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I ROLLED MY SHOULDERS back, took a deep breath, and eyed myself in the bathroom mirror.
I was ready for this. Ready for anything they threw at me. I knew Mauro was going to hit me with a whole lot of questions, and I had to be ready to deal with them. I wanted to prove to him that I could handle everything that had been going on with Nadia just as well as I could everything happening in New York, and I wasn’t about to let anyone tell me any differently.
Speaking of Nadia. I knew she was due in New York soon, and I couldn’t wait to see her – I had texted her late last night with the details of the tickets I had gotten for her and her father, and I was sure that she had just been too busy to shoot off a reply yet. They were uprooting their lives again, after all, and the least I could do was give them a little time to work that all out.
Mauro had insisted on meeting with me as soon as I got back to the city, and I knew there was no way that I could blow him off. He was already starting to get pissed that I had been spending as much time with Nadia as I had, and the last thing I needed was for the one guy who was irrevocably on my side to turn against me and get annoyed at everything happening in my life.
But damn, I missed her already, and I was sure that much would be obvious from the moment Mauro set eyes on me. He knew me well enough to be able to guess what was going on in my head at any given time, and I had no intention at all of letting that get away from me. I needed to keep my cards close to my chest – I didn’t want him interfering with what I had going with Nadia. That was my shit, and I was going to keep it that way.
He had sounded pretty urgent on the phone, and I waited in my office back at my apartment for him to arrive. I was sure he’d be panicked about my absence. He didn’t like it when I was out of town, especially not when tensions were running as high as they were right now – there was far too much of a chance that someone would look at me missing and think that it was their chance to make a move, and with the Serbs so ready to strike, he might have had good reason to worry.
I was just hoping that our promise of a meeting would keep this uneasy alliance in place for as long as it took for me to get Nadia home and safe again. I just wanted to know that she was back in New York, back where she belonged, and I would be able to keep her safe from anything that they might have wanted to throw at her.
At the back of my mind, there was this nagging thought, though – a reminder that, if I had just let go of her for good, then she might have been safer than if I had stuck around. People were only out for her because they were sure she had something to do with me, and I hadn’t done much to dissuade them of that. Wouldn’t it be safer if I just cut her out entirely...?
But then I thought back to the time we had spent together in Miami, and I knew that I couldn’t do it, no matter how much sense it would have made, no matter how much safer she would have been. I needed her. And yes, that was selfish, but I was pretty sure she needed me, too. She had spent all that time with me when I was down in Miami, and it seemed clear she wasn’t willing to call this quits, either. She wanted me. I wanted her. We just had to work out how to balance that with everything else going on right now.
There was a knock at the door, and Mauro opened it before I had a chance to call out to him. His mouth was set into a hard line, and I was certain that he wasn’t going to have any good news for me.
“What’s up?” I asked, gesturing for him to take a seat opposite me. He leaned on the door, not moving.
“Something’s going on.”
“What, exactly?” I pressed. I wasn’t in the mood to coax out any of this stuff from him, I wanted him to be straight-up and just tell me what was happening.
“I’m not sure yet,” he explained, furrowing his brow. “But I’ve heard people talking – sounds like the feds are poking around in our side of the city. I don’t like it. Not one bit.”
“There’s nothing to find, is there?” I pointed out. “Everything’s legit now—”
“Yeah, but they’re coming to find out what happened with the Serbs,” he explained. “With the fire. And if they find out that you’ve been having meetings with them...”
He trailed off, leaving it hanging in the air. He didn’t need to say much more than he already had. I grimaced.
“So what do we do about it?” I asked. We had that meeting this week, and I knew if we pulled out, the Serbs would come out swinging for us. But if we went, then it might have been even worse. The feds could get involved, and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to keep them out of the equation if they came looking.
“I’m not sure yet,” Mauro replied, shaking his head. He looked genuinely concerned, and it freaked me out. He was normally the one who had it all under control, and it worried me that this was clearly going a little too far even for him to get a handle on.
