Page 15 of Hidden Ties (Made Men #11)

THIRTEEN

DESPERATE TIMES CALL FOR DESPERATE MEASURES

S al woke up from the horrid, haunting memory, sweating profusely.

At ten years old, he had to understand that a drug deal gone bad was the reason he’d watched his mother bleed out on the pavement. He had lain there, holding her in his arms, crying out for help until his voice gave out. Not one person came to help him until the full moon began to disappear.

It was Dante who had found him.

Ever since Dante had seen him in the Internet café, he would drop by from time to time to check in on him. Upon his first look of Sal, he’d known that the child was Lucifer’s son, and it didn’t take him long to realize he was gifted beyond measure.

That early morning, as Dante headed to the café, dumb luck had him stumbling onto the scene.

Afraid his adversary, Lucifer, would find out Sal was his child and groom him for himself now that his mother was gone, Dante did everything in his power to try to convince a young Sal to come live with him and his family.

It wouldn’t be until Sal turned thirteen on his birthday and had to eat Taco Bell out of the dumpster for the last time that Sal finally gave in.

Having been told the truth by Dante of who his father was upon his return, he no longer desired to leave the Caruso family home and began to accept his mother’s death and new family into his heart.

Sal’s gifts made Dante prouder and prouder each day as they grew, so while Dante took him off the streets for selfish reasons, Sal became a true son to him, regardless of his parentage, having actually gotten closer to him as a father than his own sons he had fathered.

Dante’s legitimate children, Lucca, Maria, Nero, and Leo, could have begrudged him for that fact. However, they never did. Each one accepted him into their family with open arms. They were a family not born out of blood but out of loyalty. A loyalty so strong that each of them would pay with blood.

It took him standing under a hot shower for a long time to finally calm. By the time he got back into bed, he couldn’t help but hear a persistent thudding noise coming from downstairs.

Tossing the covers off him in a huff of air, he threw on his white sleeveless undershirt and patted down the steps to find her looking through his kitchen cabinets, opening and closing each one as if it wasn’t the middle of the night.

“What on earth are you doing?” he growled from behind her with his arms crossed.

Half scared to death by his unknown presence, she jumped ten feet in the air.

Sal had no fucking idea how the girl could ever be good at video games; her awareness of her surroundings in real life was at a zero. How she’d made it to this age still alive, not kidnapped, or headless, he didn’t understand.

“Fucking hell, you scared me half to death.”

Under his breath, he mumbled, “Not like that’s hard.”

After finally calming her heart rate, she made a worried face. “I’m sorry, did I wake you? I thought I heard the shower running, so I decided it was safe to get up ’cause I’m starving.”

How she was so small was another thing he’d never understand. Valerie had found the old shirt he’d left out for her, revealing more of her shape than her usual baggy attire. While it swallowed her in height, it fell against her tiny hourglass frame, and it slightly bothered him that he noticed.

“You didn’t,” he agreed, not wanting her to feel too bad. Taking a seat at the counter, he ran a ragged hand through his hair.

“Bad dream?” Valerie asked.

“Yeah, something like that.”

After listening to her abuse another one of his cabinets, he finally gave up and got up from his seat to move toward a door that didn’t really look like one since it blended into a cabinet seamlessly and revealed a secret pantry.

Her eyes grew in wonder. “No wonder I couldn’t find any of the good shit!” After contemplating her options for a few minutes, it was obvious she still couldn’t find what she wanted. “Have you ever heard of MSGs? Where do you shop? Whole Foods ?”

Internally groaning, he leaned over her frame from behind her, causing him to internally groan for another reason. Grabbing a bag from the top shelf that she probably couldn’t see, he held it out for her. “Try these.”

When she wrinkled her nose, he found the action kind of cute as she sniffed the opened bag of cheese puffs that were, in fact, organic. Reaching in the perfectly small-portioned bag, she popped one in her mouth. “Not bad,” Valerie said, going for another.

“Glad you like them,” he commented, already heading back upstairs. Sal didn’t trust himself this close to her so late at night in just a shirt if he found the action of her eating a cheese puff attractive.

