She whirled around, her ponytail hitting his chest, her eyes blazing with more fire than her little body was capable of. “Stop calling me that!”
Amused, Dante bowed his head slightly as he would to a lady. “My apologies, queen.”
She liked that, he could tell.
“How old are you?” he asked, curious, trying to place her.
“How old are you?” she fired back.
Dante grinned. “Sixteen.”
“I’m eleven,” she declared proudly. “It was my birthday last month. I told my ma to send some of my birthday cake to you.”
Dante suddenly realized who she was – their housekeeper’s daughter. They had the same green eyes. He didn’t know their housekeeper’s name, but he had started calling her Zia after she’d started feeding him home-made cookies. While he didn’t talk much to Zia, he lived for those sweet treats. His mother hadn’t cooked much either, so Zia’s desserts were something he’d started to cherish. He looked forward to having them all the time. And she was such a nice woman. Dante liked her.
The young girl, her daughter, was too far from the staff quarters. She’d be in too much trouble if his father, or worse his uncle, saw her there.
“You should go,” he nodded to where she’d come from, not wanting her or her mother in the crosshairs of anyone at the mansion.
The girl blinked once, before giving him a little smile, almost shy. “You have really pretty eyes,” she told him. Before he could respond, she turned away and ran down the hill, back to the staff wing.
‘You have the prettiest eyes, Dante. Be careful with them.’
His mother’s words came back to him, the only person before this girl to have told him so. His memory filled with her beautiful but sad brown eyes. Running his hand through his hair, he bent down, picking up the half-smoked cigarette, put it to his lips, and lighted it again. Exhaling through his broken nose hurt like a bitch, but he welcomed the pain, looking down towards the lake and the cottage beside it.
He’d never thought he’d find anyone on this planet who hated his father more than him – until Tristan. Though just fourteen, the younger boy would one day pull the trigger on the old man, and Dante would happily give him the gun. He just had to bide his time, until he was ready, until the world was ready.
“You have to make a run to the city tomorrow.”
Speak of the devil.
Dante ignored him.
Suddenly, his father came before him, his voice agitated, “What’s all this blood? Did someone hit you?”
Dante didn’t turn as his father’s voice thundered through the grounds on the last word. The power play had begun. His father would flex his muscles, remind everyone who had authority there, just in case anyone could forget the suffocating fact, and everyone would go to their stations a little more fearful of Lorenzo Maroni.
Flicking the ashes to the ground, Dante stayed silent, continuing to smoke.
“Don’t you dare ignore me, boy. Did someone hit you?”
“It’s nothing,” Dante stated. But it was useless. His father wasn’t hearing him.
He shouted, calling to Al, his right-hand man, commanding everyone on the compound to gather on the ground.
Dante gritted his teeth, trying to watch the gorgeous sunset as minutes passed and people nervously gathered, silent but stinking of fear. That’s how his father ruled – fear. And the only way to piss him off was to not react to it.
Finally throwing the cigarette on the ground, Dante crushed it under his shoe, his eyes glancing over the crowd. He spotted Zia holding her daughter, the young girl with the green eyes who had just told him he had pretty eyes. She was watching not his father but him. He gave her a little wink, watching her flush and quickly look away, and he wanted to laugh in the middle of the shitshow. Moving his eyes over the group, he saw Tristan standing at the far side, slightly removed from everyone else, a blank expression on his face. If he thought Dante was going to rat him out, he had another thought coming.
“Who hit my son?” his father barked. He paused for dramatic effect, his eyes going over the gathering. When no one responded and looked adequately fearful, his father continued his tirade. “Who dare hit my heir? A Maroni! Tell me now or you will be punished. Tell me who did this. Attacking a Maroni on this compound is the biggest insult to me.”
Nervous glances were exchanged. Hushed whispers rolled over. The sun slowly set.
“You stand on my land, and insult my blood,” his father went on. “Tell me now, or the consequences will be severe for everyone.”
A movement from the side drew everyone’s eyes. Dante watched, surprised, as Tristan stepped out from the gathering, his eyes steady on Bloodhound.
“You,” his father sputtered, marching up to Tristan. “You did this? You disgraceful little bastard. I own you. Everything you do here, I control. You cannot-”
Dante saw, adrenaline pouring in this system, as a young boy inches shorter than his father, stepped right into his face, nothing in his expression, and uttered his first words in public.
“You ever try to leash me, I’ll fucking strangle you with it.”
If angels could sing, that was the moment Dante heard the whole freaking choir.
Someone in the crowd gasped but Dante kept his eyes on Tristan. He had been right to trust his gut when it came to him. The younger boy stared his father down for a second, before turning on his heel and walking away without another word, leaving behind a speechless, seething Lorenzo Maroni.
Oh, this was going to be good.
Tristan had just sealed his fate.
Dante grinned. They were going to be buddies if it killed him.
Amara had a problem and his name was Dante Maroni.
It was official.
It was done.
And she was absolutely miserable. Why? Because while he knew vaguely of her existence, she was nowhere, absolutely nowhere on his radar. And she? She had a crush the size of Antarctica but hotter. Way hotter. And she tried to stop. Really stop. But her heart was like a rubber-band where he was concerned. The more she pulled away mentally, the harder she felt the tug to go back to her original place.
It was all wrong. He was already eighteen-years-old, a fact that everyone in the entire city, the entire country, the entire underworld knew because him becoming an adult was a very big deal to a lot of people – some who wanted to back him, some who wanted to cut him. Dante already had enemies. How did Amara know all this already? She paid attention. It was amazing how much people tended to talk around the help without once realizing they were people with ears instead of moving furniture.
Amara wasn’t really an employee of the Maronis, but she liked to help her ma out after school and on weekends. She used to spend that time with Vin but since he started training, his schedule and hers stopped matching. They did catch up every other day though. He had recently hit his growth spurt while Amara had barely moved an inch up.