I sat down at my desk – I knew that we had to come up with something, something that we could use to deflect their attention, but they would be keeping an eye out for us doing anything out of the ordinary. They knew who my father was, after all, and I had no doubt that they would be using that to profile me – to prove to themselves that they could expose me for something.
“Maybe we could reach out them—”
“We don’t contact them unless they come to us for something,” Mauro corrected me sharply. “We’ve filed for an insurance claim like any other normal business. Hopefully, they just drop it there and lose interest. That’s what we need to push for.”
I leaned back in my seat. It didn’t sound good enough, just hoping for something, but I was sure that he wouldn’t have been dancing around the point if he had one to make.
“And what do we do in the meantime?”
“We find a new club to invest in,” he replied. “Pick up somewhere new, keep the focus on taking the business legit. That’s where we need to put our energy.”
I paused for a moment, as something occurred to me. I was sure that Mauro was going to shoot it down, but I was willing to try.
“What if we went for a place in Serbian territory?”
“What?” He scoffed. I lifted my hand, imploring him to give me a moment to explain myself.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it could be a good way to consolidate things with the Serbs,” I explained. “Kozlov would have reason to look out for us then, since he doesn’t want any shit on his doorstep. We find a place there, turn it into our club, and we make sure that they can never work against us without risking some part of their own territory in the process.”
Mauro tapped his finger on his chin. I knew it was a long shot, but we had to try something, didn’t we? Something that would connect us for good, something that would allow us to put the tensions between us to rest once and for all.
Slowly, he nodded.
“I see where you’re coming from,” he murmured, and I could see him starting to soften in front of me. I knew that he was still pissed at me for running off to Miami when he felt like he needed me back in New York, but if I could come up with something that would work in our favor, he would be more willing to forgive me.
“We could bring it up with Kozlov this week at the meeting,” I suggested. “Start moving on the whole thing, you know?”
“Yeah, that sounds smart,” he agreed. I felt my shoulders start to unclench – I needed Mauro on my side, more than anyone else right now. He was the one who would guide me in the right direction, he was the one who would make sure I didn’t make a mess of my father’s legacy in some unfixable way. I had to trust him on that, and I intended to. He had been guiding me my whole life, and I needed to keep it that way.
Just because Nadia was in my life now didn’t mean that I had to forget everything else that I had been through.
Mauro and I finished up our meeting, and I checked my phone as I walked him to the door. There was still nothing from Nadia, even though her flight was meant to be leaving soon, and it was starting to worry me.
“The girl?” Mauro asked. He knew who I was worried about, he knew that it was always her. I nodded.
“Yeah...”
“She’ll be all right,” he told me briskly. That was the most that I was going to get out of him on the matter – it was obvious he didn’t want to spend too much of our time thinking about her, but he had no idea how important she was to me. How quickly she had wormed her way into my heart, and how much I wanted her back here and safe.
“I know,” I replied at once. I believed it. She would get on the plane and she would come back and we would be back together again, and that was all I was focused on. As soon as she was back, we could start working out everything that was going on between us. Maybe I could even convince her to stay with me in my place for a while, as I got everything sorted out.
Mauro headed out, and I returned to my phone, wondering if I should give her a call – but I had no idea what I would say, and I had learned that she didn’t exactly take kindly to being disturbed when she wasn’t expecting it. She would reach out to me when she was ready, and I would be there when she did.
Right now, I needed to stay focused on everything that was to come – everything with my father’s business. I was doing this all for him, really, and I never wanted to let him down, to do anything that might have harmed the powerful image he had left behind.
I wondered what he would have thought of me spending all this time focused on a woman. Wondered if he’d ever found himself involved with someone who had made everything he had worked so hard for take a back seat. I had never known him with any specific girl, but I was sure that there had been a few over the years. Maybe I could ask Mauro about it.
For now, though, I just had to wait on the return of the woman that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Once she had made it back to New York in one piece along with her father, I could go back to focusing on what mattered, what Mauro had laid in front of me.
Who was I kidding? When she was here, she was going to be an even bigger distraction than she had been down in Miami. But at least I could distract myself with her in person, instead of having to stick to the version of her inside my head.