The night he’d spent with Samantha had been so unsatisfactory. Sal wanted to blame Valerie for working himself up in anger and not being able to perform, but he was starting to realize that the truth was, Samantha wasn’t the girl he had wanted that night.

There was no one on this Earth that made Sal as hard as he was right now, except the unbearable, aggravating woman standing in front of him.

“Wait,” she said, causing him to curse internally.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Christ, even her potty mouth was rubbing off on him.

“You don’t happen to have any video games, do you? I’m usually wide awake at this time, working on my game or playing. I’m a night owl,” she politely added, stating the obvious.

He nodded before going up to his bedroom, and she annoyingly followed behind.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

Sal flexed his jaw. “Guess not.”

Seeing the loft-like bedroom upstairs, then the huge walk-in closet, she couldn’t help but appreciate the amenities. “Damn, it just keeps getting better and better.”

Going to the back of his closet, he pulled out an old storage tub that, when he opened it, sent dust particles flying.

Inside were all the old video games he and Terry used to play when he was a kid at the Internet café.

It was a box of memories he hadn’t opened since the day he’d placed the items in there.

After his haunting dream, it gave him a bittersweet feeling to see them again.

“A Nintendo 64!” Valerie squealed, grabbing the system up carefully, along with the controllers.

He could instantly tell she looked at it the same way he did—with bittersweet memories of her own.

“I’m jealous you kept yours. I had to sell mine after I got kicked out of my home.”

Sal felt for the poor girl, knowing if it weren’t for Terry, he wouldn’t have had a single thing from his childhood.

While the car he drove was the Coupe de Ville his mom had owned for that short period of time, he knew it wasn’t the exact one as the original that had gotten impounded.

There was just something about still owning the original you had as a child that made the nostalgia of something so much better.

“Oh my God, you have Mario Kart for it, too,” she gasped, catching sight of the game in the bottom of the tub. “I could kick anyone’s ass on Rainbow Road.”

Sal couldn’t help but let his inner child take that as a threat. “Wanna bet?”

Valerie had officially died and gone to heaven.

Here she was, in a sick-ass penthouse that overlooked the city, with a man who looked hot as hell right about now as he began plugging the old gaming system into the TV, and she was about to play Nintendo 64? This was a gamer girl’s fantasy.

If this was what the mafia was like, she wanted to sign on the dotted line. Even if she had to do it in blood, she didn’t give a fuck. This was great! Going to jail was the best thing that had ever happened to her in all her life!

“Does the mafia accept women?”

Sal stopped what he was doing for a moment, clearly taken aback by her bluntness.

Does she want to die?

Never in all his life had an outsider asked him something like that, let alone just come out and say the word mafia . He knew she understood how serious it was, considering she had brought a weapon in to meet the head of the family, yet she’d say risky shit like that?

The woman was an anomaly, for sure, and she was damn fucking lucky he was the one who controlled all the cameras and audio in the Casino Hotel. God forbid Lucca heard her talk so freely.

The question was: Did he entertain it in private? Should he just shut her ass down here and now? Or did he just say fuck it, ’cause the woman wasn’t stupid enough to believe anything other than the truth, anyways?

Goddammit … Lucca’s going to kick my fucking as—

“Not exactly .”

“Well, what does not exactly mean?” she asked. Sensing Sal’s frustration with the wires, she went to help him hook it up correctly. When she took a look, it was no wonder he was having trouble—he had all the wires messed up.

What a noob.

Flustered from her questioning, Sal gave up and let her do it.

He knew exactly how to hook the stupid thing up.

He had only done it a million times growing up.

He was The Great fucking Salvatore, for fuck’s sake.

If she knew he was the notorious hacker, there was no way Valerie would have even stepped in to help in the first place.

Knowing her degree and job, he knew without a shadow of a doubt Valerie knew of The Great Salvatore, but he had yet to tell her, secretly hoping it would never come out.

If he thought she talked too much now, he would never get her to shut up if she did know exactly who he was.

All the questions she’d ask him about how he did this or that would be endless.

This whole time, Valerie was thinking he was hiding only the fact he was a made man, when in actuality, little did she know he was more concerned with hiding his even bigger secret.