Page 25 of His Wicked Wants (West Coast Mobsters #6)
BEFORE
The school recital was as boring as ever, and Sandro’s piano-playing had been truly atrocious, earning him glares from the music master. It had been difficult for Nero not to outshine him; for a few moments, he’d been carried away with the music and forgot himself.
“Why do you do that?” Sandro asked him afterward.
“What?”
“Play so badly when you have such a gift.”
They were standing at the window of the boarding house, staring at the trees in the distance. Those trees had come to represent freedom to both of them, because when they escaped the school, that was the way they headed. Their salvation lay over that hill, down in the town below—a cornucopia of delights that both were eager to taste in their final year at the boarding school.
“Why do you play badly?” Nero retorted.
Sandro chuckled. “Because I’m tone-deaf and my fingers are clumsy. I don’t know why Mamma insists on me learning the damn thing when the yellow-haired bastard is always going to be better at it than I am, no matter how much I practice. But you—you should show them what you can really do.”
“Why would I want them to know what I can really do?” Nero asked, irritated. “I don’t want to play second fiddle for the rest of my life.”
“You wouldn’t be second fiddle. Not with your talent. You’d be first chair.”
Sandro sounded so sincere that Nero turned his head to stare at him. “They don’t make guys like me first chair, Sandro. That’s for guys like you. Yes—even when you’re tone deaf and have clumsy fingers. You were made for the spotlight. Not me.”
Sandro scoffed. “Bullshit. Talent is the important thing. And playing to those talents is what gets you ahead.”
Sandro really believed what he was saying. That was the sad thing. And he never realized that the violin had always been meant as a joke, a private joke between his mother and Nero. She’d made Nero take up music along with Sandro, forced him to learn the violin.
Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Others had made the connection. Not Sandro. Or at least, if he had, he’d never mentioned it. Never made a joke of it at his best friend’s expense. Sandro was as loyal as his mother had promised when she’d plucked Nero out of the gutter and made him into a new creature.
The problem was, Nero loved the violin. Loved the way it could transport him beyond . And loved the way he was so much better at this one thing than Sandro, even if that one thing was just pulling a bow across strings. But he was terrified that La Contessa would remove the violin from him if she ever learned the truth.
And she’d been at the recital tonight.
“I’m not so talented. In fact, my greatest talent is seducing whimsical young men.” Nero grinned. “And I’d love to get in some practice. So are we going out tonight, or what?”
Sandro looked at him for a long time before shrugging. “Why not? I have an itch that needs scratching.”
“And so many beautiful boys eager to lend you their nails. Shall I send word ahead? Let them all prepare themselves for the great Alessandro Castellani? They’ll be waiting with cheeks open if I do.”
Sandro shoved him, not hard, just a warning. “You do just as well as I do. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get out of that white shirt; it’ll shine too much under the moon and give us away before we get halfway across the grounds.”
It was true, Nero thought, as they ran through shadows toward the trees on the hill, cursing the strong moonlight and praying that no insomniac masters happened to be looking out the windows at that moment. He did just as well as Sandro, but no one could ever know that. It wasn’t his role to shine, not even under the moonlight.
Sandro had to be under the spotlight. Under the full glare of the sun.