“It means enduring.”
“What about Romeo?”
“That one depends on your source. Some say it means passionate seducer.”
I laughed. “That’s appropriate.”
He tickled me, then playfully nipped at my collarbone. “Others say it just means pilgrim from Rome.”
“That’s not nearly as sensational. I say we stick with the first meaning.”
“Works for me, farfalla.”
“Dahlia for a girl or Dante for a boy. We seem to prefer D names,” I mused.
“Apparently,” he said, shutting his eyes again and sounding sleepy.
I became quiet then to allow my husband to rest, my mind swirling with the names Dante, Dahlia, and Emilia Rose.
26
Romeo
That next morning as I got up to get dressed, I studied my wife as she slumbered in our bed. A beam of sunlight illuminated a stripe along her bare chest and belly, which were currently partially covered by a white sheet. I realised I could make out the slightest of curves there, the rising bulge of our child. Lucia’s fragrant black hair lay mussed and spread out over her pillow like a halo, and her olive complexion glowed as she reclined there in repose. Sometimes, like now, I couldn’t believe just how much I loved this woman. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her, and I knew I’d spend the rest of my life proving that.
Brushing my lips to her forehead, I left without waking her.
When I proceeded into our headquarters, I found my father on a rampage.
“Two million dollars’ worth,” he spat at Marcello, who stood there taking my father’s barrage with his typical silent stoicism. I might’ve been tempted to backtrack out the door, but then, Angelo caught sight of me. “Why haven’t you been monitoring the deliveries more closely?”
“What happened?”
My father grabbed Marcello’s coffee mug out of his hand and flung it across the room, shattering it on the far wall. “Our drugs were confiscated by DEA agents in California. That’s what happened.”
Immediately, I sat at the computer console and pulled up the delivery schedules for our outgoing packages. While most packages showed finalized deliveries, the twenty separate shipments going out in the middle of the night the previous evening had apparently been intercepted. Considering we shipped much of our product using the good old United Postal Service, such an interception should be statistically unlikely if not impossible.
“Someone must’ve tipped the agents off. It’s the only rational explanation,” Marcello said in his deep voice. I agreed.
“Who?”
My father strutted up between my brother and me. “Fucking find out who,” he shouted into my face. He’d done it so vehemently, that I had to wipe his spittle from my face. Automatically, my hands clenched into fists. I’d never responded well to aggression, and it took everything I had to keep from punching my father right in his face. Kicking a rolling office chair on his way out, Angelo departed from the room.
“That was impressive,” Marcello commented, keeping his voice low.
“What was?” I imagined my blood pressure going through the roof.
“How you kept from cleaning his clock. The old coot deserved it, too. He knows it couldn’t have been your fault.”
“Since when has that ever stopped him,” I said, having been on the receiving end of Angelo’s temper too many times to count. He was the only one in the world I hadn’t retaliated against, and that was only because I’d learned early on antagonizing the patriarch wasn’t worth it. Savio chose that moment to skitter in, his youthful clean-shaven face a little pale. “You get an earful, too?”
“What bug crawled up his butt?”
“Two million dollars’ worth of bugs. A bunch of our shipments were taken by the DEA.”
“Seriously?”
I nodded, already tracing the locations of the packages to see the exact locations where the shipments were halted. Then, I ran the software program we used to hack into the DEA’s mainframe undetected. I didn’t like using it because there was always a risk, but we needed to know if we had a mole in our organization. Since such a thing couldn’t very well be an accident, we must.
I ran the program, waiting on tenterhooks to discover the results. In the meantime, I listened with one ear as Savio put forth one name after another as possible culprits.
“Diego?”
“He was raised in our household, and we’ve taken good care of him and his father. Why would he go turncoat?” Marcello, ever the voice of reason, asked our little brother.
“Okay, how about LeBrazio?”
“Our mechanic?” Marcello sounded incredulous. “He doesn’t know anything about the operation.
“Salvatore?”
“Our ninety-year-old barber?”
“All right, all right,” I broke in, tired of their distractions. “Quit yanking stupid theories from out of your ass and make yourselves useful. Savio, do a balance of the accounts and make sure everything’s up to date. Marcello, go connect with our contacts and see what you can learn. Maybe someone with their ear to the ground has heard something we don’t yet know.”
Yet hours later, all three of us came up empty-handed. My decryption software wasn’t finished, but what it’d brought up so far told us nothing. The offshore and legit accounts appeared untouched, and though Marcello had put feelers out, no one had responded with anything remotely useful.
Worst of all, we might have to halt shipments and lay low for a while until things settled back down, which meant our father’s tantrums would not be going away anytime soon. I stayed with the problem all day and half of the night, only to determine that we had no leads as to who it might be. The program had come up empty. So not only had we lost all those profits, since we didn’t know who’d been responsible for tipping off the feds, that same source could do it all over again without us being about to do anything about it.
At three in the morning, I remained in the headquarters, starving and my hip throbbing hard enough that I couldn’t stop rubbing it. I needed some food and sleep, but I knew my father wouldn’t allow me to regroup for long. Still, my eyes were shutting on their own, so I slipped into bed with Lucia, the tension in my body making the movement of laying down hurt. I’d just shifted back onto my pillow, twisting to get comfortable, when I felt something in my hip bone give way and I groaned.
Fuck, it was excruciating.
“Romeo?”
Great, now I’d awakened my wife. I attempted to shush her back to sleep despite the fact that it felt like someone was shoving an ice pick into my hip. “Shhh, farfalla. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
There was a gruffness in my voice I couldn’t hide, and since my luck had turned to shit, she detected it.
“Are you okay?”
Just peachy. No problem. “Yes.” It came out as a grunt.
“You don’t sound okay.”
“Lucia, just…” I snapped at her, then took a sharp inhale as the pain made me double over.
“You’re hurting. Badly.” I couldn’t deny it at this point. “It’s your hip, isn’t it?”