Page 23 of Bleed (Two Wheeled Psychos #4)
The clatter of my shiny new commercial kitchen is loud, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
We’re busy with customers waiting over an hour for a table for the third week in a row since we opened the Italian fusion restaurant in the old location of Valentino’s.
It’s a nice kick in the teeth to the families that fucked us both.
Using the inheritance money to rebuild the property we destroyed to get it is a nice big fuck you that made both Dani and I happy. We now have our own lives, away from the rule of the mafia, where the only ones who decide our fate is ourselves, and maybe the customers we serve daily.
Standing in the kitchen, looking around, I pat myself on the back, proud of what I’ve done here, and even prouder that I was able to bring back all the staff that I saved the night I burned down their job, including Mark, who is proving to be an excellent sous chef.
Antonio trained him well, and I can even see hints of my old friend’s techniques in the way that boy handles a knife.
Very clean, very professional, and very precise.
It’s been months since I’ve killed anyone, and I thought I would miss it, but really I don’t. When you marry the love of your life, settle down, and actually have a normal job and a normal life, things like that just seem so…wrong.
We had a beautiful, but small, beach wedding in the Outer Banks, with just Mark and his girlfriend Abigail as witnesses, and of course the little one in Dani’s belly who was present but not able to actually witness her mother and father getting wed. But she was still there.
Her name is Grace, named after the way I see her mother, my love, every day, as a grace from God to a man who was lost. She’s the most beautiful little thing with the same dark chocolate hair and bright blue eyes as Dani, and as of now, the only thing that makes her look like me is her bald little head that I kiss hundreds of times a day.
“Hey Damien!” Mark calls out from the prep line, breaking me from my thoughts. “You gonna help or what?”
“Awww man, I have to work?” I joke with him, tightening the string on my apron and tossing a terry towel over my shoulder.
“You’d better if you want that Missus of yours to be happy.”
“It only makes her happy because it makes me happy.” I say back to him, grabbing a printout from the POS and reading it out to my cooks.
“And that right there ladies and gentlemen is the secret to life.” Mark shouts through the noise around us.
“Happy wife, happy life?”
“Yeah, something like that.” Dani adds as she pokes her head around the corner, holding Grace in her arms.
“Something like that.” I agree with her, smiling at the two most important women in my life.
Don’t worry about Luna though, she’s still my best girl ever, we just don’t tell the other two that or she won’t start, and I’ll have to walk home…again.
Women. Can’t live with them, can’t…I’d better not think it. I don’t do that anymore.