I seem to have said the right thing. Luca flicks a hand at Frank. “Go,” he says. “We’ll discuss things later. And get your wife under control, Frank. I mean it,” he adds, with a dark look.
That knocks the smile from Frank’s face. “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbles. “Hope you feel better soon, principessa,” he says to me, and then he’s gone with a wave.
“I’ll let you sleep,” Luca says, but I catch his hand.
“I want you to know, I wasn’t trying to…What I mean is, this was an accident. Please don’t blame Mikey or Celia.”
He raises one eyebrow. “I don’t,” he assures me. And then: “I blame you. You’re the fool who put that shit in your body.”
My fingers clench on his. “It’s not easy, this,” I say sharply, and then I start coughing. He helps me lean up in the bed and rearranges the pillows behind my back. Then he brings me a cup of water and a straw. “Thanks,” I croak, once I can talk again. “Anyway, like I was saying—”
“You think I don’t know?” he sighs. “I understand it’s difficult for you. It’s difficult for me, too.”
“Fuck difficult for you,” I snap. “I can’t handle that fucking apartment, Luca. It is a prison cell, and I would rather die, even though this definitely wasn’t an attempt at that—”
“It won’t be forever,” he says, frowning. “All I wanted was a few days to get the lie of the land, a few weeks to make my plans. I wanted you somewhere quiet and safe while I figured things out.”
“That’s not what you said,” I break in stubbornly. “You told me this was my fucking life now, and I’d better get used to it.”
He looks me over. “I suppose I did,” he says at last. “Maybe I should have been clearer. Would that have made a difference?”
“Yes, it would have made a fucking difference!” This fucking guy!
He nods. “Well, then, I guess I apologize.”
I get the feeling he doesn’t apologize very often, because after he says the words, he tugs at his cuff. His stupid polyester cuff. He sees me looking at it and must read my mind, because he crosses his arms and looks annoyed.
To annoy him more, I give him a toothy grin. “Apology accepted. Only, you have to tell me exactly when I’m going to be allowed out. On my own, too. No Mikey.”
My husband turns to prowl about the room. “First of all,” he says, in this calm voice that tells me he is furious, “I don’t have to tell you anything. You are a marital hostage, angel, which you seem to keep forgetting. Second, you will never be allowed out alone. You will always have a bodyguard with you, because there are people who really, really want to see you dead.” He stops and glares at me, and I can’t help pressing back into the pillows under the force of his gaze. “And lastly, it certainly won’t be Mikey. He was only with you today because I couldn’t get anyone else at short notice. Mikey’s a good soldier, because he does what he’s told, but I obviously need someone with more smarts to keep an eye on you.”
“I’m a wily one,” I agree. Luca rubs a hand tiredly over his face. “Why can’t you be my bodyguard? Isn’t that why Tino made you marry me? To protect me? As well as to control my Pops, obvs.”
“I will protect you,” he says. “Protecting you is my top priority and my number one goal. You have my word on that. But I can’t be with you constantly, because I have a job to do. And that job is to make your life safer, before you say anything else.” I shut my mouth. I had been going to say something. “I was hoping to jump a little higher than I have, but being made Capo is better than nothing. It means I can make you safer.”
“What’s a Capo?”
His eyebrows shoot up. “And to think, you’re the great-grandson of the most feared Irish mobster in Boston,” he says. “Although I suppose it’s a term specific to our lot. A Caporegime leads a crew.”
“I thought you already led the Fuscone crew,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Fuscone was our Capo. In name, anyway. In reality, he left the day to day operations to me, although he hates me.”
“Then why’d he let you run things for him?”
He gives a wolfish smile. “Because I’m very good at it,” he tells me. “And because Fuscone is lazy, stupid, and incompetent, but he knows how to make himself look good by using his underlings.”
“And now you’ve been made Capo for realsies? That sounds like a good thing.”
“It sounds like it, yes. That is what Tino intended: for it to sound like a good thing.”
I pick up on his tone. “But it’s not a good thing,” I say slowly. “Why not, baby? I thought you wanted to move up the ranks.”
He moves restlessly again, frustration in his movements. He tugs at his cuff again; the suit doesn’t fit him well. I think about mentioning a tailor, but figure it’ll just trigger him at this stage.
“How about this,” I say, when it becomes obvious he’s trying to find a way to talk to me without actually talking to me. “I’ll sleep, and you talk your business problems through with yourself, just to be saying it out loud, you know? Like, to help you think it over.”
He regards me with cool eyes and then slowly his lips turn up. “Just talking to myself, hm? Alright.”
I ostentatiously close my eyes, and listen to Luca prowling the room.
Chapter Twenty-Six
LUCA
“I made a play today that failed, and I’m trying to think through why it failed, and what the repercussions will be.”
That’s how I start, and at first it feels dumb to be talking aloud to myself, without looking at Finch. But his idea isn’t bad.
The less he knows about the business,
