Page 63 of The Perfect Heir

TATUM

I’d left Clara with Luca, who was the numbers guy of our enterprise, to help her learn the software she’d been struggling with when I came home yesterday. As for me, today was the beginning of Sebastian’s training. I met him at the Dacia Café, which doubles as Alex’s office and our home base, to take him along the rounds of our various businesses in the ‘hood.’ The plan was to let clan members see him with me and to expose him to my duties.

When Alex first brought Sebastian around, I did an extensive background check on him. He was as squeaky clean as they came. After his father, Mihail’s death, he had no contact of any kind with a mafia clan or crime syndicate.

Honestly, it was a bit of a surprise to me, considering who Mihail was, but the man had done an excellent job of isolating his second family from the rest of his life. After his murder, they’d been shielded from our world and lived off a trust fund he’d set up for them. Granted, it wasn’t easy to search for us, even if we lived in plain sight, but I was astonished by their total lack of contact with the Lupu clan.

As per Mihail’s instructions, his mother gave Sebastian a sealed letter when he turned twenty-five years old. In it, his father explained his reasons for keeping the two families apart and gave Sebastian the blessing to approach Alex. Needless to say, the first meeting had turned into a shitshow for Alex and Nicu, who’d both worshipped the ground Mihail walked on until that point.

But Alex would never pass up the chance of cultivating a loyal foot soldier and possible future officer. So, Sebastian was brought into the fold.

Despite my initial reservations, I got to know him in California while we tried to woo the Hagi and other smaller clans over to the dark side. He was charismatic and handsome, but most importantly, he looked like a Lupu. He was also bright, although apparently, Emma was the genius of the family. Whereas she was notoriously shy, he was a charmer and had already won over half the mafie girls, even with being only half Romanian. It was ironic how Alex and I had switched positions. Now he was reticent while I was the one gunning for Sebastian.

“I need you to do well,” I stated as we stepped out of the café onto 48th Street. Our first stop was a Romanian bakery, which doubled as a depot for storing illicit merchandise, down the street on the commercial strip of Greenpoint Avenue.

“I won’t fail you,” he promptly replied as we passed a row of townhouses, which were soon replaced by larger five-story red brick apartment buildings.

“You’d better not. I’ve already done my due diligence on you, but I’m warning you, I’m going to dig into everything. I’m going to excavate so far back I’ll be going through your kindergarten grades. I’m going to dig so deep your bones will ache from how far I’ll tunnel under your skin.”

We reached the corner and crossed under the Welcome to Sunnyside sign suspended across Greenpoint Avenue.

“Do it,” he shot back. “I’m not scared. There are no skeletons in my closet. You’ve grown up in the mafie world, so you don’t understand that regular people don’t normally get into trouble. They can live their entire lives without taking one step outside the bounds of the law. That was me before I approached Alex. You don’t have to worry, Tatum. I’m your man.”

I halted in my tracks in front of a small music shop named Pianos, even though the only items in the display window were a music stand and an upright guitar. Scrutinizing him, I asked, “Why, Sebastian? Why won’t you fail me?”

My tone was suspicious, harsh even, but I didn’t have time to waste. If he couldn’t get the job done, I’d have to set my sights on another man.

“Because I have to prove myself,” he said as he held my gaze. “I’ve wanted to be part of this world since I was a kid, but Mihail forbade it. We were his dirty little secret, his backstairs family, and he didn’t want to get grief from his mother, his wife, or his clan. My family was an oasis for him, and he made sure not to mix the two worlds. It wasn’t for some semi-noble reason, like protecting my mother or Alex’s mother from the truth. I honestly don’t think he loved either of them enough to care about their feelings.”

“Okay, so you’ve always wanted to be part of the mafie. Is that it? Because that’s not enough for me. Convince me. Tell me something I don’t know,” I said, testing him. “Something no one knows.”

An old man in a suit that had seen better days hobbled by with a cane, nodding to me in recognition. I called out a greeting in Romanian and waited patiently for him to be out of earshot before returning to Sebastian.

His green eyes, so much like Alex’s, turned hard as emeralds. “One person knows my secret, and that’s because she’s part of it,” he said cryptically.

My eyes sharpened, registering every flicker of emotion on his face. A flash of pain crossed over swiftly before he hid it.

“What is it?” I ordered as I resumed walking. “Tell me.”

“I want to succeed in the clan and rise up because of Lana.”

I jerked back. “Gabby’s older sister? That hellion?”

To say I was shocked was an understatement. The fact that he knew her nickname was significant enough on its own. Only her family, and I knew her family well since Gabby was Star’s best friend, called her Lana. “What about her? What does she have to do with you?”

“You haven’t done enough research on me yet, I see,” he joked, his eyes twinkling for a moment. Then it was gone, and he was serious again.

“Explain,” I demanded because, fuck me, there was something there and, as consilier, I should’ve known about it. It should’ve come up in my research like he’d said.

“Relax. You didn’t fall down on the job. There’s no way you could’ve known that we spent time together as kids. The only people aside from Emma who knew are dead and buried,” he said.

I breathed out in relief.

“As you know, her father was consilier. He was the only one in Mihail’s inner circle who knew about us. My mother used to complain about how Mihail didn’t share any part of his life with her, so he brought Lana’s father along. Over the years, he’d come with Lana, who was close to my age. Gabby was an infant, and he wasn’t the type of man to change diapers, if you know what I mean, so I didn’t meet her until later.

“One day, when we were teens, we were caught kissing.” His eyes turned a stormy green, gray and green swirling around each other, fighting for dominance. “Her father yanked her out of my room and dragged her out of the house by her hair.” His eyes turned bleak. “I never saw her again.”

He broke eye contact, twisted his head away, and stared off down the bustling street. He rubbed his chin for a good moment.

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