Page 18 of Alliance

I don’t know what to tell him. I’m not sure I know why I slept with Lana.

I saw those hazel eyes, filled with so much fucking sadness and I wanted to change them. I wanted to see an emotion in those eyes that wasn’t complete and total loneliness. Maybe I saw in her the same despair that rests in me. That need, no desire, to do or be more. Searching for some sort of meaning in life. That same crushing weight of responsibility that breaks your soul and keeps you from becoming anything. I could see the fire dancing behind her eyes, just barely covered.

Her fire matched mine.

Maybe I’ve always liked to play with fire. Watch the flames dance along my skin, threatening to engulf me. Because if there’s no meaning, no reason for this life, then why not go up in flames?

Lana is a match waiting to combust, on the edge of burning everything down.

And maybe I wanted to be there when it happened.

“I don’t know,” I tell Sam with a shrug.

He laughs it off. “Well, you work for me now, kid.” Sam is barely a year older than me, but I don’t comment on him calling me kid.

“Why?” I ask, watching as his eyebrows rise at my response. “Why would you hire me after...” I trail, looking over my body. “All this.”

He brings a hand to his jaw, running his fingers along the stubble that lines his chin. “Marcus is an ass,” he says. “Has been since we were kids.” His dark gaze drifts over to me. “Can you be loyal, Naz?”

I’m surprised Sam Costello even knows who I am. I nod my head.

“Those assholes”—he tilts his head back in the warehouse’s direction—“have a different view of how things should work. I disagree. My father disagrees, and my grandfather did too. None of us want to see Lana married to that prick.”

“Then why don’t you just kill them?” I ask.

“Can’t kill a made man.”

Made man. Something I’m not. The title given to men who enter the brotherhood of the Costellofamiglia.

“Why did you protect me?” I ask.

Sam chuckles. “To piss them off.”

It feels wrong that my life and death hang in the balance between the men in this family. That they decide my fate based on how they want someone else to feel.

I’m nothing but a pawn in their games.

“You don’t want to be that, huh? Just an object used to piss someone else off?” I don’t even have to respond for him to know he’s right. I hate the feeling running through my head, that I’m nothing, useless. Just a piece in a fucking game. “We can change that, ya know,” he adds. “You work with me, I’ll get you your button, then no one will fuck with you. You want that?”

I could say no. I could say I want out and run far away from this fucked up family. I could find work somewhere else, somewhere not Louisiana.

But then I look at Sam in his black fitted jeans and dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He commands the room he walks in, takes control of the situation. In a few years, he’ll probably be running the show.

I want that.

I want the power that radiates from him.

I want the indestructibility that comes from being a made man.

I want Marcus to look at me and know he can’t touch me.

And for some fucked up reason, I want Lana Romano.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I want that.”

Chapter Ten

THE SMOOTH SURFACE OF THEtomb is warm to the touch and burns through my short-sleeved shirt when I lean back against it. I tip the half-filled bottle of whiskey toward my sister’s resting place. “Cheers,” I tell her, bringing the bottle to my lips.

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