Page 6 of Marcellus: House of Drakos
She smiled, knowing that a man like him wouldn’t like her response. “If that’s the comparison, you’re right.”
She was right. Marcellus didn’t find that humorous in the least. “I’m notthatold,” he said, and she laughed.
But he found he loved her laugh and he smiled too. “You said you’re from Indiana?”
“I was born in Detroit, but me and my mother moved there when I was eleven.”
“My mother and I,” he blurted out, correcting her speech. Something he didn’t mean to do to her because he could tell right away she was a bit embarrassed. But to her credit, she corrected her mistake.
“My mother and I,” she said, “moved there when I was eleven. But Chicago is just a half hour away so I consider myself a Chicagoan through and through. What about you? I thought Niko said you lived overseas somewhere.”
“I have a home here in Chicago, and my corporation is headquartered here, but I spend most of my time in France, which is the place of my birth.”
“What part of France?”
“Now? I live on an island off of Saint-Tropez. But I was born in Paris.”
Savannah smiled. “With a golden spoon in your mouth I’m sure.”
Marcellus looked at her as if she had to be kidding. “I was born to a penniless prostitute and a rich Greek mafia boss who abandoned my mother and I. We didn’t live in the tourists parts of town. We lived on the backstreets. The side of Paris nobody talks about. When I was a kid, it was as gritty as it got.”
“Why did your father not help you and your mother if he was so rich?”
“He had another family in Greece. A wife and children. When they first met he kept my mother in a little apartment and paid the bills so that she wouldn’t have to be on the streets anymore. But mainly because anytime he came to town she would be available for him and him alone. But as soon as she told him she was pregnant, he left, stopped paying the rent on the place, and never looked back. She literally delivered me in the gutter, which was where I was raised. The only golden spoon I would have had in my mouth when I was born was a rusty crackpipe.”
Savannah was astonished. “Boy was I wrong.”
“Yes you were. But that’s what you get for judging somebody your ass don’t know.”
She didn’t expect him to still be offended by her misjudgment, but he was.
“What about you?” he asked her. “How was your upbringing?”
“My mother wasn’t on drugs and wasn’t a prostitute, she just couldn’t make ends meet. She worked two jobs, but kept getting laid off. We were mostly homeless and hungry throughout my childhood. That’s why I had to stay employed when I got of age. I couldn’t miss a beat because I had to help my mother out. I support both of us to this day.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I never knew the man.”
Marcellus stared at her. Both of them were hard luck people. Maybe that was the real attraction. “What about your personal life? Ever got married? Have any kids?”
But Savannah was shaking her head before he could finish his questions. “I’ll probably get married in a year or two. I mean I have to. I always wanted to have a family before I was thirty, but that doesn’t look likely. But I’ve got to find something better than what I’ve been seeing. I refuse to have a baby with just anybody.”
Marcellus smiled. “I wish I had that fortitude when I was your age.”
“Niko has a lot of siblings.”
Marcellus’s smile left. And he nodded. “Yes.”
“He said you have like five or six baby mamas, or something like that?”
“Five children. Four mothers. Which I’m not proud to admit. I started early, but I finished early too. I haven’t gone down that road in over a decade. My youngest is seventeen.”
“Niko said one of your baby mamas was a black woman.”
Marcellus nodded. “She is. She’s the mother of my two youngest children, Fredrick and Kalayna. Is that surprising to you that I would have black children?”
“It was before I met you.”
