Page 60 of Sinful Attraction

I feel my blood pressure rising as this news hits my ears. “She’s already running,” I growl. “Damn it. Do you think Dad can find her if he decides she’s guilty?”

“Dad can find pretty much anyone, Mike. If he wants to.”

And there’s the rub. It would be so easy and convenient to satisfy Mom by simply... not finding Maria. Acknowledging what she did for about three seconds, then burying it and ignoring why she’s suddenly disappeared from our lives.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

“Yeah.” He huffs, and I hear him take another swig. “But just because this could all turn out badly doesn’t mean it’s actually going to. Dad is interrogating that guy, and at the end of the day, he’ll deal with any threat to the family. Even ones that come from within.”

I really hope he’s right. “Did Maria say anything to you before she took off?”

“Not a damn thing. She knows she’s cooked. What I don’t get is why Dad didn’t grab that guy we’ve got in the basement the night he threw you out.”

I do my best to forgive him in my head, at least while I’m talking to Billy. “Probably an oversight. Emotions were high. But God, it would have made things so much simpler if he had.”

I hear something from the bedroom then, something that sets my nerves on edge. A sob.

“Billy, I’m gonna have to call you back,” I mutter. “Got something up here.”

“You okay?”

I’m not. “I’m fine. I’ll call you back later tonight. Text me if you learn anything.” I hang up and turn to hurry into the bedroom and see what’s happening with Arya.

I almost immediately know, and my heart sinks.

Arya is holding her phone away from her ear with tears in her eyes while her mother is screaming and her sister lecturing. They’re double-teaming her. I don’t even have to make out the words to know it’s a whole giant undeserved pile of abuse.

My blood boils. I come over to her, put an arm around her, kiss her hair... and then gently take the phone out of her hands. She resists for a moment and then lets it go and buries her face in my chest.

I put the phone to my ear.

“And on top of everything else, we find out that your silent partner in thisinvestigationis the very man you let steal from us? Are you completely out of your goddamned mind, Arya?”

I wince. Ouch. It seems that the Castelluccis have found out about Arya working with me. That level of pissed off isn’t entirely expected... but she is still their daughter, damn it.

They fill up the silence with more yelling. Her sister, this time, from her slightly more reasonable tone: “You’re betraying thefamily, Arya. First, you refuse to get married, then you screw up being our computer person, and now this? Do you hate us?”

That’s emotional manipulation at its finest, and it makes me see red in the corners of my vision. I take a deep breath and weigh whether to answer for her or not. I’m done with letting them make her cry, and Arya clearly hasn’t learned yet how to tell bad relatives to fuck off.

Then, again, she doesn’t seem to have any good ones.

“Arya?” the sister asks.

I decide speaking won’t do anything to help and hang up instead.

Arya continues sobbing, and I drop the phone on the bed. It’s set to vibrate and starts buzzing right away. We ignore it as I hold her.

“Thank you,” she mumbles into my neck. I pet her hair and say nothing for a while.

“I should have hung up when they said the family’s disowning me,” she mutters, her voice breaking up in the end. “But they are, they’re really actually doing it this time.” Her arms wrap around me, she jams her face against my shoulder, and I hold her tighter.

“Fuck,” I murmur. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about this possibility, but talking about it is way different than facingit. I want to go storming off to her house to confront them in her defense, but that would be a bad idea even if we weren’t mob families.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I add, not sure what to say beyond that. “I didn’t talk to anyone about my working with you except my family.”

“They must have had someone keep tabs on me,” she mumbles against me. “And now, they’ve gotten the report back, so they do this.”

“Arya...”God fucking damn it.I hate this feeling. I can’t hack or fight or talk away this problem for her. I can’t defend her from her family being shitheads. But I still want to.

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