Page 3 of Of Grief And Gratitude

He was done waiting for me to fix my shit and toe the line for the family business. He wanted me all in. Unfortunately for him, I’d learned to compartmentalize and shove my responsibilities to the back of my mind. After another hour of working out and a few shots of whiskey and tequila, the brown-eyed strawberry blonde with a boyish figure would be out of my head, and I’d be back to running Excel sheets for payroll and membership dues.

Flex was an in-your-face front for the family business, and many of the people paying top dollar for their luxury gym memberships never darkened the doorway of one of my locations. It was the perfect method for collecting regular payments from those who owed the Nerettis money. A fuck ton of people around the country paid for monthly gym memberships to gyms they never went to. The feds could never prove anything except many of our members were shit at following through with their New Year’s resolutions to lose that extra ten pounds they gained during the holidays.

There were plenty of legit members, too. None of the locations were ever empty during operating hours. They had the choice of gym equipment, classes run by instructors, and spa services like massage by appointment. After college, I’d gotten my massage therapy certification for the hell of it. Call it insurance in case I ever needed something to fall back on if the gyms ever went under.

Though, the only way I could see that happening was if the feds came down on the family and people went to prison. Probably me included. It was always an unlikely possibility, but the Nerettis had skirted the law without consequence for generations. There wasn’t much we couldn’t buy our way out of, and when people couldn’t be bought, they were eliminated via other means.

Like Corilynn.

Fuck.

No, she could have been bought. She wasn’t like the dirty cops and feds we had to pay off to look the other way. She was just a girl looking for upward mobility in life. A girl with a degree in early elementary education and an interview for a position as a kindergarten teacher that she’d never show up for.

I stood and stretched, kicking my legs and trying to shake my muscles loose before I flung the towel over a treadmill and stepped on. If I couldn’t lift heavy weights to clear my mind, I’d run until I was so exhausted I could hardly walk. Then I could focus on a different kind of pain.

I didn’t know how my older brothers did it. They never seemed affected by anything the family did. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Niccolò had never liked the family business. He’d gone and found business partners and started a kink club that the family had no control over. I envied him for that, but he hadn’t escaped unscathed.

It was sheer luck—or fate, as he’d say—that he’d found his wife Mia when my father ordered that he marry. They were sickeningly sweet together, with their shared looks and stolen kisses, when they thought the rest of us weren’t watching. Somebody was always watching in a large Italian family.

My feet pounded heavily against the conveyor belt as my leg muscles started to fatigue. Instead of quitting, I increased the speed, punishing my body for my failings.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” My brother Cosimo leaned against the machine with a bored look. “I swear to fuck; I’m tired just watching you for the last half hour.”

“I’m fine,” I panted between breaths.

He lifted a brow. “Yeah, sure you are. Heard about the girl.”

“Did you do it?” I asked, nearly missing a step and grabbing onto the handles to steady myself so I didn’t fall face-first and fly off the end. I wasn’t about to become somebody’s internet fail video.

“Seriously?” He crossed his arms. “You have to ask?”

I shook my head. “I never know how far he’s going to go.”

“He’s afraid of me,” Cosimo said mildly. Fear was likely an understatement. Grown men wet themselves when they came face-to-face with the Neretti enforcer. His brutal reputation for torture and murder was well-earned. The man looked like he walked around with a perpetual storm cloud overhead, with his dark looks and rigid countenance. He practically bled danger from his pores like a pheromone of death. “He won’t cross the lines I’ve drawn in the sand. I don’t kill women. Not without good reason. So far, he’s never given me a good enough reason.”

“Lucky you,” I huffed out like a curse.

“Did you know her?” He didn’t have to tell me who he was talking about.

“Her name was Corilynn,” I supplied, increasing the speed again. “She was a desperate girl who didn’t deserve to die.”

“One of the few, then.” Cosimo examined his perfectly manicured nails. It never failed to piss me off that the man who spent his time in a fucking dungeon he constructed, mangling people in the family's name, could look damn perfect when he stepped back into the real world.

I could barely speak; my lungs were sore trying to keep up with my pace. “Only you think most of humanity deserves to die; you know that?”

“If you saw what I see every day, you’d agree.”

“Doubtful.” I’d never have the bloodlust the older of my twin brothers had. Something was broken in Cosimo’s head, and no amount of therapy could fix it. I never had discovered whether my father was responsible for that. He’d always been abusive toward his sons, but I was the youngest save Bianca, and his focus had been mainly on my three older brothers. My sisters weren’t worth the effort as far as he was concerned. Women were only good for marrying off to make alliances and carrying on the Neretti DNA.

My anger toward my father helped me push to the next mile mark before I had a thought. “Did Dante send you?”

“Yeah.”

Man of few words, my brother.

“Any reason he didn’t show up himself?” I asked.

“Didn’t say.” Cosimo shrugged. “But given the hit order, he might have thought you’d blame him just as much as our father.”

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