Page 65 of The Contract

His hands plant on his hips, parting his open jacket and revealing the heirloom watch chain. I’d like to wrap it around his neck.

He looks down his nose at me and says coolly, “I’ve ignored your disrespect of me. I’ve helped you all I can—”

“How have youhelpedme?” Above the desk, I say calm. Under it, my fingers dig into my thigh.

“This company, Dante. Your startup capital.”

“That was my trust fund from Grandfather.”

He died soon after Noah brought me back. I had one week with him in Rome. I don’t think I spoke the whole time. He didn’t try to make me. We just drank wine and ate gelato and walked around, and when I panicked, he just stayed with me until it passed.

I don’t think I would’ve made it to eighteen for Noah to save me again if not for that week with Grandfather.

My father argues, “My name paved the way for you—”

“It’s his name too.”

I’m baiting him. I want to see if he’ll say it. I fucking hope so.

He says, “You think his money is any cleaner than mine?”

My smile makes him uncomfortable. Maybe his own words do too. He likes to pretend that the Adesso family fortune is and always has been clean. Like all those years we were importing olive oil and wine from Italy we weren’t also importing guns and drugs for the mafia.

He likes to pretend that he and Lorenzo Capelli weren’t the best of fucking friends and the coziest of business partners before my father screwed Capelli over by selling the import company out from under him and getting “clean.” Like that isn’t the very reason that Capelli retaliated against him by kidnapping me when I was fourteen and selling me to the Society.

Of course, for my father, that never happened. I was just “away.” I wasn’t being raped on a nightly basis by rich, crooked men. Not at all. I was studying abroad, like a rich man’s son is supposed to do.

I don’t bring it up. I haven’t tried to talk to him about it since I was sixteen. I haven’t tried to talk to anyone. I guess my father succeeded in part. I did manage to shut it all away. Sort of. I do kill people, after all.

But on the surface, I’m what my father wanted: a successful, respectable businessman.

I don’t press the point. It’s enough for me to have my father’s words hanging in the air. Instead I ask, “What do you want? I know you didn’t come in here to reminisce.”

“You need to stop riling Capelli up. He contacted me, Dante. Hethreatenedme.”

“Oh, no,” I drawl.

“He says you’re stealing his clients.”

“Next time he contacts you, just refer him to me.”

My father’s face purples even through his Italian complexion. I’m actually kind of enjoying this. He’s usually so calm and collected. His anger is actually soothing mine. Until he opens his mouth again.

“It would’ve been so much better for everyone, especially your mother, if you’d never come back.”

I thought I was way past the possibility of being hurt by my father, but his words hit me in the gut so hard that for a second I can’t breathe. It must show on my face because, for that same second, he looks like he wishes he hadn’t said that. Then his face hardens, and so does mine. I feel it. The way my jaw turns to stone. The way everything tightens.

I get up from my chair. I walk around my desk. My father’s eyes widen. He draws back. We’ve been so cold and distant with each other for so many years that I suspect he had forgotten, until this moment, how I once threw him to the floor in our kitchen and almost choked him to death.

He backs toward the door as I prowl his way. His hand fumbles with the latch, but he gets the door open. He’s clumsy, scrambling out. It makes me want to attack him.

I want to throw him down again. I want to hit him. I want to kill him.

I stand in the doorway, rage crashing through my body while my face remains stone still. Only when my father turns the corner, vanishing from sight, do I register another presence.

I’m so far gone that I must stare at Tristan for a full ten seconds before I’m able to react. Even then it’s only because he bites at his lower lip. My emotion reconfigures itself. The heat in my body moves down. Not all of it. I’m still angry. But my cock starts hardening.

“Um …” Tristan trails off.

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