Page 77 of Tesio
“How’d it go?” Micro asked him, and I felt the ever present tension practically freeze him like a statue. He cleared his throat before he spoke, and yet his voice was still a little gruff.
“Pretty much how I expected. I betrayed the family.I die.”
I gasped, pulling back to look at him, to look into his eyes, and see if he really meant that, like he wasn’t shooting shit with the guys, but really expected to die. It was all there in his eyes, a desolateness I’d never seen in him before. I thought I’d seen him resigned to his fate already, but this was beyond all of that.
“He can’t do that!” I snapped, because clearly I thought I had all the answers. Grease offered me a half smile, and dragged me to the sofa, sitting down and pulling me with him, so I landed gracelessly in his lap.
“Dickhead,” I hissed, and he chuckled.
“Thanks, little pain, I needed that.”
“So what’s next?” Torch asked him next, and we all waited for him to say something. Anything. A plan. Even a hint of an idea. A fucking flicker of something. Instead, he just shrugged.
“Seriously?”
He sighed heavily, tucking my hair behind my ear, even as I glared at him.
“Sorry, babe. I just… what the hell am I supposed to do here? I have all kinds of plans for all kinds of things, but I never expected to be the one betraying Rossi. I considered running, just taking you with me, but that was before this. You can smooth over all kinds of shit with him, but betrayal? That’s the one thing nobody survives.”
“So we run,” I said firmly, because suddenly my career, my whole life, was completely irrelevant, in the face of losing Grease. He’d risked his life for me. He’d betrayed the mafia to save me. How the hell could anything be more important than keeping him safe?
I watched a slow smile appear on his face, lightening some of the tension, even for just a moment, as he stroked my cheek.
“I’d run anywhere with you, babe, but it’s not an option. They’ll find me. They’ll always find me. If it didn’t happen this week, or this month, or even this year, it’d happen at some point. You run, and you keep running, because that threat’s always there. I can’t put you through that.”
He was pulling away from me. He was trying to protect me, like an absolute asshole!
“How fucking dare you,” I hissed at him, and I heard a groan from behind me, and a murmur of ‘here we go’, but I ignored dumb and dumber, and focused on the man I was sitting on.
“Babe?”
“You threw away everything for me. You threw it away for both of us. You destroyed everything we both had, and for what? To turn into a pussy now?”
His eyes narrowed at me, and we both ignored a soft chuckle from behind me.
“Excuse you? Yes, I risked everything. To save your ungrateful ass!”
Anger felt so much better than fear, or defeat. I could feel it filling me up, warming the cold that had settled inside me. I could feel it giving me strength, giving me courage.
“You’re so afraid of one man, that you’re going to lay down and die? You’re not the man I thought you were!” I scrambled up from his lap, and he followed me, getting up to tower over me.
“Afraid? I’m not fucking afraid! I’d die for you, you stupid bitch, but you’re missing the fucking point here!”
“Oh yeah? And what’s that? The ‘stupid bitch’ is clearly too dumb to understand!” I folded my arms and glared up at him, waiting for this revelation he was holding back. Maybe this was what we both needed; to yell and argue things out. It was pretty much our entire relationship so far.
“What do we do, man? Should we leave them to it?”
“I kinda wanna see how it plays out.”
Grease glared over my head at the fucking peanut gallery, but I kept my focus on him. What was I missing? I knew what had happened, and I knew we were cowering in a corner, but why? The guy might be a mafia don, but there were ways to escape him. Surely there were.
“Look, PC Pain.” Oh we’re back tothatnow. “It’s not just about Don Rossi, okay? It’s about every fucking man who worksfor him, and it’s not even just that. It’s about every fucking ally he has. Every other family he has ties to. Every fucking… biker club… he has ties to. They’ll all be obligated to honour his wishes in this. He wants me dead, us dead, and every one of those people will have to give us up if they see us. We’re not running from one man, we’re running from a fucking army!”
“Wait, what? I’m not giving you up to that cunt!” Micro hissed from behind us, and Torch agreed.
“We’ve got your back, man.”
Grease groaned, and I swear to god, he looked like he was touched by their words. He passed a hand over his face briefly, and swallowed hard.
